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

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.

Citation

Porter, T.M. (2007), "The Rise of Cost–Benefit Rationality as Solution to a Political Problem of Distrust", Zerbe, R.O. (Ed.) Research in Law and Economics (Research in Law and Economics, Vol. 23), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 337-344. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0193-5895(07)23014-3