Cost-benefit analysis causes the very distortions it claims to prevent

Evidence

Even if the corps had included human health and environmental values within its costbenefi t calculations, the agency still would have faced theoretically and normatively diffi cult questions regarding how to monetize those values and how to account for their intertemporal distribution, as chapters 4 and 6 demonstrate. What the New Orleans hurricane planning pro cess more narrowly shows, however, is that costbenefi t analysis in practice is capable of leading to the very kinds of politi cal and analytical distortions that the procedure is designed to guard against. The failure to account adequately for the lifesaving purposes of hurricane protection led the corps not only to understate the justifi cation for hurricane protection but also to promote private landdevelopment schemes that may well have been counterproductive from the perspective of guarding against storm surges. — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere, 237

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Statistical objectivity in environmental policy rests on unwarranted assumptions about the physical world — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 15; Hidden value judgments hide behind claims of technical objectivity — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 231; Cost-benefit’s guarantee of better outcomes rests on an assumed costless information premise. — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 535 (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• Cost-benefit analysis erases the moral remainders that technology standards preserve #expands (0.85) — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere, 578
• Cost-benefit analysis narrows the questions environmental law can ask #expands (0.80) — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere, 317
• Cost-benefit analysis treats dynamic policy processes as static snapshots #corroborates (0.80) — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere, 311
• Efficiency is treated as uncontestable truth rather than a contestable value #corroborates (0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 121
• Positive incentive systems can be corrupted into subsidies for the very harm they target #complicates (0.75)
• Economic ideas can blind policymakers to the flaws of their institutional designs #expands (0.75) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 252
• Existing environmental statutes already reject welfarist cost-benefit reasoning by design #corroborates (0.72) — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere, 618