…we can attach monetary values to mortality to illuminate the often controversial question of how to value life in Africa.

Large fractions of the respondents in the World Poll report the mortality of an immediate family member in the last twelve months, with malaria typically more important than AIDS, and deaths of women in childbirth more important than deaths from AIDS in many countries.

A life evaluation measure (Cantril’s ladder of life) is relatively insensitive to the deaths of immediate family, which suggests a low value of life. There are much larger effects on experiential measures, such as sadness and depression, which suggest much larger values of life.

It is not clear whether either of these results is correct, yet our results demonstrate that experiential and evaluative measures are not the same thing, and that they cannot be used interchangeably as measures of “happiness” in welfare economics.

That is a new NBER working paper from Deaton, Fortson and Tortora.

There are not nearly enough measurement investigations in economics. This one is important.

We use subjective measures of well-being to inform policy choices and measure disparities all the time; perhaps they are misleading. When we say that Niger is performing worse than Nigeria, that is because we have placed a subjective value on one indicator over another (mostly based on whether we have data). These numbers have influence.

Also, if some forms of death are more terrible for others, perhaps they ought to be a development priority. From a psychological perpective, we might want to understand whether bereavement lessens as the likelihood of death increases. To an economist: is the marginal value of a life diminishing in mortality risk?

What a chilling sentence to write. It occurs to me that the authors could have written their abstract to be less… cold.

An ungated version is here.