Divide, add, subtract and rule

Ah, the cost-benefit analysis. Great for deciding where to go on holiday. Great for deciding what to cook tonight. Not so great for politics, justice, and democracy. Political decisions must not be left up to the flawed methodology that consists of weighing up quantified costs and benefits. A vision is what we need. Since 1979, most of us in this country decided that holidays, food, and politics are one and the same. And the result has been the unleashing of the free market and the atomisation of individuals and their private interests.

You can’t just turn society’s problems into an endless Excel document with two columns

The principle-less assume that everything can enter a cost-benefit analysis. Yet politics involves things that cannot be quantified. They’re self-proclaimed modernisers of politics, shunning the old left and right for a “third way”. But really they let their prejudices slip in through the back door, because any political trade-off requires ideas of value. I cannot decide between saving public libraries or making tax cuts unless I decide on the value of education versus that of economic liberalism. And I’d rather develop and defend a theory of what is valuable – principles – than let half-formed, incoherent prejudices influence my politics. The principle-less like to present themselves as reasonable, down-to-earth individuals. ‘I have just one principle: maximising good outcomes’. Really Well the problem is, my idea of good outcomes could be very different to yours.

You can’t just turn society’s problems into an endless Excel document with two columns. You have to ask: Whose costs? Whose benefits? Why is there a clash of interests? There are ideas about how we can live well together that transcend cost-benefit analyses. Benevolent slave-keepers could increase our well-being. But we don’t allow that because of core beliefs about living one’s own life. Cost-benefit analyses force you to find a common unit of benefit.

The principle-less like to present themselves as reasonable, down-to-earth individuals.

It’s normally money. So we have to reduce everything – the value of education, life, the environment – to a single, exact, neat, quantified amount of money. This reflects these people’s materialism, this idea that nothing matters but the material prosperity of the country. Forget social cohesion and fairness. Forget the non-material atmosphere in which you live. Even if you agree with the materialists, the cost-benefit analysis breaks down when you ask who is included in it or whether we should take account of pre-existing inequalities. Some people must lose out in politics.

We must decide who draws the short straw using consistent values, principles, and morals, not, my friends, one dollar sign against another. It’s down to our generation to reverse this political trend, and breathe humanity back into politics. Let’s start on campus.

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Header image courtesy of flickr.com/@Doug88888