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issue 17
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Need Efficiency – and Much More! A
response to Richard Wolff
© Copyright 2002 Grischa Perino
Before I explain why I think the first option is dangerous but the second very important, let me summarise his reasoning. Richard Wolff says that from an “overdeterminist” view of the world, “any one act, event, or institution has an infinity of effects now and into the future” and vice versa that “each of such effects actually had an infinity of causative influences”. He concludes that it is impossible to undertake a complete analysis of all positive and negative effects of any policy. Cost-benefit analyses are therefore by their nature selective. Different social groups struggle against each other to gain the power to define the set of effects (and therefore interests) included in the process of evaluating different policies. The group who wins this fight sets its own definition of efficiency as an absolute measure and imposes a hegemony over the rest of society.
As it is impossible to develop a tool which predicts the ‘true’ effects of any policy on the agenda, it is pointless to claim that a particular tool is inappropriate because it fails to do so. There may be a lot of reasons to criticise the concepts of efficiency and cost-benefit analysis, but being limited in scope and therefore selective isn’t one of them. It is not only pointless but dangerous to use this kind of criticism. As there is no instrument of policy evaluation which satisfies this condition, the call for tools which aren’t selective is equivalent to saying that there should be no policy evaluation at all: but in my opinion there is nothing more dangerous than arbitrariness. It is nevertheless most important to keep in mind that all evaluations of policies are limited and selective, because it follows that no single tool could claim to tell the truth. Each and every analysis ignores some causes and effects and therefore interests. Richard Wolff is right in concluding that the implementation of one single instrument leads to a systematic bias towards particular interests and the exclusion of others. But how can we avoid building a hegemony without falling back to arbitrariness? The solution relies on two features. We need rich and diverse branches of social sciences (among them economics) which offer many different instruments and apply them to evaluate policies. After an open discussion which should aim to reveal the different values behind the analyses, the decision on which policy is chosen should be up to a democratic process. In my opinion there is no better way to take into account both the limits of our ability and the necessity to evaluate policies.
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