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Senseless Kindness: The Politics Of Cost Benefit Analysis, Louis E. Wolcher

ExpressO

This essay identifies a social phenomenon that the Russian-Jewish novelist and war correspondent Vasily Grossman calls "senseless kindness." Emerging without prior warning from certain face-to-face encounters between human beings, the striking reversal of preferences that characterizes this phenomenon can be used to cast a critical light on the practices of Cost Benefit Analysis ("CBA"). Not only does senseless kindness highlight the troubling theoretical problem of determining the "correct" ex ante—the point in time at which CBA measures people's preferences—it also points towards the possibility of a more general critique of CBA's indifference to how preferences are formed and expressed. The …