Law Commons^™

The Fatal Failure Of The Regulatory State, W. Kip Viscusi

William & Mary Law Review

Although regulatory agencies place high values on the benefits associated with the reduction in mortality risks due to regulations, these same agencies substantially undervalue lives in their enforcement efforts. The disparity between the valuation of prospective risks and fatalities that have occurred is often by several orders of magnitude, diminishing whatever safety incentives the regulations might have generated. A review of the practices by the major federal agencies with responsibility for product safety and occupational safety finds that the value placed on fatalities in agencies’ regulatory analyses can be a factor of 1000 times greater than the magnitude of the …