The costs of many environmental regulations can be calculated in dollars but the benefits often are in terms of lives saved (mortality) or decreases in the incidence of a particular disease (morbidity)

What does this imply about the cost-benefit analysis of environmental regulations? There is an old saying "You can't put a price on a human life." Do you agree or disagree? Explain.

We will need to translate the mortality and morbidity data into dollars if we are going to compare the costs and benefits of environmental regulation. For example, if we knew that a new regulation would impose a cost of $20 million on firms and that it would save one life, we would need to know whether a life is worth more than $20 million or less than $20 million. As ghoulish as these efforts to place a dollar value on a life may sound, government (and individuals, for that matter) need to make these calculations implicitly or explicitly. There is very substantial economic literature on the value of a life. Most studies estimate the value of a life in the range of $7 million to $9 million.