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

Theodore M. Porter

A chapter in Research in Law and Economics, 2007, pp 337-344 from Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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.

Date: 2007
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eme:rlwezz:s0193-5895(07)23014-3

DOI: 10.1016/S0193-5895(07)23014-3

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