Economists therefore tend to prefer observing real choices. If you're willing to cross a busy street to pick up a ?20 note, the economist who put it there can infer something about your willingness to accept risk. More orthodox approaches look at career choices: if you're willing to be a lumberjack, part of that decision is to accept risk in exchange for financial reward.
Being a soldier is risky; so is being a drug-dealer or prostitute. The difficulty, evidently, is to disentangle the health risk and the financial reward from all the other motivations to choose a particular way of life. That isn't easy but economists try.
World Bank economist Paul Gertler and his colleagues reckoned that Mexican prostitutes valued their lives at about $50,000 per year, based on willingness to take money not to use condoms. At five times their annual earnings, that's a similar figure to workers accepting risky jobs in rich countries.
There are anomalies. Steve Freakonomics Levitt and sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh calculated that Chicago drug dealers seemed to value their entire lives at $50,000 to $100,000 - low indeed, even for poor young men whose career choice indicates a taste for risks.
Whatever the frailties of these calculations, they are the best we have. And far from cheapening life, this sort of research often highlights just how valuable our safer, healthier modern lives really are. Kevin Murphy of the Chicago Graduate School of Business recently visited London to present his research on the value of health improvements in the US since 1970. They're vast - about $10 trillion in today's money. Looking further back, if you had to choose between the material progress of the 20th century and the improvements in health, it would be a toss-up. The health gains are as valuable as everything else put together. Encouragingly, health in most developing countries has improved faster than in rich ones, suggesting that global inequality is falling.
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