@BCAppelbaum According to the @CDCgov , nearly 3 Americans die from accidental cut/pierce injuries every week. Maybe not all of them from paring knives, but surely some. Moreover, some paring knife injuries are no accident.

@BCAppelbaum @CDCgov In spite of the grave risks posed by paring knives, their sale and use is virtually unregulated. You can pick one up online for $3. No background check, no waiting period. No minimum wage -- you could send your kid to the store to pick one up for you.

@BCAppelbaum @CDCgov Why hasn't the paring knife been banned? Why isn't there a paring knife buyback program? Because the risk, although well-documented and easily understood, are small relative to the usefulness of the object. Literally, it slices, it dices...

@BCAppelbaum @CDCgov If you have a paring knife in your kitchen, you've concluded that its usefulness justifies the risk it poses to your life. Which means you have assigned a finite value to your life. We can squabble over exactly what that value is, but you've taken a quantifiable chance.

@BCAppelbaum @CDCgov We lead lives beset with enormous risk. The only way to eliminate it all, ironically, is to not be born at all. How do we make reasonable decisions about mitigating risk, to avoid penny-wise pound-foolish initiatives like banning the paring knife? Analytically. As economists do.

@BCAppelbaum @CDCgov This type of analysis begins with the premise that we can't treat lives as though they are of infinite value. We'd have to confiscate not just paring knives but every object that poses any sort of risk. Students typically recoil on learning this, but it remains a key lesson.

@BCAppelbaum @CDCgov Lest you think that one paring knife murder was an isolated incident...

@BCAppelbaum @CDCgov Lest you think that two paring knife murders were isolated incidents...

@BCAppelbaum @CDCgov We could go on like this all day... yet I imagine nobody here is going straight home to melt down their paring knives...

@JakeVigdor @BCAppelbaum I think it's the "dollar value" that gets to people. So, I use real goods. Use a "year of college education" value (call it $10k) on human life. So, if VSL is $10mil, it means I'd be willing to raise my chance of death by about 1/1000 to get a free year of college.