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EliKeeneFirstEssay 5 - 14 Apr 2015 - Main.EbenMoglen
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(1) Figures provided by EPA, OECD (for OECD-European countries), and a 2008 Stanford-Wharton study, respectively. | |
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A note:Our crim law reading for next week is an entire unit on law and economics. As I'm reading it, I couldn't help but come back to this essay. For example, Professor Gary Becker writes:
"[T]he cost of an imprisonment is the discounted sum of the earnings foregone and the value placed on the restrictions in consumption and freedom."
He then goes on to briefly discuss differential incomes and differing sentences before giving us a formula which he claims represents the "total social cost of punishments". Yet nowhere does he question whether his baseline assertion for calculating the cost of imprisonment is correct.
While my essay focused on environmental issues, the more I read and the more I think about it, the more it becomes a problem of law and economics as an entire branch of thought.
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I think the best way to improve the essay is to step back from its structure a bit.
You are using Michigan v. Environmental Protection Agency only as a convenient hook to hang a general argument on. You could save time and space by omitting it, unless it becomes the point of the next draft, rather than an occasion. | | | | |
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< | Comment (Matt Burke):
Below is a link to the story I mentioned in class today. It provides an interesting, if at times tangential, commentary to your paper. | >
> | Your real effort is to argue against cost-benefit analysis in regulatory decision-making, not to discuss whether it should be required at all stages of a regulatory proceeding, which is the "issue" at stake in Michigan v. EPA. Your reasons are well-enough known, don't constitute a surprising set of criticisms, but also don't seem to have taken account of the usual responses. So the next draft should go up that next level, by dealing with the explanations predictably given when the arguments you are raising are raised. Obviously no one supposes that there is "a" value of a human life, whether in quantitative or qualitative terms. But how does abandoning the effort to force entities to internalize the social costs of their behavior by giving up on assigning values to intangible social harms provide us with better policy outcomes? Why is an indeterminate value superior to one assigned for the purpose of requiring entities in society to manage, individually as well as collectively, socially significant risks? | | | | |
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< | http://www.radiolab.org/story/what-dollar-value-nature/ | >
> | How does requiring certain forms of policy analysis to be made by government agencies prevent either agencies or the legislature from supplementing their view with analyses derived by other means and other parties? In a complex mass democracy, one should expect diversities thought-modes to follow from the diversity of participation. This by no means implies that the resources allocated by the public for development of policy internal to government should or could reflect all the thought-modes of participants in the public debate. Showing that cost-benefit analysis is incomplete seems to me only a partial response to the question you claim to be answering. | | | | |
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< | For those looking on, here's the story's lede: | >
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< | "Back in 1997, a team of scientists slapped a giant price tag on the earth. They calculated the dollar value of every ecosystem on the planet, and tallied it all up: 142.7 trillion dollars. It's a powerful form of sticker shock — one that could give environmentalists ammunition to protect wetlands and save forests. But some people argue it actually devalues something that should be seen as priceless. Then the apple farmers of Mao county in central China turn this whole debate upside down and make us question the value of understanding nature in terms of dollars and cents." |
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