News

May 25, 2018

Review by James K. Hammitt

Pricing Lives: Guideposts for a Safer Society  (Princeton University Press, 2018) is a tour de force. It provides an entertaining, accessible account of the modern approach to valuing mortality risk. In non-technical prose, it covers the major aspects of the approach and how it should be applied to social decisions.  It shows how US regulatory agencies’ adoption of the ‘value per statistical life’ (VSL) to replace the ‘cost of death’ (i.e., human capital) approach has led to more-protective regulation and argues the VSL approach should be extended beyond regulation, to private-sector decisions about product design and to government sanctions for regulatory violations. It also finds that the values used outside the US are typically far too small; revising these upward would lead to more-protective and more-appropriate regulation in other countries.

Report from the SBCA President on the 2018 Annual Conference and The Plenary Presentation by Tomas Philipson

By Don Kenkel

It was my honor to preside over the 2018 Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis (SBCA) Conference  held March 14 – 16 at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. I am happy to report that by all indications it was another successful conference. We had 319 total registrants from 19 countries across 5 continents. U.S. participants represented 31 states and D.C. Half of all participants were affiliated with the U.S. federal government. The next largest group were academics (almost one-third); other attendees were from the private sector or from state and international government agencies. The three pre-conference professional development workshops were well attended and also drew a mix of participants from federal, state, and international agencies, as well as academics.