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Thursday, March 12, 2020

Thinking About the Price of Safety

I have been a pretty vocal critical about the value of PTC when it comes to general rail safety.  It's the sort of thing that sounds great in practice, but looking at the number of lives lost in PTC preventable rail accidents the costs are seriously hard to justify.  Anyway, in this day of weighing the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives lost due to a pandemic against the severe cost of an economic depression, the folks at 538 took a crack at trying to figure out how much the government should spend to save a life.  It provides some additional metrics beyond "lives" or even Quality Adjusted Life Years that get to people's own subjective valuation of risk.

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