Livermore and Reveszare the authors of Retaking Rationality: How Cost-Benefit Analysis Can Better Protect the Environment and Our Health (Oxford) and the editors of The Globalization of Cost-Benefit Analysis in Environmental Policy (Oxford). Together, they founded the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law, which Revesz now directs.

• Introduction


• Part I. Guardrails


• 1. Politics and Regulation


• 2. A Threatening Synthesis


• 3. Staying in Bounds


• 4. A Retreat from Reason


• Part II. Charade


• 5. The Illusion of Costs without Benefits


• 6. Erasing Public Health Science


• 7. Resurrecting Discredited Models


• 8. Ignoring Indirect Benefits


• 9. Trivializing Climate Change


• 10. Manipulating Transfers


• Part III. Rebuilding


• 11. Future Directions


• 12. Improving the Guardrails

Reviving Rationality explains how Donald Trump destabilized the decades-long bipartisan consensus that federal agencies must base their decisions on evidence, expertise, and analysis. Under the Trump administration, inconvenient evidence has been ignored, experts have been sidelined, and analysis has been used to obscure facts, rather than inform the public. The results have included haphazard and incoherent policy, social division, defeats in court, a demoralized federal workforce, and a loss of faith in government's ability to respond to the pressing problems facing American society. The hard work of rebuilding a rational regulatory system will fall to future administrations.