Fomenting revolution brings to mind crowds storming the barricades, not analysts struggling to debug a spreadsheet or craft a clear sentence. Yet in his book, The Cost-Benefit Revolution, Cass Sunstein (Robert Walmsley University Professor, Harvard Law School) argues that benefit-cost analysts are doing exactly that. The barricades we surmount are decision-making errors resulting from overreliance on intuition and emotion, our weapons are science and economics, and our achievements are better policies.
As a previous Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, which oversees the U.S. regulatory program, it is not surprising that Sunstein focuses on the use of benefit-cost analysis in the regulatory realm. However, his insights and conclusions are broadly applicable to wherever benefit-cost analysis is practiced.