It feels like a sin against the sanctitude of being alive to put a dollar value on one year of a human life. A year spent living instead of dead is obviously priceless, beyond the measure of something so unprofound as money. But it gets a price tag in the world of economic models. Different agencies and organizations use different estimates—no one can seem to agree on the precise going rate. But according to the Environmental Protection Agency, a statistical lifetime is valued at about $11.5 million in 2024 dollars. By one new analysis, that translates to about $250,000 per year of living.
That’s important to know, because the EPA is in the business of calculating how much money is lost or saved by preventing people’s early demise through various environmental regulations. Making contaminated water safer and dirty air cleaner costs money, but the country also benefits financially by keeping people alive. In the EPA’s own language, the agency simply estimates how much people are willing to pay to reduce their risk of dying from exposure to an unclean environment.
Polluted air is particularly important to the life-cost calculus. Air pollution is associated with some 100,000 to 200,000 American deaths each year. Particulate matter from burning fossil fuels is responsible for roughly one in five deaths worldwide. In the U.S., those lost life years and other air-pollution-related damages amount to about 5 percent of GDP. The U.S. has largely decided that the cost is worth it, more than made up for by the financial benefits of keeping the economy moving. But a pair of new analyses suggests that we may be getting that calculus wrong—that air pollution is already a silent but severe tax on human life and will get only more costly as the world warms.
In the first report, economists at MIT, the University of Chicago, McMaster University, and the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009—despite causing profound economic hardship—actually increased Americans’ life expectancy. And the economic advantages of those added life-years might even roughly equal the economic costs.
Using county-level data focused on local labor markets, they found that every 1 percent increase in unemployment led to a .5 percent decrease in the death rate. Some regions saw larger benefits than others, and young people, whose lifetime earning power is especially harmed in any recession, were likely still harmed more than helped, at least in the short term. But older Americans, who have naturally higher mortality rates, got especially lucky. Out of every 25 Americans age 55, for instance, one appears to have received an extra year of life. On average, across all age groups, the recession reduced the American mortality rate by 2.3 percent.
The recession officially lasted just 18 months, but life expectancy stayed elevated for at least 10 years. And crucially, the researchers estimate that more than a third of the reduction in deaths resulted from fewer commuters hitting the road, as well as lower industrial activity and electricity generation—in short, a reduction in air pollution.
When the team applied the value of a life-year to the recession-induced longevity, they suddenly saw the recession differently: What Americans lost in income and purchasing power, they gained in life-years, Matthew J. Notowidigdo, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and an author of the paper, told me. “From a social-welfare perspective, they kind of even out.”
Remarkably, the recession seemed to even reduce the “deaths of despair” typically linked to economic downturns. For each 1 percent increase in the unemployment rate during the recession, deaths from drug overdose, liver disease, and suicide went down 1.4 percent in the years following it. The cleaner air of the Great Recession might have contributed: A recent study of suicide in China found that a major reduction in particulate-matter pollution during the country’s recent crackdown on pollution prevented some 46,000 such deaths in just five years.
The China study is not the first to link dirty air with suicide. And that makes sense, given the many connections researchers are now drawing between air pollution and cognitive outcomes. Ultra-small air-pollution particles known as PM2.5—so named because they are 2.5 microns or smaller in diameter, about 30 times narrower than a human hair—can cross the blood-brain barrier, and are linked to a suite of neurological harms. A 2023 paper found that Amercians living in places with the country’s median level of PM2.5 air pollution had a 56 percent higher chance of developing Parkinson’s disease than those living in the cleanest air. High levels of PM2.5 appear to also be related to higher rates of dementia. In children, whose brains are still developing, exposure to PM2.5 has been associated with behavioral and cognitive problems.
