Only a Poor Workman Blames His Tools: On Uses and Abuses of Benefit-Cost Analysis in Regulatory Decision Making About the Environment

The debate that has raged in the legal literature for the last decade about benefit-cost analysis (BCA) in regulatory decision making about the environment has not been very productive for two key reasons: (1) it has focused on the way that BCA is used in the OIRA review process to “fine tune” 1 regulations just before they are issued, and (2) it has suffered from “selective realism” 2 by discussing the flaws of BCA but not comparing them to the flaws of human decision making unaided by BCA. John Graham’s 146 page, full-throated defense of BCA brings much needed balance to this debate by answering the critics. 3 His article is particularly useful for making accessible to lawyers and law students the ethical and philosophical underpinnings of BCA, and also