In wrongful death cases, he says question should be `How much would you be willing to pay to extend your life?'
Allan Feldman often advises those who leave his office in Robinson Hall to look both ways when crossing the street. Yes, he is being polite. But Feldman also has more than just a passing interest in people's personal safety.
For the last several years, Feldman has been examining the means by which the value of a human life is calculated. This foray into examining how monetary assessments are made of an individual's life began after he started to testify as an expert witness in wrongful death lawsuits over a decade ago.
He has since expanded that work into teaching a class about the intersection of law and economics. Feldman also wrote a paper recently - "The Value of Life Revisited" - that examines what he perceives as the weaknesses of past accepted determinants of a life's worth and puts forth his own theory on how the value of human life should be assigned.
So just what is the correct means of calculating the value of a human life?
Feldman believes that calculation begins by asking individuals how much they would be willing to pay to extend their life for a finite period of time.
"The subject should not be asked to hypothetically evaluate death, which he does not know. The subject should be asked to evaluate additional years of life, which he does know," writes Feldman. "The model should not be about buying extra probability of survival, it should be about buying extra years of life. Uncertainty coupled with an unknowable state should be set aside, and replaced with certainty coupled with choice of additional units of a known state."
The amount people are willing to pay to extend their life for a fixed period of
time, according to one version of Feldman's model, is roughly equal to what
that person would spend on personal consumption during that time.
Feldman's theory is in the minority, however. Most economists working in this
area calculate the value of a human life by examining how much an individual is
willing to pay to reduce the risk of death. But Feldman believes this method
is fraught with philosophical and empirical deficiencies. For example, he
points out that when you ask someone what they would pay to reduce his or her
risk of death by one percent, that answer would be entirely different from what
they would be willing to pay to reduce the risk by 10 percent.
"The empirical studies for such an ill-defined concept get estimates all over
the place and sometimes get bizarre results," he said, citing one study that
showed unionized workers were willing to pay eight times more for reducing
their risk of death than non-union workers.
Although this economic model - willingness-to-pay measures - has been adopted
by most economists, the courts use the human capital model to determine damages
in cases of wrongful death. "This views people as a machine - a stream of
income," said Feldman. "To make [the plaintiffs] whole, they look at what the
deceased would have earned and passed on to them."
Feldman believes there is a certain logic to this when widows and children go
before the courts to seek justice for a family member who has lost his or her
life through another's negligence. But such an approach "implies that someone
who is 65 years old or is retired is worth nothing," said Feldman. "A younger
person's life is going to always be more valuable using this model."
He also has concerns about survival statute provisions that enable dependents
to be compensated for a deceased's pain and suffering. "They only compensate
the deceased's pain and suffering," and not the dependents', Feldman writes,
"but the compensation typically ends up in the hands of those dependents."
The human capital model also doesn't correctly assess what people are willing
to pay to avoid death, Feldman believes. "If you tell Mr. Smith that he will
earn $500,000 over his lifetime, he would probably not trade his life for
$500,000," Feldman said. "The model doesn't count and figure how people enjoy
their lives."
Although Feldman acknowledges there are problems with his notion of having
people pay for finite periods of time to extend their life, he contends it does
not have the uncertainty that the other models bring to the matter. "This is an
important question that will be debated for years to come," he said.