[PDF] Pricing Lives eBook

Author : Ariel Colonomos
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 28,84 MB
Release : 2023-08-30
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0192890557

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This book discusses the equating of human lives with the material and argues that pricing lives lies at the core of the political. Indeed, as in Plato or Hobbes as well as in the Weberian ethics of responsibility, measurement is considered to be one of the central features of the political. This book argues that this measure relies primarily on two goods: human lives and interests. It also argues that the material equivalence to lives is twofold. Such equivalence is a double equation, as we pay for lives and we pay with lives. This double equation is constitutive of the measurement upon which the political equilibrium of a society depends and, as such, is constitutive of the political. The book adopts two approaches: one explanatory and the other normative. First, its purpose is to explain the nexus between existential goods and material goods and includes a thorough analysis of several case studies drawn from contemporary politics both domestic and international. Second, it discusses normatively the material valuation of human lives and the human value of material goods. The book relies upon interdisciplinary thinking as the material equivalent to lives is not only extremely relevant for political theory and philosophy, it is of great relevance for law. Great works of literature such as Shakespeare's plays are also excellent political illustrations of the importance of pricing lives we can learn from. Value attribution is an important question in the social sciences, notably in sociology, history and international relations.

Author : W. Kip Viscusi
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 38,92 MB
Release : 2018-05-15
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0691179212

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How society’s undervaluing of life puts all of us at risk—and the groundbreaking economic measure that can fix it Like it or not, sometimes we need to put a monetary value on people's lives. In the past, government agencies used the financial "cost of death" to monetize the mortality risks of regulatory policies, but this method vastly undervalued life. Pricing Lives tells the story of how the government came to adopt an altogether different approach--the value of a statistical life, or VSL—and persuasively shows how its more widespread use could create a safer and more equitable society for everyone. In the 1980s, W. Kip Viscusi used the method to demonstrate that the benefits of requiring businesses to label hazardous chemicals immensely outweighed the costs. VSL is the risk-reward trade-off that people make about their health when considering risky job choices. With it, Viscusi calculated how much more money workers would demand to take on hazardous jobs, boosting calculated benefits by an order of magnitude. His current estimate of the value of a statistical life is $10 million. In this book, Viscusi provides a comprehensive look at all aspects of economic and policy efforts to price lives, including controversial topics such as whether older people's lives are worth less and richer people's lives are worth more. He explains why corporations need to abandon the misguided cost-of-death approach, how the courts can profit from increased application of VSL in assessing liability and setting damages, and how other countries consistently undervalue risks to life. Pricing Lives proposes sensible economic guideposts to foster more protective policies and greater levels of safety in the United States and throughout the world.

Author : W. Kip Viscusi
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 48,78 MB
Release : 2020-10-06
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 069120859X

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How society’s undervaluing of life puts all of us at risk—and the groundbreaking economic measure that can fix it Like it or not, sometimes we need to put a monetary value on people's lives. In the past, government agencies used the financial "cost of death" to monetize the mortality risks of regulatory policies, but this method vastly undervalued life. Pricing Lives tells the story of how the government came to adopt an altogether different approach--the value of a statistical life, or VSL—and persuasively shows how its more widespread use could create a safer and more equitable society for everyone. In the 1980s, W. Kip Viscusi used the method to demonstrate that the benefits of requiring businesses to label hazardous chemicals immensely outweighed the costs. VSL is the risk-reward trade-off that people make about their health when considering risky job choices. With it, Viscusi calculated how much more money workers would demand to take on hazardous jobs, boosting calculated benefits by an order of magnitude. His current estimate of the value of a statistical life is $10 million. In this book, Viscusi provides a comprehensive look at all aspects of economic and policy efforts to price lives, including controversial topics such as whether older people's lives are worth less and richer people's lives are worth more. He explains why corporations need to abandon the misguided cost-of-death approach, how the courts can profit from increased application of VSL in assessing liability and setting damages, and how other countries consistently undervalue risks to life. Pricing Lives proposes sensible economic guideposts to foster more protective policies and greater levels of safety in the United States and throughout the world.

