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Safety-Focused Altruism: Valuing the Lives of Others

The value of statistical life is an estimate of the monetary benefits of preventing an anonymous death. Society's willingness to pay to eliminate private health risks determines agencies' value-of-statistical-life estimates. Most estimates ignore society's willingness to pay to eliminate others' health risks. There are two possible reasons. First, altruism does not exist: Peter is not willing to pay to save Paul's life. The second possible reason is a bit more complicated. Certain economists argue that increasing benefit estimates to account for altruism involves double-counting.
The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate these possibilities. Accounting for altruism, it turns out, is not double-counting if altruism is paternalistic. Furthermore, I empirically demonstrate that people are willing to pay to reduce others' health risks. Thus, the two justifications for ignoring altruism are, seemingly, unfounded, which indicates that analysts should increase the value of statistical life to account for altruism.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UTAHS/oai:digitalcommons.usu.edu:etd-1217
Date01 December 2008
CreatorsBrady, Kevin Lee
PublisherDigitalCommons@USU
Source SetsUtah State University
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceAll Graduate Theses and Dissertations
RightsCopyright for this work is held by the author. Transmission or reproduction of materials protected by copyright beyond that allowed by fair use requires the written permission of the copyright owners. Works not in the public domain cannot be commercially exploited without permission of the copyright owner. Responsibility for any use rests exclusively with the user. For more information contact Andrew Wesolek (andrew.wesolek@usu.edu).

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