The Rise of Cost–Benefit Rationality as Solution to a Political Problem of Distrust

• Published date: 16 October 2007
• Pages: 337-344
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0193-5895(07)23014-3
• Date: 16 October 2007
• Author: Theodore M. Porter

THE RISE OF COST–BENEFIT

RATIONALITY AS SOLUTION

TO A POLITICAL PROBLEM

OF DISTRUST

Theodore M. Porter

ABSTRACT

Cost–benefit analysis in its modern form grew up within mid-twentieth-

century public agencies such as the Army Corps of Engineers. It was at

first a very practical program of economic quantification, practiced by

engineers before it drew in economists, and its history is as much a story

of bureaucratic technologies as of applied social science. It has aimed

throughout at a kind of public rationality, but in a particular, highly

impersonal form. The ideal of standardized rules of calculation is adapted

to the constrained political situations which generated the demand for this

kind of economic analysis.

Cost–benefit analysis, with its promise of rational solutions to political and

administrative problems, has never been above controversy. Economists and

other social scientists have been at work for about 60 years trying to develop

better ways to assign monetary values to the various factors that must be

weighed in the cost–benefit balance. Many have also been engaged as

Research in Law and Economics, Volume 23, 337–344

Copyright r2007 by Elsevier Ltd.

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 0193-5895/doi:10.1016/S0193-5895(07)23014-3

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