How Much Is a Human Worth? (according to engineers)

A large part of engineering involves a tug-of-war between cost and safety.

Comparing costs and safety is an enormous challenge. On one side, you have dollars, and on the other, you have people. Sometimes you need a conversion factor. It sounds morbid, but it’s necessary for good decision-making to put a dollar price on the value of a human life.

Practical Engineering is a YouTube channel about infrastructure and the human-made world around us. It is hosted, written, and produced by Grady Hillhouse. We have new videos posted regularly, so please subscribe for updates. If you enjoyed the video, hit that ‘like’ button, give us a comment, or watch another of our videos!

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DISCLAIMER
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This is not engineering advice. Everything here is for informational and entertainment purposes only. Contact an engineer licensed to practice in your area if you need professional advice or services. All non-licensed clips used for fair use commentary, criticism, and educational purposes.

SPECIAL THANKS
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This video is sponsored by Rocket Money.
Stock video and imagery provided by Getty Images, Shutterstock, and Videoblocks.
Tonic and Energy by Elexive is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License
Video by Grady Hillhouse
Edited by Wesley Crump
Written and Produced by Ralph Crewe
Graphics by Nebula Studios

[PracticalEngineeringChannel]

This one is a little touchy, but I think it's a really important part of engineering that is often overlooked. Do you think I struck the right tone?

[Ethans]

As an engineering manager, I've pushed to add an additional 15% to our safety factor for our structures (we design heavy industrial machines). Our sales guys hated it initially, because our prices were 2 to 5% higher, but after a few years, we earned a reputation for reliable machines that stand up to abuse, our customers love us, and we are doing better than ever.

We as engineers have been pushed into increasingly thinner and thinner safety factors by cost cutting focused executives, but they fail to realize there is a limit and by putting so much pressure on the engineers, they are inviting trouble when unforeseen circumstances eventually come knocking. What is foreseeable though, is that there will always be unforeseen circumstances. It's important to push back, and when appropriate, to hold them accountable.

[reliantk]

Honestly, $12.5 million is more than I thought they would evaluate for a human life...

[davidfalterman]

"Your public arena for gladitorial fights can always be made safer by spending more resources on design and construction" is a hilarious sentence out of context 😂

[Azalynnnn]

According to my mom I'm priceless... I mean, that's not the wording she used, but potato, potato. Worthless, priceless. What's the difference?

[historicalfootnotes]

Humans: “You can’t put a price on a life!! It’s priceless!”
Lawyers: “12.5 million”

[paulmaxwell]

At 1:44 Grady says "If safety were paramount we wouldn't engineer anything". That is so true. Here in British Columbia I've seen many jungle gyms removed from school playgrounds because they're SO risky. Instead, the children sit around developing cardiovascular disease, which is much more acceptable, apparently.

[DanielEstrada]

I teach Engineering Ethics at a large public technical school, and hundreds of rising engineers take my classes every year. I've been sprinkling Grady's videos throughout my syllabus for years because they're a fantastic educational resource, and his case studies give a real world perspective on the importance of safety in everyday engineering practice. Still, I've been secretly wishing Grady would do a more explicit presentation on engineering ethics. I've even thought about reaching out to Grady directly to help motivate and coordinate such a project. While I've been enjoying Grady's latest videos with the sewer pipe install quite a lot, I selfishly worried that it signaled a more hands-on direction for the channel, making my dreams of an ethics-focused video seem less likely.

What a fantastic surprise to find this video in my feed this morning! The final product is really more than I could have hoped for, a showcase of Grady's skills as a video essayist and public educator. A dash of theory, some compelling historical examples (TIL about the Golden Gate Bridge net!), and an overall extremely reasonable and clear-eyed perspective on a challenging ethical issue that is absolutely central to real engineering practice. From my own experience, the question "why is there a price on human life" is one I hear regularly from students when we discuss cases like the Ford Pinto fires, where this "conversion factor" actually influenced a decision that cost real human lives. Explaining this situation to students has always been a challenge for me, since it has no neat philosophical or technical or ethically satisfying answer. This situation is a product of the messy realities of engineering in the real world.

No one is better at giving a level-headed presentation of the messy realities of engineering than Grady and Practical Engineering. Thank you so much for this video and for your work! This video is definitely going in my syllabus. =)

[ThuhOthers]

This is a tough topic to explain to the public (especially as an engineer) and you did a fantastic job of it. There is no such thing as something perfect, infallible, 100% safe no matter how much we dream, but we can always strive to make things as safe as possible and as cost effective as possible to meet the client's needs and putting ethics first.

[robertlevine]

A loss of life is a very difficult thing to forget. I can say I am still haunted by the loss of someone who was not very much younger than I was.

