Lately Good luck thoughts on how Trump-era policies are driving capitalism away, I argued that markets cannot function without trust, transparency and a shared sense of purpose. Since then, the Administration has taken another step to take the argument to the logical—and downright scary—next step.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did something unusual as a prelude to overturning the Endangerment Finding—they revised the way they measure air pollution regulations by not counting the benefits of lives saved and diseases averted. The technical term for what disappeared is “statistical living volume” (VSL)—previously estimated at about $11.7 million per person. In its place? There is nothing. Zero. Like New York Times reported, when it comes to regulatory decisions about fine particles and ozone, a human life now has a market value of $0.
The EPA’s comments are systematically brutal—and brutal and extreme in what they say. The agency says measuring health benefits is highly uncertain. The unproven costs of industrial compliance, however, are simple concrete. To be clear, the ledger now only counts what companies pay, not what people lose — an asthma attack, hospitalization, shortened life or death. The result is not neutrality; it’s draconian thinking.
If human life has no economic value, then what is? Why do we have a health care system at all? Why invest trillions in hospitals, medicine, or medical research if the outcome—people living longer, healthier lives—is meaningless? Because of this, emergency rooms are a serious expense and preventive care is a trivial commitment.
Push this idea one step further and the entire economy collapses. If people have zero intrinsic value, and businesses derive value only from people’s consumption, then the total value of the economy is also zero. Thank you: every stock index should be sold at $0; The S&P 500 becomes a philosophical thought experiment as Bloomberg’s terminals blink to silence.
This is not an exaggeration. It’s the inescapable numbers of the EPA and the Trump administration’s position on the quality of human life. If a company dumps toxic waste into a local river and your children get sick and die, there is no value lost, no cost, no liability – Milton Friedman’s ultimate cost-cutting argument.
As climatologists at the University of Chicago have pointed out, removing health benefits from a cost-benefit analysis does not make regulations more “objective”; it simply designs the equation so that pollution is cheap and people can be abandoned.
Michael Greenstone, environmental economist, said the change could result in dirty air, reducing gains made since Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970—a law that has added 1.4 years to the average life expectancy of Americans since then. Dr. Greenstone said: “Clean air is one of the great success stories of government policy of the last century. “And at the heart of the Clean Air Act is the idea that if it allows people to live longer and healthier lives, that has value that can be measured in dollars.”
A worldview in which the value of human life is zero fits well with the broader Trumpian agenda. People are reduced to abstractions or enemies. Haitian people. Somalis. Journalists. Comedy. Singers. Stephen Colbert and Bad Bunny are rated zero because they are not disruptive, offensive, or not strong enough. Is there anyone in Trump’s orbit who has value? Melania? Eric?
For decades, cost-benefit analysis—however imperfect—has served as an acknowledgment that human life is important in economic decision-making. Giving a dollar value to life was never intended to diminish it; it was meant to make sure it didn’t get lost. Removing that value doesn’t make the policy more difficult – it makes it less fair.
Capital markets are very sensitive to indicators. When the government declares, plainly or implicitly, that the people don’t care, investors should listen. Because the economy that makes human life worthless is the one that ends up having no value.
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