Eric A. Posner

Implementing Cost-Benefit Analysis when Preferences are Distorted

Cost-benefit analysis is routinely used by government agencies in order to evaluate projects, but it remains controversial among academics. This paper argues that cost-benefit analysis is best understood as a welfarist decision procedure and that use of cost-benefit analysis is more likely to maximize overall well-being than is use of alternative decision procedures. The paper focuses on the problem of distorted preferences. A persons preferences are distorted when his or her satisfaction does not enhance that persons well-being. Preferences typically thought to be distorted in this sense include disinterested preferences, uninformed preferences, adaptive preferences, and objectively bad preferences; further, preferences may be a poor guide to maximizing aggregate well-being when wealth is unequally distributed. The paper describes conditions under which agencies should correct for distorted preferences, for example, by constructing informed or nonadaptive preferences, discounting objectively bad preferences, and treating people differentially on the basis of wealth. Copyright 2000 by the University of Chicago.

Rethinking Cost-Benefit Analysis

This paper analyzes cost-benefit analysis from legal, economic, and philosophical perspectives. The traditional defense of cost-benefit analysis is that it maximizes a social welfare function that aggregates unweighted and unrestricted preferences. We follow many economists and philosophers who conclude that this defense is not persuasive. Cost-benefit analysis unavoidably depends on controversial distributive judgments; and the view that the government should maximize the satisfaction of unrestricted preferences is not plausible. However, we disagree with critics who argue that cost-benefit analysis produces morally irrelevant evaluations of projects and should be abandoned. On the contrary, cost-benefit analysis, suitably constrained, is consistent with a broad array of appealing normative commitments, and it is superior to alterative methods of project evaluation. It is a reasonable means to the end of maximizing overall welfare when preferences are undistorted or can be reconstructed. And it both exploits the benefits of agency specialization and constrains agencies that might otherwise evaluate projects improperly.

Dollars and Death

Administrative regulations and tort law both impose controls on activities that cause mortality risks, but they do so in puzzlingly different ways. Under a relatively new and still-controversial procedure, administrative regulations rely on a fixed value of a statistical life representing the hedonic loss from death. Under much older law, tort law in most states excludes hedonic loss from the calculation of damages, and instead focuses on loss of income, which regulatory policy ignores. Regulatory policy also disregards losses to dependents; tort law usually allows dependents to recover for loss of support. Regulatory policy generally treats the loss of the life of a child as equivalent to the loss of the life of an adult; tort law usually treats the loss of the life of a child as less valuable. Regulatory policy implicitly values foreigners as equal to Americans; tort law does not. We argue that both areas of law make serious mistakes in valuing life and that each should learn from the other. Regulatory policy properly focuses on hedonic loss from death, and tort law should adopt this approach. But regulatory policy should imitate tort laws individualized approach to valuing the loss from death, including its inclusion of losses to dependents. If these changes were made, tort awards would be more uniform and predictable, and regulations would be less uniform and more stringent. In addition, average tort damages for wrongful death would be at least twice as high as they are today. With respect to dollar judgments for mortality risks, a pervasive issue is how to combine accuracy with administrability and predictability; both bodies of law could do far better on this score.

Unemployment and Regulatory Policy

In an earlier article, Regulation, Unemployment, and Cost-Benefit Analysis, we argued that regulatory agencies should incorporate the costs of unemployment into cost-benefit analyses of proposed regulations. We argued that alternatives to including unemployment costs in cost-benefit analysis — including feasibility analysis and job loss analysis — make little sense because they do not specify the threshold at which job loss is excessive and do not explicitly make tradeoffs between unemployment effects and social gains. Our paper was cited in a 2012 draft OMB report that sought advice from commentators as to whether cost-benefit analysis should incorporate unemployment costs and, if so, how it should do so. This chapter, prepared for a volume on the treatment of unemployment costs within cost-benefit analysis, builds and expands upon that earlier work. We first respond to some important questions and critiques that commentators have raised regarding our paper in the intervening years since we published it. We then discuss some broader issues raised by the debate about the incorporation of unemployment costs into cost-benefit analysis, including the role of “second-order” or remote costs and benefits and the treatment of the ex ante incentives of regulation.

