Livelihood benefits of small improvements in the life table.

This article proposes and illustrates a new lower bound on the economic benefits of reducing the number of deaths due to a particular cause and specifies the underlying economic and demographic assumptions. Unlike previous estimates of the increase in a population's output due to the extension of working lives, this new bound includes the present value to the existing population of avoiding future deaths from the cause. The estimated lower bound of $20 billion benefit from eliminating U.S. male deaths due to kidney and related diseases exceeds by an order of magnitude a previous estimate that considers only current deaths.