Is Everything Securities Fraud?

Yeah, that's the problem. The economic notion of value weights according to wealth while the moral notion of value does not. It's absolutely scandalous that we let economists conflate the two.

Feed a starving kid in Africa? Zero economic value. The kid doesn't have money. Figure out how to merge together a bunch of megacorps to build a monopoly, raise prices, reduce quality, and make the lives of millions strictly worse? The market will ejaculate capital all over your value-creating endeavor.

The Wikipedia article linked above describes some ways to do it, and if you look at them you will see that with one exception they are not estimating, nor trying to estimate, expected future earning power or anything like it. (Though that might affect the answer.)

The first approach they describe: take N people and ask each of them how much they would pay to reduce their chance of dying in the next year by 1/M. Then the average of M times this figure is the group's estimate of the value of their lives. (The description in the article simplifies the calculation by taking N=M, but there is no need to.)

The second approach: look at what people are willing to forgo in order to reduce their chance of dying a bit, or willing to increase their chance of dying a bit in order to have. If you're willing to increase your chance of dying by X in order to get Y, that suggests you value your life at no more than (the value to you of Y) / X. Look at lots of different X and take some sort of average of the resulting estimates.

The third approach is looking at future earnings. The page adds this caveat: "Another potential issue when using wages to value life is that the calculation does not take into account the value of time that is not spent working, such as vacation or leisure."

The fourth approach is more or less the same as the first.

It's obvious that aside from the second these are not the same as a person's future earnings. And we shouldn't expect them to be; people generally value other things about their future lives besides the money they may earn.

(A kinda-artificial example that I think makes the point. Suppose the following things happen: 1. Economic growth stops or slows sufficiently that no one expects investments to grow appreciably an more. 2. You get rich. 3. You retire, intending to supply your needs and wants simply by spending some of your mountain of cash. In this situation your expected future income is zero. But I bet you would still be willing to pay something to reduce your chance of early death.)

Also, though this is a less important point: Life insurance is not only for paying off some fraction of your theoretical lifetime income. E.g., you can buy life insurance policies even after you have retired, even if you have no income. Obviously one reason why you would buy life insurance is to make up for loss of future income; but it could be e.g. that one thing you do is to care for other family members, and that if you died they would need someone else to do that who would need paying, and if you were buying life insurance that would be something you would take into account.

> Finally, managers often pursue conduct that harms outside victims (whether by shoddy manufacturing, false advertising, or negligent safety measures) in order to bolster their share price. The fact that investor lawsuits under these circumstances are likely to be more successful and lucrative may reinforce shareholders’ potential preference for managers to continue externalizing costs to third parties, on the assumption that if the management is not caught, their shares will increase in value, and if the management is caught, they will be able to recoup at least some of their losses through settlements after the fact.

> [...] Moreover, securities class action settlements generally “target the wrong party for sanctions;”83typically, the firm pays the settlement while the manager who actually committed the fraud is, at worst, fired.

> Also, though this is a less important point: Life insurance is not only for paying off some fraction of your theoretical lifetime income. E.g., you can buy life insurance policies even after you have retired, even if you have no income. Obviously one reason why you would buy life insurance is to make up for loss of future income; but it could be e.g. that one thing you do is to care for other family members, and that if you died they would need someone else to do that who would need paying, and if you were buying life insurance that would be something you would take into account.

If you have no income you can't buy life insurance. How would you pay for it?

Retirement income is still income. You're still buying insurance to provide that income in the event you die before your dependents. It should be noted however that those polices tend to be very expensive as the insurance company calculates that you may not be paying into it for very long before they have to start paying out.