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Andrew Gelman over at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science has been arguing that the following statement by Becker doesn’t make sense:

According to the economic approach, therefore, most (if not all!) deaths are to some extent “suicides” in the sense that they could have been postponed if more resources had been invested in prolonging life.

This goes back to a quote from Becker’s book The Economic Approach to Human Behaviour (which has been catapulted to the pole position of my reading list) posted on the Freakonomics Blog.

Gelman makes a few points, but this one seems central to his argument:

I don’t see how you can call it suicidal of the pedestrian that the driver was not paying attention. Nor do I see it as suicidal if someone develops kidney cancer and dies, nor do I see it as suicidal if a kid is playing and falls out of a high window, or if someone in the Middle East is hit by a bomb while sitting in a school, etc.

I may tend to look at the issue of suicide prevention through my economist glasses while wearing my economics hat, but to my mind, Becker makes nothing but sense. It is all about marginality, and diminishing returns to scale. The same point is made in the comments, but this is how I see it:

What Becker means is very much along the lines of the example commonly used to illustrate that the value of life is apparently not infinitely high. If it were, we would be willing to take zero risk of death, i.e. invest all our resources into the prevention of death.

Traffic lights reduce the probability of having an accident. So why do we not have traffic lights everywhere? Because the impracticality of it (= a type of cost) outweighs the perceived benefit.

We accept a non-zero risk of death because we prefer not to shift all resources to the prevention of death. I think his argument boils down to this, rather than to the question whether one should fly or drive to a family gathering. It is not about the resources involved in choosing a lower risk option, but about the resources involved in reducing (or eliminating!) the risk of death per se.