An American economist who won the Nobel prize for economics in 2005. He challenged the "human-capital method" of valuing life (which priced a life by its lost earnings and therefore assigned a value of zero to the old, the sick and those without paid work). Schelling drew a distinction between the "identified life"—which has near-infinite value ("let a six-year-old girl with brown hair need thousands of dollars for an operation…and the post office will be swamped with nickels and dimes to save her")—and the "statistical life": the increased risk of mortality for some unidentifiable person. His insight was that people continually take risks which might result in their death, and that measuring how much they are willing to spend to reduce those risks allows one to derive the value of a statistical life.
The point is, you see, that there is no point in driving yourself mad trying to stop yourself going mad. You might just as well give in and save your sanity for later.