Thomas Schelling's classic distinction: the life you save may be your own, the identified life we die to rescue versus the statistical life we budget for. Policy runs on the second; headlines run on the first.
Documented
The essay
Documented: Schelling's 1968 essay in Problems in Public Expenditure Analysis introduced the framing that built a field: let the worth of life be read from what people actually pay for small reductions in risk, their own risk, revealing a value of statistical life rather than pricing a named one. The approach became the basis of the VSL figures used by transport, health, and environmental regulators worldwide.
Assessment: Documented: the essay and the regulatory apparatus it founded. The VSL is in your government's cost-benefit forms right now.
Stories
The identified life
The documented asymmetry: identified lives command extraordinary spending, mine rescues, transplants, hostage ransoms, while statistical lives are purchased cheap, and courts and agencies treat the two as different currencies. Schelling's own examples, stranded whalers and trapped miners, remain the standard illustrations.
Assessment: Documented: the asymmetry is stable across decades of studies. Nobody has resolved it; everyone prices around it.
Interesting claims
The tyranny of the face
The connection to the numbing literature: the statistical life is the numbed life, and Schelling's essay is the institutional workaround, a machine for caring about the uncounted, deliberately designed to bypass the empathy circuit that only fires for one face. That the machine feels cold is documented; that the alternative feels warm and saves fewer people is also documented.
Assessment: Interesting: the VSL is a prosthetic conscience, built because the original is logarithmic. The archive files it under engineering fixes for evolved limits.
Sources and further reading
Thomas Schelling, 'The Life You Save May Be Your Own', in Chase, ed., Problems in Public Expenditure Analysis, Brookings, 1968 (primary essay)
US DOT and EPA VSL guidance documents (the regulatory descendant, current editions)
The identified-life vs statistical-life spending literature (documented asymmetry)
Worth asking
Why does the victim with a name outrank the ten without one?