That approach earned Sunstein considerable scorn from some progressives, who thought the process wound up junking or delaying invaluable life-saving regulations. More broadly, Sunstein’s philosophy represents a commitment to technocracy that a growing number of liberals and leftists are increasingly rejecting as politically naive at best, and suicidal at worst given the realities of asymmetric polarization and Republican interest in minority rule. Why strand your own policies in a procedural quagmire of your own making when the other side just does what it wants when its party is in power?[...]
I think some people on the left think we underestimate the benefits of regulation and overestimate the costs, so cost-benefit analysis is inadequate or it needs to be accompanied by a discounting of the costs we see or a boosting of the benefits we see. The data on the past 30 years doesn’t justify that broad conclusion. Such data as we have suggests that agencies do err — sometimes in understating and overstating both costs and benefits — without a systematic skew toward benefits understatement.[...]
My observation from afar says that the Trump administration in some ways has been admirably committed to cost-benefit analysis, which is why the assault on the administrative estate has been less severe than widely reported.[...]
The book is not an unambivalent celebration of the revolution. We’ve referred to distributional factors, which matter, and the knowledge factor, which matters. Cost-benefit analysis is the best way of capturing human welfare right now. But we’re increasingly learning that something might have increasingly high costs and not as high benefits, but it might make people’s lives better regardless. Something Trump just endorsed, which is a tribute to this, is mandatory cameras in cars so you can see behind you. That saves lives, and driving is a lot easier. You can see if you’re about to hit something.
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