The young man climbed down into a tank that was lit only by the flashlight he was carrying. At the bottom of the ladder, he turned left took one step, and fell to the bottom of the tank. Had he turned right he would still be alive.

During the plan approval process, I rejected the arrangement and the lack of a railing. I rejected each drawing until I was instructed by the vice president of engineering to stamp the drawings approved.

A life was lost for the cost of a handrail. A trivial cost in a multi-million dollar project. During construction the shipyard had a temporary handrail in place for OSHA compliance.

I still feel responsible for the loss, although I had no control over the decisions that were made.

[googlyeyedmoose]

I don't comment that often and I hope you see this. This was really well done and gave information I had no idea about. I work in construction but not the engineering side. I find all your videos fascinating and I learn something every time.

Just wanted to thank you for putting in the time you do to make these. We really do appreciate it.

[arthurreis]

12:11 The aeronautic's version is "I can design a plane that never crashes! Unfortunately it won't be able to take off"

[luongmaihunggia]

Safety during construction is just as important as safety after construction. We need to keep those workers safe.

[Int_resting]

For everyone saying "the trolly problem is simple because of this workaround"
1) that's not the point of the problem, and
2) look at "The Greater Good | Mind Field | S2:E1" by Vsauce for a more thought-out problem with testing. (the tests begin at 14:34)

[Beryllahawk]

Extremely well balanced way of explaining this idea and this problem. I think it's a decision most of us would never be comfortable making, in all seriousness. Some folks are willing to joke around and mock the trolley problem, but even they would flat refuse to accept responsibility for such a decision in real life. And yet - as you said, when something is constructed RIGHT, the engineer is the one getting the praise - for a little while at least. Maybe the best praise though is when no one says a word? Because then, you know they aren't even noticing an issue enough to worry about it. Think about how many hundreds of thousands of people cross the Golden Gate Bridge every single day, and how many of them think as they approach it "hm, is this safe?" Of course they mostly don't, because they've learned to trust the bridge, and the engineers who built it. I think ALL of us in the developed world implicitly trust the engineers, even if they don't know it. We've been trained to that expectation, that whoever is designing and building a thing knows what they're doing on SOME level. Surely I never wondered if a road was actually "built right" until I understood what goes into making one in the first place. And roads were something I saw being built all the time, I've never lived in a place where big structures like bridges or huge buildings were being constructed! I can't even imagine what it would be like to have some massive skyscraper going up "next door" as it were. But folks see that all the time in the biggest cities, don't they? And no one seems to spend much time worrying if the giant crane is going to fall over on them. I think that speaks to the consistent ability of modern engineers to look out for the safety of everyone, even when you do factor in the many accidents and disasters it's still incredibly rare for such things to happen. Otherwise we wouldn't be so shocked about it, would we!

[jurjenbos]

As a professional doing risk analyses, I really like your comments on white area in your graph at 10:44. Even my colleagues have a hard time understanding that just multiplying probability with effect isn't always giving a good value to the risk.

[sayethwe]

at 5:20 in the example of the highway, I'd like to note that a lot of these end up increasing the speed people travel, largely because they feel safer and thus more comfortable taking risks like driving faster, or using phones, or being otherwise inebriated.
adding safety to a system can allow users to behave less safely and trust in the system to catch them.

this is not a reason to *not* build safety into a system, but it is something to consider when claiming the changes will reduce danger.

[foranken]

Grady, once again you haven't shied away from difficult subject matter, and have put forth thoughts and concepts that serve to explain quite well WHY things are the way they are. I love what you do, and the care you put into your narrations. They are gold.

[prblackhawk]

Its interesting to hear how engineers consider safety. I work in medicine and everything we do is a risk/benefit analysis. No treatment is guaranteed and side effects and adverse effects are always to be considered. Thanks for sharing the engineering version of this!

[DaveMody]

Great job Grady! A couple of things I might add are:

Adding safety features is adding layers of protection. In the "swiss cheese model", you have to ensure there are no holes in those layers that line up and eliminate the safety features.

Risk is the multiplication of Consequences x Probability.

The layers protection work to reduce either the consequences or the Probablity like this:

Design features: Location of the road, The roughness of the road, the curvature radius, width of the road, slope etc., design of the cars
Administrative and Passive controls: qualification (drivers tests), procedures, standards, operating instructions that people follow (like stop signs and road rules), maintenance, ..
Active engineering Controls: Like rail road gates that close when a train is crossing a road, stop lights, air bags, (things that could fail, but have engineered systems to prevent their failure
Emergency Response: Things that reduce the consequences, but don't affect the probability of the event, location of hospitals and availability of ambulances etc.