This measure can serve as a useful input in analysing the trade-off of lives versus livelihoods Let me begin with a confession.
The topic of today’s column is fraught with moral and ethical dilemmas. If you are one who believes that human life is priceless and that any attempt to even analytically explore this is taboo, this column is probably not for you.
As lockdowns wear on around the world, a debate on public health gains versus economic costs has begun in earnest. The trade-off between the economic impact and the value of a (saved) life has occupied economists for several decades.
Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling, a game theorist, first coined the term “value of a statistical life" (VSL) in a 1968 essay titled The Life You Save May Be