The Institutional Structure of Immigration Law

Immigration law scholars should give more attention to the institutional structure of immigration law and, in particular, the way that the government addresses problems of asymmetric information in the course of screening potential migrants and attempting to control their behavior once they arrive. Economic models of optimal contracting provide a useful starting point for analyzing this problem. This approach is applied to several current debates in immigration scholarship, including controversies over “crimmigration” and courts’ refusal to extend labor and employment rights to undocumented aliens.

Judicial Independence in International Tribunals

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 3 I. Background on Intemational Dispute Resolution 8 II. Independence and the Role of Intemational Tribunals 12 A. Independence in the Domestic and Intemational Spheres 12 B. Why States Use Intemational Tribunals 14 1. Information Disclosure in Treaty Disputes 15 2. Infonnation Disclosure in Customary Intemational Law Disputes 18 3. The Dispute Resolution Mechanism 20 C. The Design of Dispute Resolution Mechanisms 22 1. The Single Arbitrator 22 2. Three (or More) Arbitrators 23 3. From Arbitration to Courts 24 4. Measuring Tribunal Independence 26 D. Measurements of Effectiveness 27

Transitional Justice as Ordinary Justice

Theorists of transitional justice study the transition measures used, or eschewed, by new democracies that succeed communist or authoritarian regimes - measures including trials, purges, lustration, reparations, and truth commissions. The theorists tend to oppose transitional measures, portraying them as illiberal and as a distraction from the task of consolidating new democracies. In this Article we argue against that view. The critics of transitional justice have gone wrong by overlooking that transitional measures are common in consolidated legal systems, which themselves constantly undergo political and economic shocks resulting in transitions of greater or lesser degree. Ordinary justice has developed a range of pragmatic tools for managing transitions. Consolidated democracies use trials, purges and reparations to accomplish valuable forward-looking goals without allowing illiberal repression; new democracies can and should use those tools also. Because transitional justice is continuous with ordinary justice, there is no reason to treat transitional-justice measures as presumptively suspect, on either moral or institutional grounds.

A Critique of the Odious Debt Doctrine

Defenders of the odious debt doctrine, which bars creditors from collecting sovereign debts that financed the personal consumption of former dictators, argue that this rule would benefit populations following dictatorships and discourage would-be dictators from staging coups in the first place. We show that optimism about the doctrine is based on unrealistic assumptions about the motives and practices of dictators. With more realistic assumptions, the odious debt doctrine could be beneficial or harmful, depending on circumstances. Defenders of the doctrine have not made the empirical case that the net benefits would be positive if the doctrine were incorporated into international law, and there is ample reason for skepticism that they would be.

Inside or Outside the System

In a typical pattern in the literature on public law, the diagnostic sections of a paper draw upon political science, economics or other disciplines to offer deeply pessimistic accounts of the motivations of relevant actors in the legal system. The prescriptive sections of the paper, however, then issue an optimistic proposal that the same actors should supply public-spirited solutions. Where the analyst makes inconsistent assumptions about the motivations of actors within the legal system, equivocating between external and internal perspectives, an inside/outside fallacy arises. We identify the fallacy, connect it to an economics literature on the “determinacy paradox,” and elicit its implications for the theory of public law.

Climate Regulation and the Limits of Cost-Benefit Analysis

Over the past two years U.S. regulatory agencies have issued fourteen regulations that take into account the effect of industrial activities and products on the global climate. The regulatory activity so far has already set precedents on which future regulation will rest. Yet despite the potentially momentous consequences, it has received no comment in the law review literature. This Article examines the record of these agencies and criticizes the methods they have used to calculate the social cost of carbon emissions. We also develop a larger theme about the relationship between cost-benefit analysis and politics. The best case for cost-benefit analysis is that its recommendations are politically neutral in the sense of drawing on widely shared intuitions about human well-being. But cost-benefit analysis cannot cope with inherently political questions involving contested normative issues. Policymakers will have to find alternative tools when those questions predominate