Valuing Life: Humanizing the Regulatory State

Harvard professor Sunstein (coauthor of Nudge), who served as Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) from 2009 to 2012, argues that government must always consider the impact of proposed regulation on human life. Sunstein describes how the OIRA actually works, explains the role of break-even analyses in government regulation, and explores how the government might account for risk to nonquantifiable goods, such as privacy. Both insufficient and excessive regulation can be harmful, and Sunstein notes that regulators need to consider probability neglect—that is, regulators need to realize that people’s fear of unknowns, such as terrorism or environmental degradation, may have little to do with the likelihood that the feared event will occur. When dealing with probability neglect, the government must balance attention to public fears with caution about unnecessary regulation demanded by fearful people. Readers will have to plod through some statistics and technical terms, but overall this is a lucid book that sheds light on how the government reasons, and how it ought to reason, about the regulations that shape our everyday lives. [em](Oct.) [/em]