Livermore, Michael A.

Reviving rationality : saving cost-benefit analysis for the sake of the environment and our health / by Michael A. Livermore and Richard L. Revesz. - New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2020 - 1 online resource ( , pages) : color illustrations.

https://www.universitypressscholarship.com/

Includes bibliographical references and index

I. Guardrails -- 1. Politics and regulation -- 2. A threatening synthesis -- 3. Staying in bounds -- 4. Retreating from reason -- II. Charade -- 5. The illusion of costs without benefits -- 6. Erasing public health science -- 7. Resurrecting discredited models -- 8. Ignoring indirect benefits -- 9. Trivializing climate change -- 10 Manipulating transfers -- III. Rebuilding --11. Future directions -- 12. Improving the guardrails

Reviving Rationality: Saving Cost-Benefit Analysis for the Sake of the Environment and Our Health explains how Donald Trump destabilized the decades-long bipartisan consensus that federal agencies must base their decisions on evidence, expertise, and analysis. Administrative agencies are charged by law with protecting values like stable financial markets and clean air. Their decisions often have profound consequences, affecting everything from the safety of workplaces to access to the dream of home ownership. Under the Trump administration, agencies have been hampered in their ability to advance these missions by the conflicting ideological whims of a changing cast of political appointees and overwhelming pressure from well-connected interest groups. Inconvenient evidence has been ignored, experts have been sidelined, and analysis has been used to obscure facts rather than inform the public. The results are grim: incoherent policy, social division, defeats in court, a demoralized federal workforce, and a loss of faith in government’s ability to respond to pressing problems. This experiment in abandoning the norms of good governance has been a disaster. Reviving Rationality explains how and why our government has abandoned rationality in recent years, and why it is so important for future administrations to restore rigorous and even-handed cost-benefit analysis if we are to return to a policymaking approach that effectively tackles the most pressing problems of our era.

9780197539477 (e-book)


Trade regulation--United States
Trade regulation--Cost effectiveness--United States
Administrative agencies--Decision making--United States
Environmental law--Cost effectiveness--United States
Public health laws--Cost effectiveness--United States

KF1600 / L75 2020