Retrospectives: Cost-Benefit Analysis and the Classical Creed
回顾了成本效益分析作为经济学主导方法的历史，探讨其在公共项目评估中的应用、争议及政治影响，适合关注经济政策与公共投资决策的读者。
Cost-benefit analysis provides the dominant economic approach with whicheconomists talk to each other, to government bureaucrats and to the general laityabout the desirability of public programs and investment projects. Cost-benefitstudies have pushed economic thinking into public debates and, reciprocally, havebrought an uncommon level of public scrutiny to the technical deliberations ofeconomists.Precisely because cost-benefit analysis addresses serious real-world decisions,this widely used and frequently abused tool of applied economics has had a bumpyhistory. Last year, newspaper headlines across the country announced that aPentagon investigation had found systematic manipulation of net benefit estimatesat the Army Corps of Engineers (for example, Grunwald, 2000). The Corps hasbeen the political godfather of cost-benefit analysis in the United States, but ithas also long been suspected of an institutional bias in favor of projects that canadd significantly to its own budget allocations. Reflecting on the early record of