{"id":376991,"date":"2026-04-01T19:41:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-01T19:41:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/376991\/"},"modified":"2026-04-01T19:41:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-01T19:41:08","slug":"the-epa-just-valued-a-human-life-at-0-thats-not-just-a-moral-crisis-its-a-market-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/376991\/","title":{"rendered":"The EPA just valued a human life at $0. That’s not just a moral crisis \u2014 it’s a market crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my\u00a0recent Fortune opinion piece<\/a>\u00a0on how Trump-era policies are driving capital out of capitalism, I argued that markets cannot function without trust, transparency, and a shared sense of purpose. Since then, the Administration took another step to take that argument to its logical\u2014and frankly terrifying\u2014next step.<\/p>\n

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did something extraordinary as a preface to revoking the Endangerment Finding\u2014they revised how they evaluate air pollution rules by not counting the benefits of lives saved and illnesses avoided. The technical term for what disappeared is the \u201cvalue of a statistical life\u201d (VSL)\u2014previously measured\u00a0at approximately $11.7 million per person. In its place? Nothing. Zero. As the\u00a0New York Times reported<\/a>, when it comes to regulatory decisions on fine particulate matter and ozone, a human life now carries a market value of $0.<\/p>\n

The EPA\u2019s rationale is bureaucratically brutal\u2014and\u00a0cruel and radical in its implications. The agency claims that quantifying health benefits is too uncertain. Unverified compliance costs to industry, however, are conveniently concrete. To be clear, the ledger now tallies only what companies pay, not what people lose\u2014the asthma attacks, hospitalizations, shortened lives, or deaths. The result isn\u2019t neutrality;\u00a0it\u2019s draconian ideology.<\/p>\n

If a human life has no economic value, then what does? Why do we have a healthcare system at all? Why invest trillions in hospitals, pharmaceuticals, or medical research if the outcome\u2014people living longer, healthier lives\u2014registers as meaningless? By this logic, emergency rooms are sunk costs and preventative care is a frivolous indulgence.<\/p>\n

Push this ideology a step further and the entire economy implodes. If humans have zero intrinsic value, and corporations derive value only from human spending, then the sum total of economic value is also zero.\u00a0Congratulations: every stock index should trade at $0;\u00a0the S&P 500 becomes a philosophical thought experiment\u00a0while Bloomberg terminals blink into existential silence.<\/p>\n

This is not hyperbole. It is the unavoidable math of the EPA and the Trump administration\u2019s position on the value of human life. If a company dumps toxic waste into a local river and your children get sick and die,\u00a0there is no value lost, there are no damages, no liability\u2014the ultimate rationale for Milton Friedman\u2019s externalization of costs.<\/p>\n

As\u00a0University of Chicago climate scholars pointed out<\/a>, removing health benefits from cost-benefit analysis doesn\u2019t make regulation more \u201cobjective;\u201d\u00a0it simply rigs the equation so that pollution is cheap and people are disposable.<\/p>\n

Michael Greenstone, an environmental economist,\u00a0said the change could result in dirtier air, undercutting the gains made since Congress strengthened the Clean Air Act in 1970\u2014a law\u00a0that added 1.4 years to the average American\u2019s life expectancy since. \u201cClean air is one of the great success stories of government policy in the last half-century,\u201d Dr. Greenstone said. \u201cAnd at the heart of the Clean Air Act is the idea that when you allow people to lead longer and healthier lives, that has value that can be measured in dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n

A worldview in which the value of a human life is zero fits neatly within the broader Trumpian project. People are reduced to abstractions or enemies. Haitians. Somalis. Journalists. Comedians. Musicians. Stephen Colbert and Bad Bunny are assigned a value of zero because they are inconvenient, annoying, or insufficiently deferential to power. Does anyone in Trump\u2019s orbit have a value? Melania? Eric?\u00a0<\/p>\n

For decades, cost-benefit analysis\u2014imperfect as it is\u2014served as an acknowledgment that human life matters in economic decision-making. Assigning a dollar value to life was never meant to cheapen it;\u00a0it was meant to ensure it wasn\u2019t lost. Removing that value doesn\u2019t make policy more rigorous\u00a0\u2014\u00a0it makes it morally and ethically vacuous.<\/p>\n

Capital markets are exquisitely sensitive to signals. When the government declares, implicitly or explicitly, that people don\u2019t matter, investors should listen. Because an economy that prices human life at zero is one that ultimately has zero value.<\/p>\n

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of\u00a0Fortune.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In my\u00a0recent Fortune opinion piece\u00a0on how Trump-era policies are driving capital out of capitalism, I argued that markets…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":376992,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[246,1068,61,60,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-376991","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-environment","9":"tag-epa","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=376991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376991\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/376992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=376991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=376991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=376991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}