Cost Benefit Quotes & Sayings

The point of this example is that policy debates are not matters of rational discussion on the basis of literal and objective categories. The categories that shape the debate are moral categories; those categories are defined in terms of different family-based conceptions of morality, which give priority to different metaphors for morality. The debate is not a matter of objective, means-end rationality or cost-benefit analysis or effective public policy. It is not just a debate about the particular issue, namely, college loans. The debate is about the right form of morality, and that in turn comes down to the question of the right model of the family. — George Lakoff

Washington is a place where men praise courage and act on elaborate personal cost-benefit calculations. — John Kenneth Galbraith

They looked like two apes pounding their chest and asking for a banana. The thing about me - I was not so willing to give just anyone my fucking banana. Every benefit should outweigh the cost. — Krista Ritchie

This needs to work on that level, but it has the additional strain of it's going to be profoundly scrutinized by political junkies from the right and the left who will pick apart every little thing. We are inherently dramatizing Hillary Rodham, or Hillary Clinton, who's a very famous figure. There's a lot of biographies about her, but there's also elements that are private moments, that are dramatized with an arc, and we have to take creative license. Everything is sort of a cost-benefit. — James Ponsoldt

Unlike you, who must do a cost-benefit analysis of every human interaction," he said, "I have no idea what I hope to accomplish. I only know that I must try to see her. That's what love is about, Roger. It's when a woman drives all lucid thought from your head; when you are unable to contrive romantic stratagems, and the usual manipulations fail you; when all your carefully laid plans have no meaning and all you can do is stand mute in her presence. You hope she takes pity on you and drops a few words of kindness into the vacuum of your mind. — Helen Simonson

Most people blindly accept the fact that gaining money is essential for survival, without questioning its nature. The truth is, our current monetary system is the reason that humanity is in such a devastating state, the reason that the world is so full of corruption. Our monetary system has been limiting the potential of human beings for centuries.
Inventions that benefit humanity are hidden or destroyed because they are not profitable, or because they interfere with the business of corporations. The supreme goal of modern man is to obtain wealth, because he believes that material things will bring him happiness. He invests the majority of his time and energy into gaining money at any cost. The accumulation of wealth has contributed to man's greed and selfishness. Earning money is more important to him than being a good person, benefiting humanity, and even life itself. — Joseph P. Kauffman

It's easy K. on one side of the page you got your costs and on the other side your benefits. All you do is mark which one is which, then you weigh one side against the other and you get your decision just like that. that's all you ever have to do. i live by this."
"But what if you don't know the difference between a benefit and a cost? what if you've never been very good at telling a plus from a minus? — Andre Dubus III

The Internet is the first technology since the printing press which could lower the cost of a great education and, in doing so, make that cost-benefit analysis much easier for most students. It could allow American schools to service twice as many students as they do now, and in ways that are both effective and cost-effective. — John Katzman

On my view there is no net benefit to coming into existence and thus coming into existence is never worth its costs. — David Benatar

If an action must be taken that will benefit the majority at the cost of the minority, is it morally indefensible?
If an action taken for the benefit of a majority occurs at the expense of a minority, is it moral action? — Garth Nix

It is not that uncommon for the cost of an abstraction to outweigh the benefit it delivers. Kill one today! — John Carmack

What really happens is that the gene pool becomes filled with genes that influence bodies in such a way that they behave 'as if' they made complex, if unconscious, cost/benefit calculations — Richard Dawkins

I can't go on flying apart just for those who want the benefit of a few verbal kicks. My God, do you know what poems like that cost? They're not written vicariously: they come out of actual suffering, real madness. — Theodore Roethke

The true principle of taxation is the benefit principle - those who benefit from a government service should pay for it. It's also known as the 'user pay' principle. Every effort should be made to link the payment of taxes or fees to the cost associated with the government service. — Mark Skousen

Every relationship is a cost benefit calculation; either it is material or spiritual. — M.F. Moonzajer

