Determining Insurance based on Human Life Value

An important name in those earlier attempts is Dr. Solomon S. Huebner—a former professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is credited with developing one of the first systems for determining how much life insurance is appropriate based on the economic value of a human life—appropriately
called the human life value approach.  The human life value approach involves estimating an individual’s personal earnings each year to retirement, from which the costs of self-maintenance, life insurance premiums, and income taxes are
deducted to produce residual income. The residual income stream is then discounted to its present value. The present value of that residual income stream is the value of that human life.  Although any individual life may have many different values to society or to other individuals—for example, that life may produce great art, like Michelangelo—life insurance is really concerned with
the economic value of a human life.