BOOK REVIEWS

Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing
by Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling

Reviewed by Neva Goodwin, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Global Development and Environment Institute, Tufts University

This book is going to be enormously valuable for the environmental community. Many contemporary attacks on environmental progress depend on the use of cost-benefit analysis, more often than not based on bad economics and law, along with flawed assumptions and just plain wrong facts. Does it sound absurd to you to try to determine the dollar value of human lives, the environment, or conservation? Tracing the sources for commonly cited numbers that are claimed to represent the cost of a particular illness, or the value of the life of a child or an adult, this book shows the logical as well as moral absurdity of such efforts.

The first comprehensive rebuttal of the Bush administration’s market-based assault on legal protections for human health, the environment, and natural resources, Priceless gives concrete (and often horrifying) examples of the danger of allowing an artificial bottom line to distinguish right from wrong in public policy. It shows how to recognize badly flawed cost-benefit analysis, and describes a variety of critical situations where this approach is simply inappropriate. It is highly readable, and will be a tremendous aid in defending against anti-environmental pseudo-science.

About the authors: Frank Ackerman is an economist at Tufts University's Global Development And Environment Institute (GDAE); Lisa Heinzerling is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center. (In the interests of full disclosure, I would add that I am a colleague of Ackerman's at GDAE. For a similarly enthusiastic review by someone who does not know the authors, see the Publisher's Weekly review, posted on the book's page on amazon.com.)