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Full-Text Articles in Law
Abdication Or Delegation? Congress, The Bureaucracy, And The Delegation Dilemma, Mathew D. Mccubbins
Abdication Or Delegation? Congress, The Bureaucracy, And The Delegation Dilemma, Mathew D. Mccubbins
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Rethinking Cost-Benefit Analysis, Matthew D. Adler, Eric A. Posner
Rethinking Cost-Benefit Analysis, Matthew D. Adler, Eric A. Posner
Faculty Scholarship
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 …