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On Wednesday, September 20, 2006,
USDA's Economic Research Service (ERS)
will present its 3rd annual Henry C.
Taylor Lecture—featuring
Dr.
W. Kip Viscusi of Vanderbilt University, an
award-winning author and one of the
world's leading authorities on cost-benefit
analysis. This lecture is free and
registration is not required.
Viscusi's lecture, Pricing
the Priceless, is based
on his working paper, Monetizing
the Benefits of Risk and Environmental
Regulation, where
he responds to those opposing attempts
to monetize the value of environmental
amenities and the value of risks to life
and health. (This paper is available at
the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for
Regulatory Studies web site.) In this
article he explores the history of how
monetization of benefits came to be the
norm for government policy and he
discusses some of the key economic
debates on this issue. He asserts that putting benefit
values in dollar terms ensures that
there will be full recognition of these
benefits in the policy evaluation process,
and also places them on terms comparable
to program costs. He explores sensitive
issues such as the heterogeneity of
the value of statistical life with respect
to income and age. While the use of
a “senior discount” was controversial
and involved too great of a discount,
there is substantial evidence that there
are age variations in the value of statistical
life. He advocates the continued use
of stated preference approaches to valuing
environmental benefits, which is in
contrast to the critiques of stated
preference analyses by those who consider
environmental resources to be priceless
and by those who believe that all non-use
values of environmental benefits are
zero.
This lecture was named for
Henry
C. Taylor, who early in the last
century, pioneered the use of economic
analysis and research in USDA to improve
U.S. agriculture. ERS continues expanding
that mission in today’s fast-changing
environment for food, agriculture and
trade. The annual lecture was established
to pay tribute to the critical public
decision-making role played by economists
for nearly a hundred years.
See
Directions to ERS
Read more about
ERS’ history.
See information on our past speakers:
Jagdish Bhagwati
and
Dr.
Vernon L. Smith.
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