Why policies should be based on careful consideration of their costs and benefits rather than on intuition, popular opinion, interest groups, and anecdotes. Opinions on government policies vary widely. Some people feel passionately about the child obesity epidemic and support government regulation of sugary drinks. Others argue that people should be able to eat and drink whatever they like. Some people are alarmed about climate change and favor aggressive government intervention. Others don't feel the need for any sort of climate regulation. In The Cost-Benefit Revolution, Cass Sunstein argues our major disagreements really involve facts, not values. It follows that government policy should not be based on public opinion, intuitions, or pressure from interest groups, but on numbers--meaning careful consideration of costs and benefits. Will a policy save one life, or one thousand lives? Will it impose costs on consumers, and if so, will the costs be high or negligible? Will it hurt workers and small businesses, and, if so, precisely how much? As the Obama administration's "regulatory czar," Sunstein knows his subject in both theory and practice. Drawing on behavioral economics and his well-known emphasis on "nudging," he celebrates the cost-benefit revolution in policy making, tracing its defining moments in the Reagan, Clinton, and Obama administrations (and pondering its uncertain future in the Trump administration). He acknowledges that public officials often lack information about costs and benefits, and outlines state-of-the-art techniques for acquiring that information. Policies should make people's lives better. Quantitative cost-benefit analysis, Sunstein argues, is the best available method for making this happen--even if, in the future, new measures of human well-being, also explored in this book, may be better still.

Gradually, in fits and starts, American Government is becoming a cost-benefit state: government regulation is increasingly assessed by asking whether the benefits of regulation justify the costs of regulation. The rise of the cost-benefit state is creating a number of intriguing and novel challenges for policy analysts, for all branches of government, and for the law in general. If a statute allows agencies to balance lives against costs, how will the balancing occur? What are the legal limitations on the agencies' choice of how to balance costs and benefits? How can lives and health be turned into monetary equivalents? What is the value of life? How should an agency handle a small risk of catastrophe, from terrorism, nuclear power, natural causes or some other source? How, if at all, should future generations be counted? What does it mean to say that agencies can exempt trivial risks from regulation? How do we know that a risk counts as 'trivial'? How can it be legitimate for courts to allow agencies to make such exemptions? This book hopes to make some progress on such questions.