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From: jer@peora.UUCP (J. Eric Roskos)
Newsgroups: net.columbia
Subject: Re: What price safety? (was: Escape tower for shuttle orbiter?)
Message-ID: <2035@peora.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 18-Mar-86 22:27:16 EST
Article-I.D.: peora.2035
Posted: Tue Mar 18 22:27:16 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 21-Mar-86 03:50:52 EST
References: <418@watcgl.UUCP> <627@bentley.UUCP> <2024@peora.UUCP> <635@bentley.UUCP> <12388@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
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David DesJardins, commenting on my suggestion that it's more reasonable to
weigh the costs of a safety system in proportion of an individual or
agency's ability (or willingness) to pay for it, writes:

>  No!  This does *not* make more sense.  This is equivalent to the
> assumption that the life of an astronaut is worth more than the life of
> any other citizen.  How can you justify this (except to the extent that
> a lot of expensive training has been invested, which is still orders of
> magnitude short of what we are talking about)?

No, I disagree with that.  It makes the assumption that you can put a dollar
value on a person's life, and further that such a value is defined in
terms of the amount being paid to protect it.

This definition of a "value of life" is one that was proposed earlier, but
it is not one that I accept in making my assertion.  I maintain that no
dollar value can be placed on anybody's life; by demonstration I would point
out that murder is a capital offense, not one that a person can pay a fine
as punishment for.

Instead, my argument was based on "willingness to mitigate risks" in a
risky endeavor.

Using the example that you accept as demonstrating your claim, that of
airbags in a car: If I drive my car, I must acknowledge that it is a
dangerous proposition.  I deal with this in several ways: I don't drive
as often as I would if it was not dangerous; I drive defensively; and I
use safety features (and choose a car with good safety attributes).  All
of these are efforts to reduce the risk in proportion to the alternatives
(e.g., driving a motorcycle, constantly, in a reckless manner).  I choose
to do each of these things, eventhough the alternative might be desirable
for various reasons, because I feel that the reduction in the probability
of personal injury offsets the tradeoffs of convenience.

However, I in fact don't have airbags in my car, despite the fact that
I believe in them.  The sole reason I don't is that they are so expensive.
Now, I realize that having them would be safer; however, I don't feel that
it would be safer in proportion to the cost.  (On the other hand, air
bags that protected one's head from colliding into the left door window
I would consider worth the cost.)

On the other hand, if I were flying in the shuttle, and assuming I had
control over the budget decisions, I would make a linearly proportional
comparison of costs vs. risks.  Since the shuttle is by nature a more
expensive vehicle, to get a proportionately greater amount of protection
(proportionate WRT the increase in protection from car airbags) I would
expect to pay a proportionately greater price (proportionate WRT the cost
of the two vehicles).  So I might be willing to pay, say, $200,000 for
shuttle airbags whereas I wouldn't be willing to pay more than $1000 for
car airbags; I would expect the airbags in the shuttle to cost more due to
their being bigger, having to meet military specs, etc. (Assuming here
that the shuttle:car cost is 200,000:1000, which I am sure is not correct
in reality).  The same reasoning would hold for some other safety feature
of the shuttle that gave an equivalent reduction in risk.

But note that this reasoning has nothing to do with "value of life", on
which I maintain no dollar value can be placed.  It has solely to do with
how much I am willing to pay to gain a given reduction in the risk (which
I already know exists) in using the vehicle.  If I (somewhat subjectively)
feel that paying $x more is "not worth it" in terms of the extra safety
gained, then I won't do it.  However, on a vehicle costing millions of
dollars I would not to expect to get a safety increase equivalent to that
of adding car airbags, and expect to only pay the price of the car
airbags.  The shuttle does more, under more difficult circumstances, and I
would expect to have to pay more for systems associated with it.

[Note that implicit in the above is the assumption that the systems
involved actually would cost proportionately more.  I think this would be
the case for the system the original question centered on.  The issue was
how to protect astronauts from catastrophic failures of the shuttle
vehicle.  Clearly a system to do this would be considerably more complex,
thus more costly, than one to protect a driver of an automobile, even if
both used a personnel ejection facility of some sort.  E.g., in the case
of a car, you could just eject the person out the top of the vehicle and
have him come down on a parachute.  A much more complex system would be
required to pull the shuttle personnel away from the vehicle at a high
altitude and get them to the ground safely.]
-- 
E. Roskos