Rock climber Alex Honnold was reportedly paid a mere $500,000 to perform a free-solo climb of the Taipei 101 skyscraper in Taipei, Taiwan.
Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Free-solo climber Alex Honnold was reportedly paid about $500,000 to climb the Taipei 101 skyscraper without ropes or protection, an act that carried a nontrivial risk of death. His decision highlights a core flaw in how economists value human life, namely, the risks people choose to take on their own are often not a sufficient guide for public policy.
That problem now sits at the center of a heated debate over the Environmental Protection Agency’s recent decision to stop monetizing the “value of a statistical life” (VSL) in its air pollution regulations. Under the new policy, EPA will no longer assign a dollar figure to lives saved when evaluating rules for air pollutants like fine particulate matter (PM₂.₅) and ozone. That marks a break from longstanding practice, as regulators have long relied on the VSL to value mortality reductions in regulatory cost-benefit analysis.
Critics accuse the Trump EPA of callously valuing human life at $0, warning that ignoring the benefits of saved lives will lead to weaker pollution controls and “dirtier air”. For example, Stanford environmental economist Marshall Burke blasted the move, arguing “The Trump administration is saying, literally, that they put zero value on human life.” Others, like University of Chicago professor Michael Greenstone, believe the change undercuts decades of economic analysis. “When you allow people to lead longer and healthier lives, that has value that can be measured in dollars,” Greenstone insists.
Much of this criticism assumes that the way individuals price their own lives provides a sound basis for public policy, an assumption long held by economists but one that deserves closer scrutiny. In their view, EPA’s decision “shelves” a powerful tool that justified stringent regulations by showing their life-saving benefits vastly outweighed industry compliance costs.
But the Honnold example points to a flaw in that reasoning. Private, VSL-style economic valuations of life, revealed through individual risk-taking, can diverge sharply from the social values that are required in a cost-benefit analysis.
The EPA’s move is actually a step toward improving the scientific integrity of regulatory analysis. Far from “ignoring” benefits, the agency is forcing a long-overdue reckoning with how economists infer values from human behavior. In that sense, it is the EPA’s critics, not the agency itself, who are clinging to a flawed and outdated analytical framework. The EPA’s decision should be applauded, and even extended not only to other EPA rules, but across government agencies.
Risk vs. Life: A Distinction Without a Difference
Defenders of the status quo often claim that using the VSL doesn’t put a dollar value on life itself, only on small reductions in risk. They argue that when agencies claim a life is worth, say, $10 million, they really mean people’s willingness to pay for a tiny chance of avoiding death adds up to this amount. But this is a semantic distraction. For mortality risk reductions to be real, lives must be saved in the aggregate. If one life is saved in a population of one million people, each individual’s risk of death might fall by one in a million. Whether analysts value that outcome as a $10 reduction in individual risk added up across everyone, or as a $10 million value directly applied to the life saved is mathematically identical.
The distinction is semantic, not economic. If no lives are saved, then no “mortality risk” has been reduced and there are no benefits to monetize. In short, the VSL used by agencies and the value of life are inseparable concepts. The insistence that we’re not pricing life, just risk is a bureaucratic comfort blanket. It is no more convincing than pretending that Alex Honnold’s climb involved “risk units” rather than the possibility of a very real human death.
Why maintain this dubious distinction? Most likely because some experts are uncomfortable with the idea of explicitly pricing a human life, and so they cling to such euphemisms. This ethical squeamishness is understandable on a personal level, but it has no place in objective policy analysis. Good economists should not flinch from the fact that saving lives does have an opportunity cost in scarce dollars. The enduring popularity of the VSL concept is partly because it disguises difficult tradeoffs, allowing uncomfortable truths to be obscured behind a veneer of science. By pretending they are only valuing “risk,” analysts hide from the moral and fiscal reality that regulatory benefits have opportunity costs. It may feel nicer to the public (or the analyst) to imagine we haven’t put a price tag on life, but in practice that is precisely what the VSL does.
When Benefits Go Mostly to the Elderly
A popular criticism of the EPA’s new policy is that by removing the VSL, EPA is effectively saying a saved life is worth zero. But even a “zero” valuation might overestimate the benefits of certain regulations, especially air regulations. This counterintuitive point becomes clear when we examine whose lives are supposedly being extended by air pollution rules.
