Priceless
On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing
Frank Ackerman & Lisa Heinzerling
The New press

The value of a non-fatal case of chronic bronchitis? $260,000. The value of preserving 60 million acres of national forest? $219,000. The value of a human life? Priceless? Think again—$3.7 million under the current administration. It sounds strange to put a cost on these things, but that is just what the government does before it takes action to protect health, safety, or the environment. In Priceless, Frank Ackerman, an economist at the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts, and Lisa Heinzerling, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, debunk the use of cost-benefit analysis and the misguided logic used to defend it. Here, Ackerman describes what is essentially wrong with placing a monetary value on everything from an IQ point to a human life.

How much would you pay to ensure that your child grows up without mental retardation caused by lead poisoning? How much would you pay to prevent air pollution that could kill your parents? As absurd and offensive as these questions may be, cost-benefit analysis requires precise numerical answers. The great fear among many economists, and particularly those in the Bush administration, is that we might spend too much protecting you and your family from environmental harm. If we knew exactly what your health is worth to you, then we could in theory fine-tune environmental protection to spend just enough, but not too much.

“The fundamental mistake lies in believing that these impossible questions are necessary for good regulation. The first wave of modern environmental regulations, adopted in the 1970s and early 1980s, mandated protection of clean air, clean water, workplace safety, and many other goals—all without benefit of cost-benefit analysis, and all at perfectly affordable costs. We are all healthier and safer today as a result, and we did not bankrupt ourselves in the process.

“Most of the costs in a cost-benefit analysis are incurred by private business—that is, by polluters who are forced to stop polluting. There is no fixed national budget for environmental protection that is allocated on the basis of cost-benefit analysis. If we spend less on one regulation, we do not automatically spend more on another. So there is no need for absurd questions about the monetary value of life and health.”

Galaxies and the Cosmic Frontier
William H. Waller & Paul W. Hodge
harvard university press
For the past 12 billion years, galaxies have governed the universe, bringing form to the firmament, light to the void. Each one a giant system of as many as hundreds of billions of stars, the galaxies are the building blocks of the cosmos, and through new data from modern telescopes—including the Hubble Space Telescope—astronomers are discovering dizzying new facts about how they formed, how they evolve, and what they are made of. William Waller, associate professor of astronomy at Tufts, and Paul Hodge tell us about the lives of galaxies over cosmic time, from their emergence shortly after the hot Big Bang to their ongoing gyrations and transmutations.

Singing in My Soul: Black Gospel Music in a Secular Age
Jerma A. Jackson, G86
university of north carolina press
Black gospel music grew from obscure 19th-century beginnings to become the leading style of sacred music in black American communities after WWII. Jerma A. Jackson, assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, traces the music’s unique history, profiling the careers of many of its leading singers and demonstrating the role women played in popularizing gospel. As gospel music gained public visibility and broad commercial appeal, debates arose over the meaning of the music and its message. Jackson explores how race, faith, and identity became central questions in 20th-century African-American life.