Slate: If God Were an Accountant

Being a soldier is risky; so is being a drug dealer or prostitute. The difficulty, evidently, is to disentangle the health risk and the financial reward from all the other motivations to choose a particular way of life. That isn’t easy, but economists try.

World Bank economist Paul Gertler, Dr. Manisha Shah, and their colleagues reckoned that Mexican prostitutes valued their lives at about $50,000 per year, based on willingness to take money not to use condoms. At five times their annual earnings, that’s a similar figure to workers accepting risky jobs in rich countries.