Cost-benefit’s guarantee of better outcomes rests on an assumed costless information premise.

Evidence

Stavins devoted no meaningful discussion in his comments to the possibility that the scientifi c and economic information necessary to fulfi ll textbook effi ciency analysis may be lacking or that nonoptimizing decision criteria may be more pragmatically sensible under conditions of epistemic uncertainty and administratively costly decision making. Hence, when the economist wrote that only the costbenefi t test “will— by defi nition— lead consistently to decisions which make the world better off,” he failed to acknowledge that costbenefi t analysis only does so “by defi nition,” that is, by an a priori assumption that the information needed to satisfy the form of the optimization exercise is both attainable and costless. — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere, 535

Categorization

• XREF: The unmasking-of-hidden-premises move matches the running theme across all chapters that objectivity claims smuggle in normative assumptions — connects to: Cost-benefit analysis causes the very distortions it claims to prevent — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 237; Cost-benefit analysis’s appearance of rationality masks its insensitivity to systemic, long-term context — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 16; People settle for easy, available information even when better decisions are attainable. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2552

Broader Connections

• Cost-benefit analysis’s appearance of rationality masks its insensitivity to systemic, long-term context #expands (0.80) — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere, 16
• People settle for easy, available information even when better decisions are attainable. #qualifies (0.78) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2552