It’s not just your 401(k) and the greenbacks in your wallet that aren’t worth as much as they once were. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), your life is also worth less than it used to be—almost a million dollars less.

What is a Human Life Worth?
The EPA places the “value of a statistical life” at $6.9 million in 2008 dollars, down from $7.8 million just five years ago, according to the Associated Press which first reported the story.

The EPA says the calculation is based on what people are willing to pay to avoid certain risks, and on what employers pay workers to assume extra risks, and should not be viewed as defining a person’s actual worth. And despite the recent reduction, the EPA still places a higher value on human life than any other U.S. government agency.

Life-Value Numbers Have Real Consequences
But before you shrug this off as bureaucratic number crunching, consider this: the less value a government agency places on human lives, the less need for regulation to protect and preserve those lives. Why? Because when government agencies consider new regulations, they first determine the value of a human life and then compare the economic cost of implementing the proposed rule against the benefit of the lives it could save.

Politics or Science: What Motivated the EPA to Devalue Human Life?
According to many observers—from environmentalists to a former EPA official to the Vanderbilt University economist whose work was partly the basis for the recalculation—the EPA decision to reduce the value of life doesn’t make sense. Critics of the decision speculate that the agency made the change so the Bush administration could avoid tougher regulations on air pollution, water pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and other environmental problems. The EPA denies the charge, claiming that agency officials were just responding to the science they used as the basis for the decision.

Still, this isn’t the first time the Bush administration and the EPA have tripped over their calculators and ended up in a political controversy when playing around with the value of human lives. In 2002, the EPA concluded that the lives of people over 70 were 38 percent less valuable than the lives of younger people—a decision which caused a public and political firestorm that led the agency to reverse its ruling.

_{Graphic by Getty Images}

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