Do Lost Statistical Lives Really Count?
The Fresno Bee’s Mark Grossi ran a piece this weekend about local deaths caused by air pollution. It must have left readers shaking their heads; indeed, that seems to have been the point. Here’s the lede:
The more than 800 people who died prematurely this year from breathing dirty San Joaquin Valley air are worth $6.63 million each, economists say. Relatives don't collect a dime, but society is willing to pay someone this price. Confused? You're not alone.
The story goes on to discuss just a few of the absurdities inherent in the process by which regulators put a dollar value on human lives lost – statistical lives, as they coldly refer to them. Grossi notes, for example, that different lives are valued differently – children’s lives are worth less than adults’. By the end of the piece, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that elaborate statistical methodologies are used to develop numbers that add up but still make no sense!
But it’s the premise of the story – that air pollution has caused 800 premature deaths this year in the San Joaquin Valley – that ought to grab our attention. It’s right there in …
The Mercatus Center is out with a new report focused on midnight regulations -- the last-minute regs pushed through by Presidents even as their successor’s inaugural parade reviewing stand is being constructed on the front stoop of the White House. President Bush and his political appointees at regulatory agencies are making considerable use of their midnight hour, working to adopt new regs that would weaken the Endangered Species Act, make it harder for women to get reproductive care, keep truckers behind the wheel for 14 sleep-defying hours a day, make it easier to get a permit to mine uranium on the edge of the Grand Canyon, weaken protections against toxic chemicals in the workplace and so much more. (For a frightening list of the Administration’s last-minute regulating, visit ProPublica’s impressive compilation.) In fairness to the Bush Administration, the Clinton Administration did something very similar. To …
CPR Member Scholar Frank Ackerman has an interesting piece in the November/December issue of Dollars and Sense magazine. He points out that the opponents of genuine action to prevent climate change have shifted their principal line of argument in an important way. Rather than arguing as they did through much of the 1990s and the first part of this decade that climate change isn’t real, or that it’s overstated, or that it’s a natural phenomenon about which we should not be concerned, or that we're all a bunch of extremist environmental wackos for worrying, they’re now arguing that doing much of anything about climate change will do violence to the economy.
Ackerman observes that opponents are making what is essentially a cost-benefit argument against meaningful action, suggesting that, at most, we should take baby steps so as to minimize economic impact …
Much is being made of the outgoing Bush Administration’s “midnight regulations,” and with good reason, too. Many of them roll back crucial protections for public health, safety, and the environment. So far, they include relaxed requirements for building filthy coal plants near national parks and the elimination of a requirement mandating that federal agencies consult with independent scientists prior to taking actions that might impact endangered species.
The fact is, however, that the Bush Administration has been surreptitiously weakening regulations for the last eight years through the backdoor process of regulatory review. And, thanks to a proposed guidance recently released by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the process of regulatory review may be tilted even further in favor of weakening regulations.
The proposed guidance involves a new requirement for how the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) conducts cost-benefit analysis during …
Joining Thomas McGarity in this post are CPR Policy Analysts Margaret Clune Giblin and Matthew Shudtz. This entry is cross-posted on ACSBlog, the blog of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy.
In the wake of the meltdown in the US financial sector, federal regulation has attracted renewed public support as a vehicle for establishing responsible boundaries and correcting market failures. Recent news stories, however, have focused public attention on a flurry of regulations that the Bush Administration has finalized, or has proposed and is working feverishly to finalize, in its last weeks in office. Has the Bush Administration recognized the failure of the deregulatory principles that have guided its nearly eight years in office and, like the public, come to embrace regulation? Apparently not. Instead, the Administration has opted to push through hundreds of new rules, many sharing the common theme of further undercutting health …
This morning, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case that could give a boost to the Bush Administration’s backdoor “tort reform” efforts – an increasingly transparent effort to shield industry from litigation over defective products. The issue in Wyeth v. Levine is whether the Food and Drug Administration’s labeling requirements preempt state tort law.
Here are the facts of the case: Eight years ago, professional guitarist Diana Levine went to a clinic with a migraine and received an injection of Phenargen, an anti-nausea medicine. The drug’s label cautioned that one method for administering the drug – the so-called “Push IV” method of direct injection into a vein – was risky because of the danger that the drug could be injected into an artery instead of a vein. But the label did not instruct doctors not to use the technique. Indeed, the manufacturer …
Halloween—a day on which not everything is as it seems—offers a fitting occasion to ponder the possible effects of globalization on the U.S. regulatory system and its ability to protect Americans.
Globalization is a complex subject, and, like the bandages of a reanimated mummy, its ramifications could probably be unwound indefinitely. Its proponents wax eloquently on the myriad ways that globalization might improve the capacity of U.S. regulators to protect Americans. They observe, for example, that increased interdependence among nations will expedite the transfer of pollution reduction technologies, developments that would undoubtedly redound to the benefit of U.S. citizens. Recent news reports, however, portend the horrors that globalization might inflict on the U.S. regulatory system. Most terrifyingly, these reports suggest how globalization can, like an ambidextrous Freddy Krueger, slice at the U.S. regulatory safety net from multiple directions.
To begin …
