Objective or Multi-Objective? Two Historically Competing Visions for Benefit-Cost Analysis
回顾了20世纪中期经济学家在成本收益分析中关于单目标与多目标愿景的争论，揭示了哲学分歧如何影响政策分析的技术细节，以及政治辩论如何掩盖学术讨论。
As they embraced benefit-cost analysis during the mid twentieth century, economists faced several challenges. One challenge was to reconcile two visions for the place of the economist in policy analysis, one limited to providing positive analysis for decision-makers, the other allowing normative judgments. This tension came to a crisis when, in the 1960s, the Water Resources Council introduced multi-objective benefit-cost analysis. The surrounding debate highlights the way philosophical differences can drive the technical details of policy analysis, the way political debates can overshadow academic ones, and the way even social scientists in a narrow subfield can profoundly misunderstand one another. <i></i>