Risk and Reason: Safety, Law, and the Environment

ISBN-13: 9780521016254 / Angielski / Miękka / 2004 / 342 str.

Cass R. Sunstein

Opis

What should be done about airplane safety and terrorism, global warming, polluted water, nuclear power, and genetically engineered food? Decision-makers often respond to temporary fears, and the result is a situation of hysteria and neglect--and unnecessary illness and death. Risk and Reason explains the sources of these problems and explores what can be done about them. It shows how individual thinking and social interactions lead us in foolish directions. Offering sound proposals for social reform, it explains how a more sensible system of risk regulation, embodied in the idea of a "cost-benefit state," could save many thousands of lives and many billions of dollars too--and protect the environment in the process. Cass R. Sunstein is the Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. Appointed by President Clinton to serve on the Advisory Committee on the Public Interest Obligations of Television Broadcasters. His many books include Republic.com (Princeton, 2001) and Designing Democracy (Oxford, 2001). He has worked in the United States Department of Justice and advised on law reform and constitution-making in many nations.

Recenzje

'Sunstein offers a sophisticated argument as to how we should reason about risk through cost-benefit analysis, and how this reasoning can improve risk regulation. This book is worth reading, both because of its comprehensive scholarship and because it exemplifies a particular approach to law and economics.' Journal of Law and Society

Spis treści

1. Beyond 1970s environmentalism; 2. Thinking about risks; 3. Are the experts wrong?; 4. This month's risk (with Timur Kuran); 5. Reducing risks rationally; 6. Health-health tradeoffs; 7. The arithmetic of arsenic; 8. Of courts and law: cost-benefit default principles; 9. Cleaning the air; 10. Tools.