Experts, Economists, Democrats
Files
Description
Should government decisions be based on cost-benefit analysis (CBA)? This is one of the most important issues in contemporary law and policy. It raises questions about the nature of individual and collective rationality and also about possible reforms of governmental institutions. Less familiar, but increasingly important, is the emerging role of comparative risk assessment (CRA). CBA explores whether a particular policy is justified on balance. CRA has the more confined role of ensuring better priority setting by ranking risks in terms of their seriousness. CRA is concerned with ensuring that the most serious risks are addressed first. A major question raised by both CBA and CRA is that of valuation: How do we compare risks? What would enable us to decide that it is "too costly" to take a certain course of action? In public policy circles, there are two principal answers to such questions. The first is offered by experts, who attempt to rank risks by reference to technocratic considerations. The second is offered by economists, who try to rank risks by seeing how much people are "willing to pay" to eliminate them (or "willing to accept" to face them). The goal of this chapter is to challenge both the expert and economic approaches and to urge a democratic alternative. The problem with expert approaches is that they ignore some distinctive features of citizen evaluations of risks that are far from irrational. The problem with the economic approach is that private willingness to pay is an inadequate way to evaluate risks or to compare the costs and benefits of proposed policies. Of course, the abstract word "democratic" points to no panacea for handling these problems; but it does suggest some general directions for reform.
Source Publication
Free Markets and Social Justice
Source Editors/Authors
Cass R. Sunstein
Publication Date
1997
Recommended Citation
Sunstein, Cass R. and Pildes, Richard H., "Experts, Economists, Democrats" (1997). Faculty Chapters. 1966.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1966
