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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Articles 1 - 5 of 5
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Deploying Machine Learning For A Sustainable Future, Cary Coglianese
Deploying Machine Learning For A Sustainable Future, Cary Coglianese
All Faculty Scholarship
To meet the environmental challenges of a warming planet and an increasingly complex, high tech economy, government must become smarter about how it makes policies and deploys its limited resources. It specifically needs to build a robust capacity to analyze large volumes of environmental and economic data by using machine-learning algorithms to improve regulatory oversight, monitoring, and decision-making. Three challenges can be expected to drive the need for algorithmic environmental governance: more problems, less funding, and growing public demands. This paper explains why algorithmic governance will prove pivotal in meeting these challenges, but it also presents four likely obstacles that …
Human Survival, Risk, And Law: Considering Risk Filters To Replace Cost-Benefit Analysis, John William Draper
Human Survival, Risk, And Law: Considering Risk Filters To Replace Cost-Benefit Analysis, John William Draper
Librarian Scholarship at Penn Law
Selfish utilitarianism, neo-classical economics, the directive of short-term income maximization, and the decision tool of cost-benefit analysis fail to protect our species from the significant risks of too much consumption, pollution, or population. For a longer-term survival, humanity needs to employ more than cost-justified precaution.
This article argues that, at the global level, and by extension at all levels of government, we need to replace neo-classical economics with filters for safety and feasibility to regulate against significant risk. For significant risks, especially those that are irreversible, we need decision tools that will protect humanity at all scales. This article describes …
The Epa's Risky Reasoning, Cary Coglianese, Gary E. Marchant
The Epa's Risky Reasoning, Cary Coglianese, Gary E. Marchant
All Faculty Scholarship
Regulators must rely on science to understand problems and predict the consequences of regulatory actions, but science by itself cannot justify public policy decisions. We review the Environmental Protection Agency's efforts to justify recent changes to its National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for ozone and particulate matter, showing how the agency was able to cloak its policy judgments under the guise of scientific objectivity. By doing so, the EPA evaded accountability for a shifting and incoherent set of policy positions that will have major implications for public health and the economy. For example, even though EPA claimed to base …
Building Sector-Based Consensus: A Review Of The Epa's Common Sense Initiative, Cary Coglianese, Laurie K. Allen
Building Sector-Based Consensus: A Review Of The Epa's Common Sense Initiative, Cary Coglianese, Laurie K. Allen
All Faculty Scholarship
In the late 1990s, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) conducted what the agency considered to be a "bold experiment" in regulatory reinvention, bringing representatives from six industrial sectors together with government officials and NGO representatives to forge a consensus on innovations in public policy and business practices. This paper assesses the impact of the agency's "experiment" - called the Common Sense Initiative (CSI) - in terms of the agency's goals of improving regulatory performance and technological innovation. Based on a review of CSI projects across all six sectors, the paper shows how EPA achieved, at best, quite modest accomplishments. …
Performance-Based Regulation: Prospects And Limitations In Health, Safety And Environmental Protection, Cary Coglianese, Jennifer Nash
Performance-Based Regulation: Prospects And Limitations In Health, Safety And Environmental Protection, Cary Coglianese, Jennifer Nash
All Faculty Scholarship
Regulation aims to improve the performance of individual and organizational behavior in ways that reduce social harms, whether by improving industry's environmental performance, increasing the safety of transportation systems, or reducing workplace risk. With this in mind, the phrase "performance-based regulation" might seem a bit redundant, since all regulation should aim to improve performance in ways that advance social goals. Yet regulators can direct those they govern to improve their performance in at least two basic ways. They can prescribe exactly what actions regulated entities must take to improve their performance. Or they can incorporate the regulation's goal into the …