Rethinking Cost-Benefit Analysis

Abstract:     
This paper analyzes cost-benefit analysis from legal, economic, and philosophical perspectives. The traditional defense of cost-benefit analysis is that it maximizes a social welfare function that aggregates unweighted and unrestricted preferences. We follow many economists and philosophers who conclude that this defense is not persuasive. Cost-benefit analysis unavoidably depends on controversial distributive judgments; and the view that the government should maximize the satisfaction of unrestricted preferences is not plausible. However, we disagree with critics who argue that cost-benefit analysis produces morally irrelevant evaluations of projects and should be abandoned. On the contrary, cost-benefit analysis, suitably constrained, is consistent with a broad array of appealing normative commitments, and it is superior to alterative methods of project evaluation. It is a reasonable means to the end of maximizing overall welfare when preferences are undistorted or can be reconstructed. And it both exploits the benefits of agency specialization and constrains agencies that might otherwise evaluate projects improperly.

JEL Classifications: H43, K23

Working Paper Series