The economic value of a human life is often used in public policy decision making. It is regularly used to determine the viability of mega-infrastructure projects such as highway upgrades through notorious black-spots, or tunnels to fight traffic congestion. That is, if a particular stretch of the Pacific Highway is regularly responsible (or the site of) multiple fatalities in a given year then it is a relatively straight forward calculation to determine the payback period. This would be estimated based on an economic value of Joe Citizen calculated as a formula involving life expectancy, earning capacity, net present values, discount rates, and various other economic instruments. The basic point is that human life is captialised in a trade-off against infrastructure cost.

Alternatively, public policy may use a similar model based on economic impact (as opposed to economic value). For example, if the Queensland Government's Department of Transport and Main Roads assigned an economic impact value of a road death based on the grieving and lost productivity of immediate family, friends, and work colleagues at around $500,000, then if 10 such fatalities occurred at a particular blackspot each year, and the cost of fixing the problem was $200 million, then the starting payback period for the project (based on human monetisation), would be 40 years. This case would then be comparatively managed within a portfolio of infrastructure asset upgrades by the department. 

With the ICT industry evaluated by Longhaus to represent just under $170 billion per year in Australia (including SMEs but excluding households), a calculation of either economic impact, or economic value of an ICT professional's life could be expected to sit well above any national average for the purposes of public policy development. Extend that to other high impact or value professions reliant on technology (which is just about everyone), and then the case becomes clearly worthy of discussion as to why technology projects are not given higher order of budgetary consideration by government treasuries. 

As previously pointed out by the Naked Chief in The Brisbane Line at a cost of $200 million the economic prosperity delivered by the PipeNetworks Project Runway broadband cable will far outstrip that delivered by the 334m Tugun By-Pass tunnel which was constructed at more than twice the cost ($423 million to the State Government; $100m + more from Federal funding)...it highlights a mismatch in understanding of what is achievable and important in terms of the state's ICT infrastructure within the global ICT economy. It also begs the question in this example as to what kind of economic benefit could the state derive on its journey from a geo-political to a knowledge economy if it now invested $200-300m in the construction of its own pacific cable and really connected Queensland to the world, as opposed to connecting it to the rest of Australia.

What is clear is that the development of an economic value of a digitally connected life (which could very well be developed and owned by any of the national industry associations) would go a long way to providing a common ground for comparative lobbying by the ICT industry for investment parity for ICT infrastructure and innovation funds compared to other built environment infrastructure investment programs.

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