Author : Peter A. Ubel
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 236 pages
File Size : 17,77 MB
Release : 2000
Category : Medical
ISBN : 9780262710091

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A rational look at health care rationing, from ethical, economic, psychological, and clinical perspectives. Although managed health care is a hot topic, too few discussions focus on health care rationing--who lives and who dies, death versus dollars. In this book physician and bioethicist Peter A. Ubel argues that physicians, health insurance companies, managed care organizations, and governments need to consider the cost-effectiveness of many new health care technologies. In particular, they need to think about how best to ration health care. Ubel believes that standard medical training should provide physicians with the expertise to decide when to withhold health care from patients. He discusses the moral questions raised by this position, and by health care rationing in general. He incorporates ethical arguments about the appropriate role of cost-effectiveness analysis in health care rationing, empirical research about how the general public wants to ration care, and clinical insights based on his practice of general internal medicine. Straddling the fields of ethics, economics, research psychology, and clinical medicine, he moves the debate forward from whether to ration to how to ration. The discussion is enlivened by actual case studies.

Author : Andre M. Perry
Publisher : Brookings Institution Press
Page : 271 pages
File Size : 35,55 MB
Release : 2020-05-19
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0815737289

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The deliberate devaluation of Blacks and their communities has had very real, far-reaching, and negative economic and social effects. An enduring white supremacist myth claims brutal conditions in Black communities are mainly the result of Black people's collective choices and moral failings. “That's just how they are” or “there's really no excuse”: we've all heard those not so subtle digs. But there is nothing wrong with Black people that ending racism can't solve. We haven't known how much the country will gain by properly valuing homes and businesses, family structures, voters, and school districts in Black neighborhoods. And we need to know. Noted educator, journalist, and scholar Andre Perry takes readers on a tour of six Black-majority cities whose assets and strengths are undervalued. Perry begins in his hometown of Wilkinsburg, a small city east of Pittsburgh that, unlike its much larger neighbor, is struggling and failing to attract new jobs and industry. Bringing his own personal story of growing up in Black-majority Wilkinsburg, Perry also spotlights five others where he has deep connections: Detroit, Birmingham, New Orleans, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. He provides an intimate look at the assets that should be of greater value to residents—and that can be if they demand it. Perry provides a new means of determining the value of Black communities. Rejecting policies shaped by flawed perspectives of the past and present, it gives fresh insights on the historical effects of racism and provides a new value paradigm to limit them in the future. Know Your Price demonstrates the worth of Black people's intrinsic personal strengths, real property, and traditional institutions. These assets are a means of empowerment and, as Perry argues in this provocative and very personal book, are what we need to know and understand to build Black prosperity.

Author : Eli Cook
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 365 pages
File Size : 41,6 MB
Release : 2017-09-25
Category : History
ISBN : 0674982541

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How did Americans come to quantify their society’s progress and well-being in units of money? In today’s GDP-run world, prices are the standard measure of not only our goods and commodities but our environment, our communities, our nation, even our self-worth. The Pricing of Progress traces the long history of how and why we moderns adopted the monetizing values and valuations of capitalism as an indicator of human prosperity while losing sight of earlier social and moral metrics that did not put a price on everyday life. Eli Cook roots the rise of economic indicators in the emergence of modern capitalism and the contested history of English enclosure, Caribbean slavery, American industrialization, economic thought, and corporate power. He explores how the maximization of market production became the chief objective of American economic and social policy. We see how distinctly capitalist quantification techniques used to manage or invest in railroad corporations, textile factories, real estate holdings, or cotton plantations escaped the confines of the business world and seeped into every nook and cranny of society. As economic elites quantified the nation as a for-profit, capitalized investment, the progress of its inhabitants, free or enslaved, came to be valued according to their moneymaking abilities. Today as in the nineteenth century, political struggles rage over who gets to determine the statistical yardsticks used to gauge the “health” of our economy and nation. The Pricing of Progress helps us grasp the limits and dangers of entrusting economic indicators to measure social welfare and moral goals.

