How to put a price on a human life

Illustration: Álvaro Bernis

Feb 12th 2026|5 min read

How much is fresh air worth? Some, taking a deep, restorative breath at the top of a mountain or an Atlantic cliff-edge, might think it priceless. Fighting air pollution nevertheless costs actual money. Businesses need to spend on new devices; some industries might need to shrink or vanish; households need cleaner ways of cooking and heating their homes. On the other side of the ledger are the benefits from avoiding the health damage that breathing polluted air causes—especially to children, the already sick and the old. Deciding how much to spend on clean-up efforts is a classic economic problem, in that solving it involves weighing one side of the ledger against the other. But how can you perform cost-benefit analysis when the benefits involve people avoiding sickness or early death? Pricing fresh air turns into an even harder problem: putting a value on a human life.