Failing to monetize human life skews flood projects toward property and development promotion

Evidence

The various normative judgments buried within the SPH model construction may have been driven by a concern that the costbenefi t constraint facing the Army Corps’ projects would not have justifi ed higher levels of storm protection. No doubt such concerns were themselves driven by the Army Corps’ failure at the time to monetize the human health and environmental benefi ts of its hurricane protection projects. They also likely were affected by the Army Corps’ standard use of a 3.25 percent discount rate to translate the anticipated costs and benefi ts of projects into presentvalue terms, a procedure that chapter 6 shows to embody a clumsy and inadequate way of addressing questions of intergenerational equity, particularly in the face of longrange planning of the sort implicated by disaster policy. The excluding of saved human lives from costbenefi t calculation and the discounting of future benefi ts may also have contributed to the Army Corps’ tendency to liberally include prospects for private development as part of its fl oodcontrol and hurricaneprotection projects. Because the Army Corps did not include saved human lives (or, for that matter, ecological resources) in its costbenefi t analyses, the bulk of the identifi ed benefi ts from hurricane protection tended to come from the safeguarding of real and personal property. Thus, in order to generate a higher regulatory “bud get” for project planning purposes, the Army Corps designed projects with easily identifi able and monetizable propertyprotection benefi ts, even if that meant earmarking for future development wetlands that might otherwise have remained in their natural, stormsurgedampening state. — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere, 234

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the ‘Grafting & Growth’ pieces treatment of development-versus-nature tradeoffs and the unstated valuations behind infrastructure choices; also the wetlands-destruction detail touches land/place.
• XREF: connects to: A sub-rosa cost-benefit analysis decided only nuclear plants warranted maximum storm protection — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 230; Profiting from developing floodways is morally equivalent to selling tainted meat — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 538; Short-term profit incentives override distant and slowly accumulating environmental harms

Broader Connections

• Short-term profit incentives override distant and slowly accumulating environmental harms #corroborates (0.78)
• Profiting from developing floodways is morally equivalent to selling tainted meat #complicates (0.72) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 538