How much do people say they value a year of life?

By Deena Mousa @ 2025-05-29T14:50 (+8)

This is a linkpost to https://newsletter.deenamousa.com/p/how-much-do-you-value-a-year-of-life

I wrote about the literature on stated preferences for health-income trade-offs (how much people would pay for a QALY in different circumstances). This research is important for policymakers and funders because the way those responses vary could mean stated preferences may under- or over-value some types of health gains. 

I expect this to be part of a series on valuing health in monetary terms. Let me know if there's a subset of that topic you're particularly interested in reading about!

Mo Putera @ 2025-06-01T06:06 (+4)

One detail that caught my eye from your post was this chart:

I was a bit surprised to see the global average WTP being $67k per QALY or ~5x world GDP per capita, while for these individual countries they seem closer to 0.5-2x. 

Eyeballing the chart below from OP's 2021 technical update makes me wonder if that discrepancy is driven by the higher WTP multipliers in LMICs:

Figure1.png

But contra my own guess, the authors say

As we’ll discuss in Appendix A, there are empirical and theoretical reasons to think that the exchange rate at which people trade off mortality risks against income gains differs systematically across income levels, with richer people valuing mortality more relative to income.

so I remain confused.