Post by rasel101 on Oct 6, 2015 18:36:42 GMT
It is hardly surprising that the use of cost-benefit analysis, quantitative risk assessment, and similar analytic tools generates substantial political controversy in the United States. The risks, costs, and benefits under scrutiny are usually difficult to estimate with precision. As one Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) scientist so colorfully put it, "One of the nice things about the environmental standard setting business is that you are always setting the standard at a level where the data is lousy" (quoted in Melnick, 1983:244). Moreover, quantitative analysis frequently spotlights politically and ethically troublesome distributional issues, issues that pit citizen against citizen, nation against nation, and even generation against generation. Sometimes the choices involved are "tragic" in that they require us to decide not just who shall live but who must die (Calabresi and Bobbitt, 1978). Such analysis, in short, is never a purely technical undertaking; it exposes rather than resolves hard political choices. For this reason, most practitioners insist that benefit-cost analysis is a "decision helping" rather than a "decision making'' tool.