The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [122]
41-44 Paying for the Dead: Kenneth Feinberg’s experience at the helm of the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund comes from Kenneth Feinberg, “What Is Life Worth?,” Public Affairs, 2005; Frances Romero, “Kenneth Feinberg: Compensation Czar,” Time, June 10, 2009; Kenneth Feinberg, Camille Biros, Jordana Harris Feldman, Deborah E. Greenspan, and Jacqueline Zins, “Final Report of the Special Master for the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund of 2001,” Vol. 1, p. 98 (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/usgd/wtc.html#exec, accessed 08/08/2010); and Benjamin Weiser, “Value of Suing Over 9/11 Deaths Is Still Unsettled,” New York Times, March 13, 2009.
44-47 Valuing Citizens’ Safety: The cost-benefit analysis of flame-resistant mattresses is found in Consumer Product Safety Commission, “Final Rule: Standard for the Flammability (Open Flame) of Mattress Sets,” Federal Register, Vol. 71, No. 50, March 15, 2006, Rules and Regulations. The analysis of costs and benefits of seat belts in school buses is in William L. Hall, “Seat Belts on School Buses: A Review of Issues and Research,” paper for the North Carolina School Bus Safety Conference, February 29, 1996. Approaches to cost-benefit analysis by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration are discussed in Fred Kuchler and Elise Golan, “Assigning Values to Life. Comparing Methods for Valuing Health Risks,” USDA Agricultural Economic Report No. 784, November 1999. Costs and benefits of Homeland Security spending are discussed in Mark G. Stewart and John Mueller, “Assessing the Costs and Benefits of United States Homeland Security Spending,” University of Newcastle Center for Infrastructure Performance and Reliability Research Report, 2009; and Mark G. Stewart and John Mueller, “A Risk and Cost-Benefit Assessment of Australian Aviation Security,” Security Challenges, Vol. 4, No. 3, Spring 2008, pp. 45-61. The high cost of some government regulations in the United States is discussed in John F. Morrall III, “Saving Lives: A Review of the Record,” AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies Working Paper, 2003; Government Accountability Office, “Superfund: Funding and Reported Costs of Enforcement and Administration Activities,” July 18, 2008; and W. Kip Viscusi and James Hamilton, “Cleaning Up Superfund,” Public Interest, Summer 1996. The costs and benefits of HO’s strategy to combat tuberculosis are laid out in Ramanan Laxminarayan, Eili Klein, Christopher Dye, Katherine Floyd, Sarah Darley, and Olusoji Adeyi, “Economic Benefit of Tuberculosis Control,” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper, 2007. The data on deaths from tuberculosis come from the United Nations Millennium Development Indicators’ data set.
48-51 Price Your Own Life: The value of life and the risk of dying in a car crash are discussed in “New Crash Tests Demonstrate the Influence of Vehicle Size and Weight on Safety in Crashes; Results Are Relevant to Fuel Economy Policies,” Insurance Institute for Highway Safety News Release, April 14, 2009; and Orley Ashenfelter and Michael Greenstone, “Using Mandated Speed Limits to Measure the Value of a Statistical Life,” NBER Working Paper, August 2002. Thomas Schelling’s proposal on valuing life is in Thomas Schelling, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” in S. B. Chase, ed., Problems in Public Expenditure and Analysis (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1968), pp. 127-162. Bike helmets, cancer risks, and the value of life are discussed in W. Kip Viscusi and Joseph Aldy, “The Value of a Statistical Life: A Critical Review of Market Estimates Throughout the World,” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Vol. 27, No. 1, 2003, pp. 5-76.