Congress’s 1972 reasons for rejecting benefit-cost correlation remain insurmountable.

Evidence

Most notably, the practical challenges that prompted Congress to amend the CWA in 1972, jettisoning an earlier attempt to correlate regulatory impositions with demonstrated ecological benefi ts, remain just as insurmountable today. Although many advances have been made in the understanding of ecosystem functioning and in methods of monetizing environmental impacts, the project of reducing environmental policy making to empirical technique remains deeply fl awed. … Instead, when viewed within the larger institutional context within which regulatory costbenefi t analysis must, by defi nition, occur, the approach appears to be an impractical and often illegitimate attempt to enshrine within law a par tic u lar po litical vision, one so deeply subscribed to by its adherents that they fail even to recognize its normativity. — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere, 527

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the running dismissal of technique-as-objectivity; pairs with reader’s LGST thread that legal institutions embed normative choices — connects to: A best-technology statute was rewritten into a cost-benefit ratio standard. — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 526; An agency cannot achieve through regulation what Congress declined to legislate — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 2444
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that cost-benefit adherents fail to recognize their own project’s normativity is the densest, most paradigm-shifting assertion in the chapter

Broader Connections

• An agency cannot achieve through regulation what Congress declined to legislate #corroborates (0.78) — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process, 2444