The French singer Maurice Chevalier (1888–1972) is credited with coining the adage, “Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternative.” Does cost-benefit analysis, like growing old, seem acceptable in view of the alternative? Throughout this book, I have criticized the attempt to assess environmental policies “by evaluating their consequences in terms of prior preferences.” What is the alternative? “Without cost-benefit analysis,” Herman Leonard and Richard Zeckhauser have written, “we would be forced to rely on an unpredictable political process. That process frequently leads to stalemate and reliance on the status quo; at other times it careens in response to popular perceptions and whims of the moment.” Environmental economist Barry Field has made the same point. He has written, “It is the politician's job to compromise or seek advantage,” while economists “produce studies that are … as objective as possible.”

The Commanding Heights in Environmental Economics

In step with the Progressive movement prominent more than a century ago, welfare economists contrast policy science with politics. Edith Stokey and Richard Zeckhauser, for example, argue that cost-benefit analysis provides a scientific, objective basis for policy making, while the alternative, a political process, is uncontrollable. “The benefits and costs accruing to all … will be counted on a dollar-for-dollar basis. Benefit-cost analysis is a methodology with which we pursue efficiency and which has the effect of limiting the vagaries of the political process.