What I mean is that on a wider level, public policy decisions about saving lives need to have a ballpark dollar valuation on human life in order to make allocation decisions.

It would not make sense to spend $20MM on an intersection upgrade which saves 2 lives per year when spending $10MM each on two other intersections might save 5 lives per year. It gets more complicated when you're comparing different things, like a dialysis machine versus a PR campaign for type II diabetes versus a traffic upgrade.

The minute you acknowledge that line of reasoning makes sense, it is easy to get trapped in this messed up alternate reasoning where the market cap of facebook is 5,884 American lives.