For shorter or poorer: attitudes toward the trade-off between poverty and mortality

Many policy decisions involve trade-offs between lives and livelihoods. We provide the first estimates for a new welfare parameter that expresses this trade-off in the longevity-poverty space. To do so, we conduct randomized survey experiments with 20,000 respondents across seven middle- and high-income countries. Both the median and mean responses imply that individuals are willing to spend no more than about two years in poverty to gain one additional year of life, sharply restricting the plausible range for this normative parameter. We show how these estimates can inform policy trade-offs related to long-run global development, pandemic responses, and climate change.