IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/jopoec/v9y1996i1p3-18.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Value of Life and the Value of Population

Author

Listed:
  • Broome, John

Abstract

This paper first distinguishes structured and unstructured approaches to valuing life. The unstructured approach bases its valuations on people's raw preferences, whereas the structured approach imposes a theoretical framework about the structure of value. The paper recommends the structured approach. This opens the way to considering the value of adding people to the population. The paper examines a common intuition that adding people is not in itself valuable, and explains the difficulties this intuition encounters.

Suggested Citation

  • Broome, John, 1996. "The Value of Life and the Value of Population," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 9(1), pages 3-18, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:jopoec:v:9:y:1996:i:1:p:3-18
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Stephen A. Marglin, 1963. "The Social Rate of Discount and The Optimal Rate of Investment," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 77(1), pages 95-111.
    2. Abraham Mehrez & Amiram Gafni, 1989. "Quality-adjusted Life Years, Utility Theory, and Healthy-years Equivalents," Medical Decision Making, , vol. 9(2), pages 142-149, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Rausser, Gordon C. & de Janvry, Alain & Schmitz, Andrew & Zilberman, David D., 1980. "Principal issues in the evaluation of public research in agriculture," Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley, Working Paper Series qt74v9m7dh, Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley.
    2. Hougaard, Jens Leth & Moreno-Ternero, Juan D. & Østerdal, Lars Peter, 2013. "A new axiomatic approach to the evaluation of population health," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 32(3), pages 515-523.
    3. Wylie Bradford, 2014. "Quo vadis: Does economic theory need a sustainability makeover?," The Economic and Labour Relations Review, , vol. 25(4), pages 551-562, December.
    4. Li, Qingran & Pizer, William A., 2021. "Use of the consumption discount rate for public policy over the distant future," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 107(C).
    5. Dong-Xuan, Bach & Qu, Xiangyu, 2024. "Restricted Dominant Unanimity and Social Discounting," Center for Mathematical Economics Working Papers 697, Center for Mathematical Economics, Bielefeld University.
    6. Diecidue, E. & Schmidt, U. & Wakker, P.P., 2000. "A Theory of the Gambling Effect," Discussion Paper 2000-75, Tilburg University, Center for Economic Research.
    7. Mark Sculpher & Amiram Gafni, 2001. "Recognizing diversity in public preferences: The use of preference sub‐groups in cost‐effectiveness analysis," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 10(4), pages 317-324, June.
    8. Heinzel, Christoph & Winkler, Ralph, 2006. "Gradual versus structural technological change in the transition to a low-emission energy industry: How time-to-build and differing social and individual discount rates influence environmental and tec," Dresden Discussion Paper Series in Economics 09/06, Technische Universität Dresden, Faculty of Business and Economics, Department of Economics.
    9. Katrina Forrester, 2018. "The problem of the future in postwar Anglo-American political philosophy," Climatic Change, Springer, vol. 151(1), pages 55-66, November.
    10. Lawrence H. Goulder & Ian W. H. Parry, 2008. "Instrument Choice in Environmental Policy," Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 2(2), pages 152-174, Summer.
    11. Andrew Caplin & John Leahy, 2004. "The Social Discount Rate," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 112(6), pages 1257-1268, December.
    12. McNamee, Paul, 2007. "What difference does it make? The calculation of QALY gains from health profiles using patient and general population values," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 84(2-3), pages 321-331, December.
    13. Pezzey, John C.V., 2001. "Optimality, Hartwick’s Rule, and Instruments of Sustainability Policy and Environmental Policy," 2001 Conference (45th), January 23-25, 2001, Adelaide, Australia 125833, Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society.
    14. Preston Greene, 2024. "Social bias, not time bias," Politics, Philosophy & Economics, , vol. 23(1), pages 100-121, February.
    15. Olmstead, Todd & Zeckhauser, Richard, 1999. "The menu-setting problem and subsidized prices: drug formulary illustration," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 18(5), pages 523-550, October.
    16. Kenneth J. Arrow, 1999. "Inter-Generational Equity and the Rate of Discount in Long-Term Social Investment," International Economic Association Series, in: Murat R. Sertel (ed.), Contemporary Economic Issues, chapter 5, pages 89-102, Palgrave Macmillan.
    17. Voinov, Alexey & Farley, Joshua, 2007. "Reconciling sustainability, systems theory and discounting," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 63(1), pages 104-113, June.
    18. Krucien, Nicolas & Heidenreich, Sebastian & Gafni, Amiram & Pelletier-Fleury, Nathalie, 2020. "Measuring public preferences in France for potential consequences stemming from re-allocation of healthcare resources," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 246(C).
    19. Coppola, Andrea & Fernholz, Fernando & Glenday, Graham, 2014. "Estimating the economic opportunity cost of capital for public investment projects : an empirical analysis of the Mexican case," Policy Research Working Paper Series 6816, The World Bank.
    20. Jean Tirole, 1981. "Taux d'actualisation et optimum second," Revue Économique, Programme National Persée, vol. 32(5), pages 829-869.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:jopoec:v:9:y:1996:i:1:p:3-18. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.