Indur Goklany's review of Cass Sunstein's Risk and Reason recently appeared in Politics and the Life Sciences. Goklany broadly endorses Sunstein's diagnosis of the regulatory state, and generally shares his view that cost-benefit analysis (CBA), despite its reliance on technocratic expertise, far from being undemocratic is, in fact, critical to developing better [and more reliable] information, without which, in Sunstein's words, "neither deliberation nor democracy is possible."

Goklany, however, takes a much more skeptical view of the achievements of 1970s evironmentalism than does Sunstein. He notes:

One cannot, however, embrace Sunstein's evaluation of 1970s environmentalism... with equal enthusiasm. Clearly it has significantly improved America's quality of life, but progress toward solving its worst environmental health problems was well underway before 1970. Between 1900 and 1970 the death rate due to various water-related diseases (typhoid and paratyphoid, various gastro-intestinal diseases, and dysentery) dropped from 1,860 to below 10 (per million), an improvement of 99.5 percent. The Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act, however, date to 1972 and 1974. Similarly, substantial air quality improvements preceded the 1970 Clean Air Act (CAA) for those pollutants and areas where they were of greatest concern. In many cases air quality improved faster before, than after, 1970, something glossed over in EPA's retrospective analysis of the CAA, and Sunstein's review of that study.

Moreover, the 1972 DDT ban, one of 1970s environmentalism's signal achievements, reduced global DDT production, and stigmatized its use. The subsequent reluctance of international aid agencies to fund its use contributed to malaria's resurgence in developing countries, with especially tragic consequences for Sub-Saharan Africa whose malarial death rate, which had dropped from 1,840 to 1,070 (per million) between 1950 and 1970, rebounded to 1,650 in 1997, corresponding to an increase in absolute deaths from 300,000 in 1970 to a million in 1997. This increase in malaria, and its effects on human productivity, is one reason why Sub-Saharan Africa is one of world's few regions where life expectancy declined, and poverty and hunger increased, over the past decades.

The review also raises fundamental questions regarding the "standard" levels of protection against cancer causing risks that are used in risk analysis:

The reader would surely have benefited had Sunstein applied the same intellectual rigor and clarity of thought that permeate this book to some fundamental questions raised by his diagnosis of the current regulatory state. For instance, what is the significance of protecting against a lifetime increase in cancer of 1-in-1,000 or 1-in-1,000,000 (as agencies attempt to do) when the lifetime risk of dying from (as opposed to contracting) cancer in the U.S. is currently 1-in-4.5, and the lifetime risk of dying is 1-in-1 (p. 135)? Moreover, regardless of what value is assigned to a life, is it justifiable for society (as opposed to private parties) to assign in a CBA, say, $6 million to "save" a life if more lives could be "saved" at the same cost via other means?

Goklany also raises the question as to how -- or whether -- success or failure of risk regulation can be meaningfully measured:

Sunstein's scheme for reforming the regulatory state also doesn't address how, or even whether, success or failure of risk regulation can be measured post facto. Without such measurements accountability and mid-course corrections are virtually impossible.

Goklany explains that:

Nowadays pollutant concentrations, while measurable, are often below levels at which adverse health effects can be confidently identified and quantified. Thus regulatory agencies attempt to prove success (or failure) by measuring not health improvements but declines in pollutant levels (e.g., in the environment, blood or body). But the two are not identical; using the latter can seriously mislead. Consider, for instance, that asthma is one of the publicly offered rationales for controlling various air pollutants. Yet for much of the 1980s and 1990s air quality improved but mortality rates for asthma worsened (age-adjusted for the total population, and children under 15). Notwithstanding the divergence in these empirical trends, asthma still is part of the rhetoric (and rationale) advanced to control those pollutants.

Finally, while acknowledging that Sunstein has some compelling arguments for a "cost-benefit state", he notes that

... it is unlikely to prevail soon. Interest groups that have honed their ability to influence public policy through appeals to emotion and mastery of existing narrowly-conceived, emotion-driven, single purpose laws (rather than through dispassionate CBA) will not necessarily cooperate in overhauling the current system if that means ceding their comparative advantages in the public policy arena. Not surprisingly, regulatory reform efforts have largely been stalemated in Washington over the past decade. But if the regulatory reform stalemate is ever broken, Sunstein's outstanding treatise lights the way forward.

The full review is available here.