A robust body of research shows that the majority of lives saved by cleaner air are in the population of older adults, often very elderly individuals with only a few years of life expectancy remaining. One recent study found that about 80% of the mortality benefits from reducing fine particle pollution are realized by people over the age of 65, particularly those with about 5 to 10 years left to live. In other words, the typical beneficiary of tighter air quality standards is an elderly retiree, not a child or a working-age adult. This matters economically. Extending the life of an octogenarian does not have the same social impact as saving a young person in the prime of life or a child with decades of productive years ahead.
In fact, extending the lives of the sick and elderly can impose net costs on society’s ledgers, costs which government regulatory analyses typically ignore. An individual in their 70s or 80s is usually drawing on public programs like Social Security and Medicare rather than producing new economic output. They also tend to have high medical expenses in their twilight years. Government data confirm that seniors on average consume more resources than they generate. Americans over 65 spend more than they earn in wages and salaries, implying consumption is financed largely through transfer payments and assets. The public sector bears significant costs from their consumption. For example, average annual Medicare-covered medical expenses exceed $13,000 for an 85-year-old.
It feels harsh to talk about “burdens” when it comes to extending life, but reality can be harsh sometimes. Resources spent to prolong one person’s final years are resources not spent elsewhere, including on younger generations or other public health measures. As hard as it is to admit, pollution-related deaths among the elderly can generate net social benefits by reducing the high medical and pension expenditures associated with those extra years of life. From a purely economic standpoint, the value of some life extensions from pollution rules may be zero or even negative.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean anyone wants Grandpa or Grandma to die sooner to save a buck. It simply means that when we tally up societal costs and benefits, we cannot assume every life saved is an unmitigated economic gain. Critics dramatize the EPA’s policy as “valuing life at zero,” but for many of the elderly lives in question, a zero-dollar valuation may be closer to the truth than the rosy numbers produced by the VSL. If there is any criticism of the Trump EPA’s policy that has merit, it is that regulators should account for both the health care savings from cleaner air and the public-care costs associated with longer lifespans in their economic analyses.
When the VSL Undervalues Life
The contrast between extending the lives of the elderly and extending the life of a high-productivity individual like Honnold is stark. The Honnold example shows that the VSL doesn’t always overvalue life, it can also undervalue it. Honnold was reportedly paid $500,000 by Netflix for his highly publicized climb of Taipei 101, one of the tallest buildings in the world. In the days leading up to the climb, prediction-market odds placed the probability of a successful ascent at roughly 90 to 95 percent, implying about a 5 to 10 percent chance of failure. On those terms, a $500,000 payment corresponds to an implicit value of life of, at most, $5 million to $10 million. That figure is striking not because it is high, but because it is certainly far too low.
Honnold’s unique abilities and high earning potential almost certainly mean his life is worth far more. In this case, applying a VSL methodology would almost certainly underestimate the economic value of life. The same metric that inflates benefits in some regulatory contexts, understates them in others.
(Interestingly, paying Honnold not to climb would have reduced his risk of death ex ante, but once survival becomes certain, it is clear no life would have been saved, illustrating that “valuing risk” only has meaning when a life is potentially at stake. Policies may involve uncertainty too, but they must ultimately be judged by realized outcomes, not hypothetical lives saved.)
Private Value vs. Social Value
Underlying these estimates is the fundamental problem with the VSL metric. It reflects an incomplete private, individualistic perspective on life’s value rather than a comprehensive social value. The statistic is built on what specific living individuals are willing to pay for small risk reductions in their own lives (often estimated via surveys or observing wage premiums for risky jobs). This captures private benefits–how someone, as an individual, values a lower chance of dying. But it does not capture external effects or broader social trade-offs. In a proper cost-benefit analysis, we want to know what society as a whole gains or loses from a policy, not just what a particular individual might pay for it.
