In that sense, there is also a democratic argument for cost-benefit balancing. But it clarifies and fortifies the claim that in legislatures, bureaucracies, and courtrooms, as in ordinary life, we often do best to translate social problems into terms that lay bare the underlying variables and make them clear for all to see. Work on the foreign-language effect seems to be about psychology, not politics or law. One of its virtues is that it weakens the likelihood that policymakers will make decisions on the basis of intuitive reactions that seem hard to resist and that cannot survive that reflection. Cost-benefit analysis is essentially a language, one that may defy ordinary intuitions and that must ultimately be evaluated in terms of its fit with what people, after a process of sustained reflection, really value. If a regulation would cost $900 million annually and prevent thirty premature deaths, it is not clear how to present those facts to make them sound a lot different - and if someone tries, public officials will probably see right through their efforts. True, people can frame costs and benefits in certain ways to try to make one or another outcome seem better, but doing that is not exactly easy.
It forces officials to speak in a language that people do not ordinarily use and that they even find uncongenial - but insofar as it helps correct biases, it is all the better for that.
Whatever the problem, cost-benefit analysis should also reduce and perhaps even eliminate the power of behavioral biases and heuristics (such as availability) - both of which strengthen or weaken the public demand for regulation. Cost-benefit analysis would seem to require that risk to be eliminated, even if the public is not clamoring for it. But suppose the risk could be eliminated at a relatively low cost and that it would save at least five hundred lives annually. Or suppose that a 1 in 50,000 lifetime risk of, say, getting cancer in the workplace, faced by millions of workers, is not much on the government’s viewscreen because it seems to be a mere part of the social background, a fact of life. The language of cost-benefit analysis imposes a firm brake on an evidently unjustified initiative. Imagine too that the benefits of any such response would be relatively low, because the incident is highly unlikely to be repeated, and that the costs of the response would be high. Imagine, for example, that because of some recent event - a railroad accident, an outbreak of food-borne illness - both ordinary citizens and public officials are quite alarmed, and they strongly favor an aggressive (and immediate) regulatory response.
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