In my recent Fortune opinion piece on how Trump-era policies are driving capital out of capitalism, I argued that markets cannot function without trust, transparency, and a shared sense of purpose. Since then, the Administration took another step to take that argument to its logical—and frankly terrifying—next step.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did something extraordinary as a preface to revoking the Endangerment Finding—they revised how they evaluate air pollution rules by not counting the benefits of lives saved and illnesses avoided. The technical term for what disappeared is the “value of a statistical life” (VSL)—previously measured at approximately $11.7 million per person. In its place? Nothing. Zero. As the New York Times reported, when it comes to regulatory decisions on fine particulate matter and ozone, a human life now carries a market value of $0.
The EPA’s rationale is bureaucratically brutal—and cruel and radical in its implications. The agency claims that quantifying health benefits is too uncertain. Unverified compliance costs to industry, however, are conveniently concrete. To be clear, the ledger now tallies only what companies pay, not what people lose—the asthma attacks, hospitalizations, shortened lives, or deaths. The result isn’t neutrality; it’s draconian ideology.
If a human life has no economic value, then what does? Why do we have a healthcare system at all? Why invest trillions in hospitals, pharmaceuticals, or medical research if the outcome—people living longer, healthier lives—registers as meaningless? By this logic, emergency rooms are sunk costs and preventative care is a frivolous indulgence.
Push this ideology a step further and the entire economy implodes. If humans have zero intrinsic value, and corporations derive value only from human spending, then the sum total of economic value is also zero. Congratulations: every stock index should trade at $0; the S&P 500 becomes a philosophical thought experiment while Bloomberg terminals blink into existential silence.
This is not hyperbole. It is the unavoidable math of the EPA and the Trump administration’s position on the value of human life. If a company dumps toxic waste into a local river and your children get sick and die, there is no value lost, there are no damages, no liability—the ultimate rationale for Milton Friedman’s externalization of costs.
As University of Chicago climate scholars pointed out, removing health benefits from cost-benefit analysis doesn’t make regulation more “objective;” it simply rigs the equation so that pollution is cheap and people are disposable.
Michael Greenstone, an environmental economist, said the change could result in dirtier air, undercutting the gains made since Congress strengthened the Clean Air Act in 1970—a law that added 1.4 years to the average American’s life expectancy since. “Clean air is one of the great success stories of government policy in the last half-century,” Dr. Greenstone said. “And at the heart of the Clean Air Act is the idea that when you allow people to lead longer and healthier lives, that has value that can be measured in dollars.”
A worldview in which the value of a human life is zero fits neatly within the broader Trumpian project. People are reduced to abstractions or enemies. Haitians. Somalis. Journalists. Comedians. Musicians. Stephen Colbert and Bad Bunny are assigned a value of zero because they are inconvenient, annoying, or insufficiently deferential to power. Does anyone in Trump’s orbit have a value? Melania? Eric?
For decades, cost-benefit analysis—imperfect as it is—served as an acknowledgment that human life matters in economic decision-making. Assigning a dollar value to life was never meant to cheapen it; it was meant to ensure it wasn’t lost. Removing that value doesn’t make policy more rigorous — it makes it morally and ethically vacuous.
Capital markets are exquisitely sensitive to signals. When the government declares, implicitly or explicitly, that people don’t matter, investors should listen. Because an economy that prices human life at zero is one that ultimately has zero value.
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