Earlier quoted context omitted.
I watched this last night, and it's always interesting to people in business talk about the cost of saving lives. There was one point where the reporter was interviewing a guy from the ATA (American Trucking Associations) where the ATA person says that one lost life is too many. And this is very common across so many industries, safety first as they always say. But then as soon as you put a cost associated with savin…
> I watched this last night, and it's always interesting to people in business talk about the cost of saving lives. My favorite example of this is the "children under 2 don't need their own airline seat". The idea was that if you required a separate seat, more people would drive. That in turn would lead to more fatalities as the fatality/mile in cars is so much higher than in planes. I would also point out that if so…
This doesn't follow. It's not as if you're only allowed to purchase life insurance if it somehow accounts for the entire "cost of your life", whatever that is. I doubt most policies and policy-buyers attempt to achieve that, though some might.
[EDIT] To expand a bit, I'm pretty sure a lot of policies are purchased with goal-oriented thinking, and that goal's usually not "account for the cost of the life": for an older person, it might be "ensure end-of-life expenses are covered". For a younger one, it might be "make sure my family's OK until they can recover from the loss, which I guesstimate to require $X" or "make sure my family can afford to remain where they are at least until the kids are out of school"