Risks, Costs, and Lives Saved: Getting Better Results from Regulation - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 019521174X ISBN 13: 9780195211740

Publisher: Hodder Education Publishers, 1996

Synopsis

The debate over environmental, health, and safety regulation has reached a new crescendo in the 104th Congress. So impassioned is the debate on occasion, and so high the feelings, that even the tools of regulatory analysis have become part of the combat.
To some, the term cost-benefit analysis, for example, is virtually a swearword, a nefarious tool used by big business to undermine regulations aimed at benefiting the people at large. To others, it is the mechanism for achieving more effective regulation at less cost.
This new book on the subject of reforming regulation is aimed at increasing the light and turning down the heat. It consists of an introduction and nine chapters written by scientists, public policy analysts, and economists on various aspects of regulation and regulatory analysis.
The book advances the latest knowledge and evidence on risk analysis, cost-benefit analysis, and related techniques for improving regulation--all based on experience and data accumulated over the quarter century since regulation in the areas of environment, health, and safety became a major player on the governmental stage. The strengths and limitations of those analytical tools are an important part of the portrait that is painted, but a common thesis is that, properly used, the tools can be helpful in getting better regulatory results.

About this title

About the Author:

Robert W. Hahn is a resident scholar of the American Enterprise Institute and an adjunct professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University.

Review:

"This insightful book makes it clear why regulatory reform needs to be at the top of our agenda."--Bob Dole

"The best collection of contrarian essays available on environmental, safety, and health regulation."--Paul R. Portney, President, Resources for the Future

"The quest to eradicate risk may be one of the most dangerous risks in America today. Robert Hahns Risks, Costs, and Lives Saved brings together some of the most thoughtful observers of this phenomenon and provides a foundation from which America can begin to find its balance again."--Philip K. Howard, Author, The Death of Common Sense

"Robert Hahn, one of the most insightful authorities on risk assessment and cost benefit analysis, has distilled his thinking in a book that is both timely and important. Hahn and his co-authors answer the critics who consider risk and cost unfeeling and immoral as instruments for determining regulatory priorities. Risks, Costs, and Lives Saved also provides sophisticated guidance to the more exuberant congressional proponents of cost-benefit analysis whose uncritical and undiscriminating deference to risk and cost threaten to discredit these analytical techniques by asking them to bear too much."--William K. Reilly, Former Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency

"Robert Hahn has assembled an illuminating collection of papers on the most mismanaged area of regulation. No one can read this book without realizing that more lives can be saved as well as billions of dollars with appropriate reform."--Roger G. Noll, Morris M. Doyle Professor of Public Policy, Stanford University, and Visiting Fellow, Brookings Institution

About this edition

• Publisher: Hodder Education Publishers
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 019521174X
• ISBN 13: 9780195211740
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Hahn Robert W.