Special Lecture: Beyond Cost-Benefit Analysis

Cost-benefit analysis has become the dominant methodology for assessing governmental policy. It has given rise to a vast academic literature, and is now officially required as part of the policymaking process in a number of governments. But cost-benefit analysis is flawed. It lacks firm normative foundations and is biased toward the rich. In this talk, I describe and defend a better approach: the social welfare function.

Speaker: Professor Matthew Adler, Duke University
Matthew D. Adler is the Richard A. Horvitz Professor of Law and Professor of Economics, Philosophy and Public Policy at Duke University, and is the founding director of the Duke Center for Law, Economics and Public Policy. His scholarship is interdisciplinary, drawing from both welfare economics and normative ethics. Adler’s current research agenda focuses on “prioritarianism”—a refinement to utilitarianism that gives extra weight (“priority”) to the worse off. He writes about the theoretical foundations of prioritarianism; its implementation as a policy analysis methodology, in the form of a “social welfare function” or cost-benefit analysis with distributional weights; and its application to a variety of policy domains, including climate change, risk regulation, and health policy.