Do you value your life at ten million? As in, would you take a 50% chance of death for five million? If so, why are you not smuggling drugs or whatever?
Well, a couple of researchers estimated that drug mules made a median of $1313 back in 2014, so I’d need to smuggle a lot of cocaine to earn that much. Seems like it would take a while...
Say my life expectancy from now is 50 years and I work at an hourly salary of $30 (~$60k yearly salary) then I implicitly value the remaining 310,250 hours of my waking life at something like $9.3m total. This breaks down if offered larger probabilities of death and larger amounts of money (e.g. opportunity cost) but $10m seems like a sensible place to start for a Fermi calculation.
In this case we don’t even have to worry about larger probabilities of death—the calculation here is essentially an expected gain of 1.2 days of life for $1000 which comes to about $50 per hour of waking life. Instead of making a vaccine only for myself I would be better just to take half a week unpaid leave and gain the same amount of time for a cost of only $600.
That’s is an easy calculation. Life value can change later and there might be a more attractive bet you will be forgoing by taking this one, say 10 million for 50% chance of dying.
Do you value your life at ten million? As in, would you take a 50% chance of death for five million? If so, why are you not smuggling drugs or whatever?
Well, a couple of researchers estimated that drug mules made a median of $1313 back in 2014, so I’d need to smuggle a lot of cocaine to earn that much. Seems like it would take a while...
Say my life expectancy from now is 50 years and I work at an hourly salary of $30 (~$60k yearly salary) then I implicitly value the remaining 310,250 hours of my waking life at something like $9.3m total. This breaks down if offered larger probabilities of death and larger amounts of money (e.g. opportunity cost) but $10m seems like a sensible place to start for a Fermi calculation.
In this case we don’t even have to worry about larger probabilities of death—the calculation here is essentially an expected gain of 1.2 days of life for $1000 which comes to about $50 per hour of waking life. Instead of making a vaccine only for myself I would be better just to take half a week unpaid leave and gain the same amount of time for a cost of only $600.
Obviously this has some assumptions baked in (like that I don’t value my job) but If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing With Made-Up Statistics.
That’s is an easy calculation. Life value can change later and there might be a more attractive bet you will be forgoing by taking this one, say 10 million for 50% chance of dying.