The Cost-Benefit Revolution Audiobook (Free)

Why policies should be based on careful consideration of their costs and benefits rather than on intuition, well-known opinion, interest groupings, and anecdotes. Views on government plans vary widely. Some people feel passionately about the child obesity epidemic and support authorities regulation of sugary drinks. Others claim that people can drink and eat whatever they like. Some individuals are alarmed about weather change and favour aggressive government intervention. Others don’t about The Cost-Benefit Trend wish for virtually every sort of environment rules. In The Cost-Benefit Trend, Cass Sunstein argues our major disagreements really involve facts, not values. It comes after that government policy should not be based on general public opinion, intuitions, or pressure from curiosity groupings, but on numbers-meaning careful consideration of costs and benefits. Will an insurance plan save one existence, or one thousand lives? Will it impose costs on consumers, and if so, will the expenses become high or negligible? Does it hurt workers and smaller businesses, and, if therefore, precisely how much? As the Obama administration’s ‘regulatory czar,’ Sunstein knows his subject in both theory and practice. Sketching on behavioral economics and his well-known focus on ‘nudging,’ he celebrates the cost-benefit revolution in policy making, tracing its defining moments in the Reagan, Clinton, and Obama administrations (and pondering its uncertain long term in the Trump administration). He acknowledges that open public officials often absence information about costs and benefits, and outlines state-of-the-art techniques for obtaining that information. Guidelines should make people’s lives better. Quantitative cost-benefit evaluation, Sunstein argues, is the greatest available way for making this happen-even if, in the foreseeable future, new measures of human well-being, also explored in this book, may be better still.