The Rise of Cost–Benefit Rationality as Solution to a Political Problem of Distrust

Cost–benefit analysis in its modern form grew up within mid-twentieth-century public agencies such as the Army Corps of Engineers. It was at first a very practical program of economic quantification, practiced by engineers before it drew in economists, and its history is as much a story of bureaucratic technologies as of applied social science. It has aimed throughout at a kind of public rationality, but in a particular, highly impersonal form. The ideal of standardized rules of calculation is adapted to the constrained political situations which generated the demand for this kind of economic analysis.