Hazardous Decisions.

• Author: Taylor, Brian J.
• Position: Research on Superfund site cleaning - Brief Article

In a sane world, it would be an obvious point; in this one, it bears repeating. When legislators craft public policy and when regulators enforce it, they tend to put political considerations before the public interest.

The most recent scholars to demonstrate this are W. Kip Viscusi of Harvard and James T. Hamilton of Duke, who recently took a hard look at where Superfund concentrates its efforts to clean up hazardous wastes. The results appeared last September in The American Economic Review, under the title "Are Risk Regulators Rational?"

According to Viscusi and Hamilton, "most of the significant influences on Superfund site decisions do not follow the expected pattern for efficient risk management," which would emphasize how many people are being exposed to risks and how much each clean up costs per life saved. While some cleanup decisions were grounded in solid cost-benefit calculations, a majority of...