When an individual decides how much reducing their mortality risk is worth, they understandably ignore external costs or benefits that fall on other people. A terminally ill patient might be willing to spend their entire life savings on an experimental treatment to gain a few months more of life. That is their private choice. But society (and government) must consider externalities. If those extra months incur large public healthcare costs, or if that person’s continued life means one’s great grandchildren receive a substantially smaller bequest, those factors typically aren’t reflected in the patient’s personal willingness to pay.
The VSL, being grounded in individuals’ private preferences, fails to correct for these externalities. It essentially imports whatever biases, myopia, or incomplete information individuals have into the policy realm. An obvious example is how the VSL treats time. People generally give less weight to the distant future. They heavily discount risks and rewards that might occur after many years. If regulators simply take those individual preferences as gospel, they end up embedding a short-term bias into public decisions.
When government acts in this way, it is known as a “behavioral government failure.” It’s what happens when policy is based on biased behavioral inputs rather than rational, society-wide valuations. In the context of life valuation, the VSL framework leads regulators to prioritize costly measures that current individuals happen to favor, even if those resources could save more lives (or otherwise enhance welfare more) if allocated differently. The present generation gets expensive regulations that make people feel safer, while future generations inherit the economic costs (slower growth, diverted investment, and public debts). The result in practice tends to be gratuitous spending for minimal present gains. A truly scientific analysis would fix these inefficiencies, not encourage them.
The Real Reason VSL Prevails
If the VSL is so theoretically problematic, why has it dominated regulatory analysis for so long? The reason is because it produces bigger numbers. In the 1970s and 1980s, analysts used more modest and economically grounded methods to value life. Those approaches were not perfect, but they were often more rigorous from an economic efficiency standpoint. Not surprisingly, they tended to yield much lower dollar values for a saved life than the modern VSL approach does.
However, lower valuations also made it harder to justify very costly regulations. Enter the VSL. Suddenly, by valuing each life at over $10 million, many regulation’s benefits magically dwarfed the costs. Not surprisingly, government agencies and regulators noticed this effect. The switch to VSL in cost-benefit analyses wasn’t a triumph of academic insight. It was convenient for regulators. It provided a much larger (if artificial) benefit number to wave around when defending rules. Over time, economists noticed that producing studies to support the VSL would get them cited by government agencies in their economic analysis, resulting in prestige and other career-enhancing benefits. Economists, intentionally or not, became enablers of government excess, some because they were conformists and VSL was the accepted paradigm, others because high VSL estimates bolstered the case for regulations they personally felt were beneficial.
A more economically rigorous life valuation, by contrast, raises tough questions–like whether resources would save more lives if allocated elsewhere. By abandoning the VSL for air rules, the EPA is stripping away a convenient analytical pretext. It is telling the world that it won’t play the game of juicing the numbers to justify regulations at any cost.
A Bold, Pro-Science Step
Make no mistake. The EPA’s 2026 decision to stop monetizing life in its air pollution rulemaking is groundbreaking. It took courage to withstand the inevitable attacks about “ignoring lives” and undermining the Clean Air Act. In truth, the agency is doing something pro-science. It is acknowledging the limitations of a misleading economic statistic and refusing to let a sentiment-driven number dictate policy.
The administration should stand firm against the pressure from special interests, be they environmental lobbyists who became comfortable with the VSL boosting their cause, or academics who built careers around the methodology. By all means, we should still reduce pollution and save lives where we can, but let’s do so with eyes wide open about costs and benefits, not through a distorted lens. The EPA’s new approach can be refined, but the principle of honest accounting should not be abandoned. In fact, the EPA’s lead should be followed government-wide. Other agencies that currently rely on the VSL in areas from highway safety to consumer product regulation ought to revisit whether their methods truly serve the public interest.
The EPA’s critics paint the agency as heartlessly deeming life worthless. In reality, the agency is elevating scientific rigor and economic reality over feel-good motivated reasoning. It is rejecting an emotion-based approach in favor of careful analysis of outcomes. As Alex Honnold’s risk-taking makes clear, even star athletes can make personal judgments about risk that are flawed as guides for public policy. The EPA’s decision is therefore a brave and correct choice. The Trump EPA should be commended for taking this bold step, and encouraged to apply this reasoning to all its rules. By resisting the outcry and sticking to its guns, the agency can lead a much-needed paradigm shift.