What is Your Life Worth?

Treść źródłowa

It is common to hear the phrase: “you cannot put a price on that.” Sometimes the phrase is meant more as a normative statement. To put a price on particular things is considered verboten. Other times this phrase is meant to be taken literally. In that context, the phrase is meant to evoke the idea that whatever is being described is not something that you could purchase. It is often used to describe an experience or a moment or something of natural beauty.For a price theorist, this use of the phrase is confusing. For example, as Thomas Sowell writes in Knowledge and Decisions:To say that we “cannot put a price” on this or that is to misconceive the economic process. Things cost because other things could have been produced with the same time, effort, and material. Everything necessarily has a price in this sense, whether or not social institutions cause money to be collected from individual consumers.Nonetheless, one often hears people use the phrase in reference to things like the value of human life. This is often meant to convey the idea that a human life is in some sense priceless. It is understandable why people might use the phrase in that context. Often this is attached to religious belief. There is a saying from the Talmud, for example, that “whoever saves one life, it is as if he saved the whole world.” Christians believe in the inherent dignity of man, that man was created in the image of God, for a purpose, and that human life is sacred and must be protected.At the same time, one can think of many everyday experiences in which people are tasked with estimating th…