How to value life? EPA devalues its estimate

The environmental agency traditionally has placed the highest value of life in government and still does, despite efforts by administrations to bring uniformity to that figure among all agencies.

Not all of the EPA uses the reduced value. The agency's water division never adopted the change and in 2006 used $8.7 million in current dollars.

From 1996 to 2003, the EPA kept the value of a statistical life generally around $7.8 million to $7.96 million in current dollars, according to reports analyzed by The AP. In 2004, for a major air pollution rule, the agency lowered the value to $7.15 million in current dollars.

Just how the EPA came up with that figure is complicated and involves two dueling analyses.

Viscusi wrote one of those big studies, coming up with a value of $8.8 million in current dollars. The other study put the number between $2 million and $3.3 million. The co-author of that study, Laura Taylor of North Carolina State University, said her figure was lower because it emphasized differences in pay for various risky jobs, not just risky industries as a whole.

Advisor: 'Numerology,' not science
The EPA took portions of each study and essentially split the difference — a decision two of the agency's advisory boards faulted or questioned.

"This sort of number-crunching is basically numerology," said Granger Morgan, chairman of EPA's Science Advisory Board and an engineering and public policy professor at Carnegie Mellon University. "This is not a scientific issue."

Other, similar calculations by the Bush administration have proved politically explosive. In 2002, the EPA decided the value of elderly people was 38 percent less than that of people under 70. After the move became public, the agency reversed itself.

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