F.B.I. Arrests Volkswagen Executive on Conspiracy Charges in Emissions Scandal

If you think of money as labor and say there are 2000 work hours in a year, then at $10/hour a $1 million waste of money is wasting 500 work-years of human life. 2000 hours/(365 days * 24 hours) = 22%, so that is 500 * 0.22 = 114 lives wasted on a fruitless project.

If a wasteful project is government, then you have the additional complication that the government ultimately uses police and SWAT teams to enforce the tax code. So $20 million / ($50,000 total taxes paid in a year) = 400 man-work-years wasted. Multiplying by the 22% time spent working above gives 90 years, which is close to the lifespan of an average person. So you could say a waste of $20 million is equivalent to wasting a software developer's life(assuming his taxes are $50k).

Murder removes the remaining lifespan from someone, so there is a sense in which it is equivalent to time spent on pointless labor, which is equivalent to money.

Though, you'd want to specify how the Volkswagen incident is a 'multimillion dollar catastrophe':

* Is it from the fines imposed? That's an arbitrary number in the law or from some judge. You can't blame Volkswagen executives for causing economic damage here; the judge or lawmaker seems like the responsible party.

* Is it from environmental damage? It's tricky to get a dollar number from this. You can try, but I'd have low confidence in the result, and chaining that with the low confidence in the 'murderwasted labor' equivalence makes an unpersuasive argument.

* Is it the forced recalls? Here, the Volkswagen executives could be said to be responsible for wasted consumer time driving it to a dealership for repair, wasted employee time fixing the cars, wasted lawyer's time defending their case, wasted judge's time fining them, wasted regulator's time preparing endless reports, etc. But, the economic cost of just the recall is probably smaller than what the OP was thinking.

* Is it damage to the Volkswagen brand? I was recently shopping for a car with a friend, and one criterion was "Anything but a Volkswagen". Even if I don't care about the pollution, cheating makes them untrustworthy. This reduces consumer choice, which has some economic effects.

In what other senses can you say that the Volkswagen executives caused an economic catastrophe(and hence, robbed people of their precious little life cleaning up the mess)?

If this blows up it's over for most german car manufacturers.

They sold a lot of diesel cars, and most of them probably have some hacks to meet Euro standards.

They should be forced to fix all cars, reimburse buyers for any losses, and be forced(!) to go green asap (which probably means at least 10 years, so yeah there should be some force)!

Don't get me wrong. I find it interesting that the FBI will arrest anyone for conspiracy when they so clearly ignore it in numerous other cases (such as in banking, real estate). I doubt though that this will be an emerging pattern for the FBI. I'm sure many more horrible conspiracies against the American people will be ignored efficiently.

Yes it would.

Unfortunately doing that in today's world would render them unelectable.

Emissions regs are the best our defective system can do, hence slow changes. That even those aren't being honoured makes it a big thing.

Of course many would rather see them start with fraudulent banking than fraudulent car makers.

At some point, "causing economic harm" stops being an abstract thing, and literally means children starving, adults going homeless and freezing to death in winter, or people turning into crime to avoid fates like these.

So yeah, billion-dollar white collar crimes are, IMO, definitely worse than murder.