by Steve Weinberg
Quick: What's the dollar value of a human life? Of a river? John D. Graham says he knows. As the White House point man who weighs every health and environmental rule to decide if it's worth the cost, he's a bureaucrat with power over life and death.
(John) Graham's specialty is a long-established but controversial number-crunching technique called cost-benefit analysis. Its purpose is to quantify, in dollars, every cost and every benefit of a possible course of action. Because Graham has spent his entire professional life working to enshrine it (and its near cousin, risk analysis) at the center of public policy, his nomination process was highly contentious. He got thirty-seven "No" votes in the Senate -- second only to Attorney General John Ashcroft, a better-known figure appointed to a much higher-profile office. Among the letters sent to the Senate about Graham was a critique signed by fifty-one academics; they charged that he had repeatedly lowballed health and environmental benefits, used "extreme and highly disputed" economic assumptions, and issued hard-and-fast opinions on complex medical and scientific topics in which he had no training. <snip>
Recently, OIRA has been asking EPA to include an "alternative estimate" for the dollar benefits of some rules, using lower figures for the value society places on a single human life. EPA uses $6.1 million as its basic figure for one "statistical life." The alternative figures, drawn from certain economists' studies of how people value risk, start at $3.7 million. But the alternative estimate also assumes that the elderly are not willing to pay as much to protect themselves. It prices people seventy or older at 63 percent of people under seventy, or $2.3 million per elderly life. Applied to, say, air pollution -- which can be deadly to older people with vulnerable lungs -- figures like these make a rule look less valuable by an order of magnitude. <snip>
Most controversial of all was the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, which Graham founded in 1989. Under Graham as director, up to 60 percent of the center's budget came from corporations, including Dow Chemical, Exxon, General Electric, Monsanto, and Union Carbide. The center has produced hundreds of diverse publications, including articles on daily dialysis for kidney patients and public attitudes about Alzheimer's. But some of its work under Graham seemed tailored to the lobbying needs of funders. A study paid for by the American Farm Bureau Federation, for instance, said that eliminating the most toxic pesticides could disrupt the food supply and lead to 1,000 premature deaths. (The idea that Americans would die of malnutrition from lack of pest control, wrote three scientists at Consumers Union, was "not remotely credible.")
http://www.nrdc.org/onearth/03spr/graham1.asp?r=nThey supposedly value life at 6.1 million (2.3 million if you are 70 or older) - do a cost-benefit analysis and then they throw out the data when it look like human life is more valuable than the cost to industry.