Author : Tim Leffel
Publisher : Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 42,35 MB
Release : 2015
Category : Americans
ISBN : 9781505651690

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Presents good value destinations to live in around the world and how to transition.

Author : Deborah Levy
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 152 pages
File Size : 16,31 MB
Release : 2018-07-10
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1635571928

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The bestselling exploration of the dimensions of love, marriage, mourning, and kinship from two-time Booker Prize finalist Deborah Levy. A New York Times Notable Book A New York Public Library Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 What does it cost a woman to unsettle old boundaries and collapse the social hierarchies that make her a minor character in a world not arranged to her advantage? This vibrant memoir, a portrait of contemporary womanhood in flux, is an urgent quest to find an unwritten major female character who can exist more easily in the world. Levy considers what it means to live with meaning, value, and pleasure, to seize the ultimate freedom of writing our own lives, and reflects on the work of such artists and thinkers as Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin, Elena Ferrante, Marguerite Duras, David Lynch, and Emily Dickinson. The Cost of Living, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal in Nonfiction, is crucial testimony, as distinctive, witty, complex, and original as Levy's acclaimed novels.

Author : Howard Steven Friedman
Publisher : University of California Press
Page : 231 pages
File Size : 20,35 MB
Release : 2021-05-05
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0520383125

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How much is a human life worth? Individuals, families, companies, and governments routinely place a price on human life. The calculations that underlie these price tags are often buried in technical language, yet they influence our economy, laws, behaviors, policies, health, and safety. These price tags are often unfair, infused as they are with gender, racial, national, and cultural biases that often result in valuing the lives of the young more than the old, the rich more than the poor, whites more than blacks, Americans more than foreigners, and relatives more than strangers. This is critical since undervalued lives are left less-protected and more exposed to risk. Howard Steven Friedman explains in simple terms how economists and data scientists at corporations, regulatory agencies, and insurance companies develop and use these price tags and points a spotlight at their logical flaws and limitations. He then forcefully argues against the rampant unfairness in the system. Readers will be enlightened, shocked, and, ultimately, empowered to confront the price tags we assign to human lives and understand why such calculations matter.

Author : Reynolds Price
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 17,15 MB
Release : 2000
Category : Authors, American
ISBN : 0684872552

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Reynolds Price has long been one of America's most acclaimed and accomplished men of letters -- the author of novels, stories, poems, essays, plays, and a memoir. In "A Whole New Life," however, he steps from behind that roster of achievements to present us with a more personal story, a narrative as intimate and compelling as any work of the imagination. In 1984, a large cancer was discovered in his spinal cord ("The tumor was pencil-thick and gray-colored, ten inches long from my neck-hair downward"). Here, for the first time, Price recounts without self-pity what became a long struggle to withstand and recover from this appalling, if all too common, affliction (one American in three will experience some from of cancer). He charts the first puzzling symptoms; the urgent surgery that fails to remove the growth and the radiation that temporarily arrests it (but hurries his loss of control of his lower body); the occasionally comic trials of rehab; the steady rise of severe pain and reliance on drugs; two further radical surgeries; the sustaining force of a certain religious vision; an eventual discovery of help from biofeedback and hypnosis; and the miraculous return of his powers as a writer in a new, active life. Beyond the particulars of pain and mortal illness, larger concerns surface here -- a determination to get on with the human interaction that is so much a part of this writer's much-loved work, the gratitude he feels toward kin and friends and some (though by no means "all)" doctors, the return to his prolific work, and the "now appalling, now astonishing grace of God." "A Whole New Life" offers more than the portrait of one brave person in tribulation; it offers honestinsight, realistic encouragement and inspiration to others who suffer the bafflement of catastrophic illness or who know someone who does or will.