Monetizing the impact of regulation in order to weigh its benefits against its costs is comme il faut in the US, see, e.g., a recent blog post by Dan Ackland in On Balance. In Sweden, this is not the case. Three laws govern the requirements for background analyses ahead of regulation in Sweden: National Budget Law, Authority Regulation, and Ordnance on impact assessment in regulation. These stipulate that consideration must be taken of costs to the state budget, and to firms, but not to individual citizens or the society as a whole. As a consequence, if a benefit-cost analysis (BCA) is conducted ahead of environmental, energy, and climate policymaking (a big if), it is often of a very poor quality (Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, 2020; Hammes, Nerhagen, & Fors, 2021).

Benefit-cost analysis, as usually practiced, sums the monetary values of effects on individuals. It can be justified by the potential compensation test: if the total monetary gain to the “winners” (those who gain from a policy) exceeds the total monetary loss to the “losers” (those who are harmed), the “winners” could (in principle) pay compensation to the “losers” so that everyone would judge herself better off with the combined policy and compensation than without. The idea is that by summing the net benefits across individuals, BCA measures “efficiency” or the size of the social pie, and that questions about distribution can be evaluated separately. Logically, policies that expand the social pie permit everyone to have a bigger slice; a smaller pie guarantees that at least some people get a smaller slice. 

Over the course of the past few years, there has been greater attention and scrutiny as to the high cost of America’s “Endless Wars” and over the past few months, alarms have sounded at the estimated price tag of $2.313 trillion in treasure and approximate 243,000 in direct lives lost from the War in Afghanistan (2021, Brown University, Watson Institute Costs of War Project) as well as calls for resignations at the collapse of Kabul. Similarly, the question of what were the benefits, if any at all, and the associated and more philosophical question of “Was it Worth it?” are even more difficult to explain and justify. The answer to these questions will be for each individual and generation to ponder, but it is expected that government leaders and policymakers should fully consider and take into account the benefits and costs prior to the declaration of war – not years and certainly not decades after the fact.

This blog series is a partnership of the Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis On Balance blog and Dr. Zoë Plakias’ Spring 2021 Benefit-Cost Analysis (AEDECON 5330) class at The Ohio State University. Students interviewed experts in benefit-cost analysis to learn about what they do and why they do it. All interviews have been edited for brevity and clarity with the help of Dr. Plakias and are shared with the approval of the interviewer and interviewee.

• Expert: Dr. James Hammitt
• Interviewer: Loryssa Lake

Dr. James Hammitt is a Professor of Economics and Decision Sciences at Harvard University. He is also the director for the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis and has affiliations with the Harvard University Center for the Environment, Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, Harvard Environmental Economics Program, the Harvard China Project, and a joint appointment at the Toulouse School of Economics. 

This blog series is a partnership of the Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis On Balance blog and Dr. Zoë Plakias’ Spring 2021 Benefit-Cost Analysis (AEDECON 5330) class at The Ohio State University. Students interviewed experts in benefit-cost analysis to learn about what they do and why they do it. All interviews have been edited for brevity and clarity with the help of Dr. Plakias and are shared with the approval of the interviewer and interviewee.

• Expert: Dr. Sandra Hoffmann
• Interviewer: Melissa Ferruso

Dr. Sandra Hoffmann is a Senior Economist with the Food Economics Division of the USDA Economic Research Service (ERS). She received her undergraduate education at Iowa State University and went on to earn a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School. She holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California, Berkeley and an M.A. in Agricultural Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  She worked on pesticide regulation as an attorney.  She also served on faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a research fellow at Resources for the Future before joining USDA Economic Research Service. Most of her work with the USDA concentrates on food safety and on valuation of the health benefits related to public policies. I had the wonderful opportunity to meet with Dr. Hoffmann to discuss her work with the USDA, as well as the career and education paths that brought her to where she is today.

Benefit-cost analyses of criminal justice policies, early childhood education, at-risk youth programs, and other interventions that reduce crime have moved beyond the academic arena into applications by both state and federal policy makers (Welsh, Farrington, & Gowar, 2015). Despite this growing interest in benefit-cost analysis, our recent article in the Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis (Miller, Cohen, Swedler, Ali, & Hendrie, 2021), provides the first estimates in 25 years of the numbers and total costs of crime against individuals in the US.