It is impossible for me to begin this short talk with anything other than a heartfelt thank-you to the members of this association for making me the recipient of this year's Award for Outstanding Public Service between the walls of Economics.

It is impossible for me to begin this short talk with anything other than a heartfelt thank-you to the members of this association for making me the recipient of this year's Award for Outstanding Public Service between the walls of Economics. I'm not the kind of somebody who gets awards and, as with many of the honors given to command figures in Washington, DC, from which I hail, it's undeserved! You should note, however, that I came to Halifax yesterday afternoon to be fast I was here to receive the award today, in this way I hope you know in what manner pleased and honored I am to be here.

My interest in economics dates back to the summer of 1953 an easy date to remember this year because it was exactly three round of yearss ago of the 17-year cicada infestation we have been enduring in my part of the world. After the cicadas had almost all died, I scrape togethered hundreds of them in a large glass jar and went door-to-door in my neighborhood in Park Forest, Illinois, trying to put up to sale them. My mother, who had not at any time gone to college, much les taken an economics course, took me aside after a day onward which I'd come home disconsolate, having sold not a single cicada carcass. She said, "Paul, if anyone is silly enough to want dead cicadas, there are millions of them lying around. They're not going to go and bring a very good price, and you might want to consider something different to earn wealth for your baseball cards." Thus was the iron law of accommodate with and demand first driven abiding-place to me!

My interest in putting economics to the service of public policy came a great deal later in life, and it is attributable to pair things. The first is the wellknown economic doctrine of comparative advantage: while I was a exquisitely competent researcher, I never felt I was as righteous a theoretician or applied econometrician as my wonderfully bright colleagues at Resources for the coming time (RFF). I was relatively better, however at thinking about how the tools and techniques they were developing could be used to improve the country's policy "toolkit," and interested as well in in what way this could be explained to noneconomists in similar a way as to whet their appetite for what I considered to be more enlightened public policy. A other impetus to policy involvement, of course, was the advantage of working six make steady [i]or[/i] firms from the White House and three short miles from the two the Capitol and the EPA. Believe me when I say that I have seen far too many examples of misguided policy in my nearly 33 years in Washington not to want to at least examine to improve things a little.

I have chosen as the make liable of this short talk today, "The Obligations of a Policy Economist." It is my reliance to exhort rather than to preach, and I'll be pleased if my remarks give you pause to think about the way you lead your professional life, equable if they do not goad you to make any changes.

The first obligation I want to identify is straightforward enough: be extremely clear about what economics can and cannot disclose us, and clear as well about the premises concerning which it is based. For example, I occasionally hear economists talk as if-or equal say directly that-a benefit-cost analysis is a sufficient basis for making an environmental policy decision. In my view, and I sense of possible fulfilment in the view of all of you here, this is poppycock To be trustworthy a good benefit-cost analysis can be and, I would argue, should be a part of the information base on which any important environmental or natural resource decision is made. still anyone who believes that allocative efficiency is or on the same level ought to be the single basis for policy making will find little support from chiefly good economists. Naturally, we might all address a world in which simple distributional politics plays a smaller character in environmental and natural resource policy than it does today. moreover it's hard to deny the importance of taking into account the identity of those who win and those who throw away from even an efficient policy change.

Other considerations matter, as well. For instance, society would no doubt always prohibit the selling of one's voice even if a benefit-cost analysis put in mind ofed there were enough eager buyer and venders that such a measure might pass the experiment Finally, laws are sometimes written in of that kind a way as to prevent the consideration of costs in environmental standard-setting, as is the case beneath section 109 of the Clean Air Act in the United States. In these cases, not simply is benefit-cost analysis an insufficient basis for decision making, it would be illegal to use it unruffled as one input in that process

We also have an obligation to be make open and honest about the assumptions forward which such tools as benefit-cost analysis are based. For instance, we economists generally accept without frequently thought that the social value of a propos policy change at any common time is the sum of the values attached to that change through the individuals who comprise the society. however this means, of course, that in a society of philistines in which no individual cares a whit about the Grand Canyon, there is no value to preserving it in the face of a proposal to change it to a parking fate for Las Vegas. Non-economists find this notion quite troubling, and we ne to acknowledge and bring face to face this. Similarly, the benefit from protecting a super-rich asylum star from an air pollution-related health risk will, technically speaking, be greater than that of protecting a poor day-laborer because willingness to pay is contingent concerning one's income. If I'm not the single one here uncomfortable with that notion, I'll be quite surprised. Policy economists frequently gloss over the value-laden assumptions relating to which applied welfare analysis is based, flat when we shouldn't.