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Cost-Benefit Analysis, Statistical Decision Theory, and Environmental Policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Mancur Olson
Mancur Olson*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland
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Extract

Even a distant glance reveals that in philosophy (as in my own field of economics) it is sometimes best to develop arguments at a very general and abstract level. There are no doubt a great many propositions in logic, epistemology, and the theory of probability, for example, which are relevant to many diverse activities and aspects of reality. If we did not abstract from the peculiarities of particular cases we presumably could not so readily illuminate certain logical or conceptual problems nor so tersely express our findings. This is unquestionably true in economics: there are many important propositions in microeconomic theory, for example, that apply about as well to one industry or society as to another, and both the development and teaching of the theory would be slowed down if highly abstract arguments were to be ruled out.

Type
Part VII. Recent Developments in Rational Decision Theory
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1976 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1976 , 1976 , pp. 372 - 394
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

The author thanks the National Science Foundation and Resources for the Future for support of his research.

This paper is a slightly modified version of a paper that was also presented at the 1975 Annual North American meetings of the Society for General Systems Research. Though the Proceedings of that meeting are evidently not available even in most research-oriented libraries, they have been reproduced or published by the Society under-the title, “Systems Thinking and the Quality of Life” (Washington, D.C.: 1975). The author hopes there will ultimately be time for him to develop some of the lines of inquiry suggested in this paper. He is especially thankful to Fred Suppe for his help and encouragement about this paper and his suggestion that it might be brought to the attention of philosophers of science.

References

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