Because particulate matter poses such a health risk, the U.S. has for more than half a century enforced rules limiting how much of it can leave tailpipes and smokestacks. Prior to the Clean Air Act, breathing was an outrageously hazardous activity in many towns and cities. On Halloween weekend in 1948, two dozen people suffocated to death in the city of Donora, Pennsylvania, when a windless weather pattern made pollution from the local zinc plant stall over the town.
Each year since the air-quality rules came into force, they have prevented nearly 250,000 premature deaths, staved off nearly 200,000 heart attacks, kept American adults at work a cumulative 17 million days, and boosted school attendance by 5.4 million days. But those benefits are now being swamped by another source of air pollution, one that’s far less directly manageable than cars and power plants: climate change. That’s the conclusion of a new report from the nonprofit First Street Foundation, which found that climate-change-fueled environmental conditions such as wildfires and ozone pollution are already reversing decades of air-quality gains for millions of Americans, a trend that will get worse for at least the next 30 years.
According to First Street, American air got better from the 1970s until 2016. Then, it began to reverse course. As the climate crisis deepens—specifically as more frequent, hotter wildfires bear down on the American West and as temperatures rise across the country—that degradation will continue. By 2054, the report projects, U.S. air quality will have degraded to what it was in 2004, wiping out years of progress. “We’re essentially adding back more premature deaths, we’re adding back more heart attacks,” Jeremy Porter, a demographer who serves as the head of climate implications at First Street, said during a webinar presenting the findings.
The impacts will be worse across the West, where wildfires are set to cause the greatest increases in PM2.5 pollution. Pierce County, in Washington State, is projected to see 12 more days of poor air quality a year by 2054, the biggest increase in the country. The researchers defined poor air days as those with an Air Quality Index of 101 or above, the threshold at which the EPA says air becomes dangerous for sensitive groups (elderly people, children, and people with certain illnesses) and can impair lung function for a sizable portion of active, healthy people too. “Twelve days doesn’t sound like a lot, but you’re thinking about 12 more days being trapped in your house, not being able to go outside, worrying about the health consequences of being exposed to the poor air quality,” Porter said. California’s San Bernardino County came in second, with nine additional days, and Fresno County would add eight more days.
California is already experiencing the worst of what First Street called the “climate penalty” on air quality. Its number of “hazardous” air-quality days—the worst on the EPA’s Air Quality Index, indicating emergency conditions—increased from three in 2010 to 38 in 2021. “Very unhealthy” days, the next level down from “hazardous,” went from one to 17 over that period. The number of days designated as “unhealthy for sensitive groups” went up, from 15 to 55. And “good” air-quality days, when the air is considered safe for everyone to breathe, declined by 32 percent.
The First Street researchers described California’s situation as a glimpse into the rest of the country’s future under climate change, barring dramatic action to curb it. The East Coast and Great Lakes regions got a taste of that future last summer, when wildfire smoke blown over from Canada’s record burns turned the sky in some places a sickening orange. Notowidigdo told me that last year, he was working on the Great Recession paper when Canadian wildfires sent air quality plummeting in Chicago, where he lives. He and his kids were stuck inside, and wore masks if they had to go out. Still, the bad air got to them through their house’s walls.
Although clean-air rules served their purpose relatively well in the 20th century, today the pollution they regulate is being dwarfed by the consequences of a warming planet. You can’t put scrubbers on a wildfire. But you can cut off the fuel—climate change—coaxing them to get bigger. The faster the American economy moves away from fossil energy, the sooner the burns stop growing.
That transition will be expensive. But the science makes clear that Americans are already paying steep costs, and stand to pay even more in the coming decades. GDP, as Notowidigdo and his colleagues note, may be an incomplete proxy for the true health of society. As long as economic growth is linked to polluting industries, it will come at the cost of human health. As such, we live in a world where economic downturns can paradoxically save lives. But a country powered by clean energy could presumably prosper economically without killing people prematurely.
The air we breathe is worsening because of an expired calculation. Maybe it was always bunk. Now, preserving life depends on how quickly we can correct that equation.