Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and
the Value of Nothing.
By Frank Ackerman & Lisa Heinzerling. New York,
N.Y.: The New Press. 2004.
Review re-printed from the Harvard Law Review,
Volume 117, June 2004, page 2804.
Overwhelming reliance on cost-benefit
analysis in policy judgments sacrifices both our common
sense and the importance of democratic participation,
leaving our health and environmental interests as
individuals and as a nation vulnerable to an unrealistic
and manipulable calculation of one forced standard
unit - the dollar. Such is the claim of Frank Ackerman
and Lisa Heinzerling, who take a hard look at the
trend toward cost-benefit analysis and explain both
its underlying theoretical principles and how pure
theory fails to account for the realities of the market
and of human life. Without discounting the importance
of cost-benefit analysis, the authors argue that benefits
to health and the environment are systematically undervalued
because they often cannot be reduced to dollar values
in a meaningful or realistic way; some things are,
in fact, priceless. Professors Ackerman and Heinzerling
combine sophisticated criticism and a provocative
policy perspective with an accessible style and an
eye for contemporary political issues. The authors'
analysis contributes not only to the debate over cost-benefit
reliance, but also to policy formation at all levels
of government and, ultimately, to how we live our
daily lives. The benefits to be derived from reading
this book are more than worth its $25.95 cover price.
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