“The Costs of Economic Growth”, Charles Jones, 2009

Considers a model where mortality is a decreasing function of the economic growth rate – that is, new inventions inherently possess some danger (i.e., radium can turn out to be poisonous, nuclear physics can lead to the potential for nuclear war, etc.).  Solves a straightforward model where for some realistic parameters, people at a high enough level of income choose to reduce the growth rate by ignoring inventions that are potentially dangerous – i.e., safety is a luxury good.

http://www.stanford.edu/~chadj/cost040.pdf

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