Quantitative Analyses Are NEVER Neutral?
Strategy+Business’s article on cost-benefit analysis reveals that any data used for this purpose must be tempered by non-quantitative considerations:
“…no matter how clever the mathematics, certain key inputs in a cost-benefit analysis cannot be translated into economic value. Security and safety, the preservation of wildlife and open spaces, the reduction of fear in a community, and scientific uncertainty in fields that spawn technological innovation are all economic intangibles - and omitting them when they are clearly important factors should invalidate the analysis. But it never does.”
The problem appears to be that cost-benefit analyses have been done in a vacuum that tends to NOT consider assumptions and views of others.
Do you have an example of a cost-benefit analysis that omitted an important factor? Did it invalidate the analysis? Or did the cost-benefit cause a poor decision to be made?
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