Valuing Life_ A Plea for Disaggregation

2004] VALUING LIFE 445
regulation are collective in character. Regulators cannot feasibly
provide protection to one person without simultaneously providing
protection to many. But it is nonetheless important to see what the
current theory counsels in principle, and to understand that the
limitations are practical ones, some of which may be overcome as
knowledge progresses. Even with the practical limitations, a uniform
VSL is increasingly difficult to justify.
It is clear that some risks produce a higher VSL than others,
resulting in significantly different analyses in many cases, above all by
producing a higher VSL for cancer risks. A program that protects
elderly people should produce a lower VSL than one that protects
younger people, and there is no ethical objection to variations on the
basis of age. 197
If a program affects mostly wealthy people, a VSL
based on the population-wide median will be too low. It would follow
that the FAA should have a relatively high VSL, because people who
fly are wealthier than the population median—and when the EPA is
engaging in cost-benefit analysis for programs protecting poor people
from risks associated with hazardous waste sites, it should have a
relatively low VSL.
The principal qualification is that when the beneficiaries of
regulation do not pay all of its cost, a high VSL may actually be in
their interests. The easy cases, in which the beneficiaries are forced to
pay for regulatory benefits, are not the same as those in which
beneficiaries pay only a fraction of the cost. Nonetheless, current
practice treats such cases as identical, perhaps because of the great
difficulty in untangling the incidence of regulatory benefits and costs.
My goal has not been to resolve that difficulty, but to suggest that the
theory behind current practice justifies far more individuation of VSL
than regulators currently provide. However regulators deal with
distributional problems and the hardest cases, the use of a uniform
VSL is unacceptably obtuse.
197. See Aldy & Viscusi, supra note 15, at 24 (“[W]orkers . . . in their early 60s have a VSL
. . . about 30–40 percent lower than the market average and between one-third and one-half the
size of the VSLs for prime-aged workers.”); Sunstein, supra note 8, at 210 (“If thirty-year-olds
are willing to pay more (or less) to eliminate a statistical risk than sixty-year-olds, then the
difference should be reflected in cost-benefit analyses of regulatory proposals. . . .
[P]olicymakers should use different values for old people and young people if and only if WTP
studies show such a disparity.”). I am putting to one side the difficult questions raised by the
need to produce a VSL for children.