1. Price your product or service in relation to the benefit it provides, not the cost of producing it. 2. Offer customers a limited range of prices. 3. Get paid more than once for the same thing. — Anonymous

The reduction in a number of pregnancies is - compensates for the cost of contraception ... Providing contraception as a critical preventive health benefit for women and for their children reduces health care. — Kathleen Sebelius

Treatment is not now available for almost half of those who would benefit from it. Yet we are willing to build more and more jails in which to isolate drug users even though at one-seventh the cost of building and maintaining jail space and pursuing, detaining, and prosecuting the drug user, we could subsidize commensurately effective medical care and psychological treatment. — William F. Buckley Jr.

The cost in terms of liberties lost and the unnecessary exposure to terrorism are difficult to determine, but in time it will become apparent to all of us that foreign interventionism is of no benefit to American citizens, but is instead a threat to our liberties. — Ron Paul

The bottom line in 2007 is that enrollment costs are going up substantially, drug coverage is declining and the brand name coverage in the doughnut hole is being eliminated ... Medicare D is an insurance program, not a benefit. As consumption increases, so too will cost. The changes in 2007 clearly demonstrate the limitations of the program. — David J. C. MacKay

Until we are willing to oppose all abortion
ALL ABORTION
then the Christian community will lack the true ethical high ground to oppose ANY ABORTIONS.
The minute we concede that there is any ground
even in the so-called case of rape, incest or the health of the mother
to make a decision to self-consciously and deliberately kill a child based on our puny, finite understanding of the facts, and a a cost-benefit analysis based on our pragmatic post-modern vision of utlilitarian ethics, we have conceded everything. We have abandoned biblical law and granted to Planned Parenthood the legitimacy of the core argument they have advanced since Margaret Sanger founded the organization
namely, that some circumstances of pregnancy are sufficiently uncomfortable or troubling that man has the right to play God and declare his own authority to take the life of an innocent, unborn baby. — Douglas W. Phillips

Lewis famously advocated a metaphysical methodology based on subjecting rival hypotheses to a cost-benefit analysis. Usually there are two kinds of cost associated with accepting a metaphysical thesis. The first is accepting some kind of entity into one's ontology, for example, abstracta, possibilia, or a relation of primitive resemblance. The second is relinquishing some intuitions, for example, the intuition that causes antedate their effects, that dispositions reduce to categorical bases, or that facts about identity over time supervene on facts about instants of time. It is taken for granted that abandoning intuitions should be regarded as a cost rather than a benefit. — James Ladyman

There are certain pressures and things that change your life to a degree that, in the cost benefit analysis that constantly goes on, sometimes makes you think, 'Maybe I should just leave.' — David Schwimmer

The free market is 'socialism' for the rich: the public pays the costs and the rich get the benefit - markets for the poor and plenty of state protection for the rich. — Noam Chomsky

Is ours a government of the people, by the people, for the people, or a kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools? — Thomas Love Peacock

If his capacity for labour remains unsold, the labourer derives no benefit from it, but rather he will feel it to be a cruel nature-imposed necessity that this capacity has cost for its production a definite amount of the means of subsistence and that it will continue to do so for its reproduction. He will then agree with Sismondi: that capacity for labour ... is nothing unless it is sold. — Karl Marx

One effect of benefit-cost analysis is to give any respectable engineer or economist a means for justifying almost any kind of project the national government wants to justify ... Exclusive reliance on benefit-cost analysis has been one of the greatest threats to wise decisions in water development. — Gilbert F. White

One particularly poor argument in defence of eating meat is that if humans did not eat animals, those animals would not have been brought into existence in the first place. Humans would simply not have bred them in the numbers they do breed them. The claim is that although these animals are killed, this cost to them is outweighed by the benefit to them of having been brought into existence. This is an appalling argument for many reasons. First, the lives of many of these animals are so bad that even if one rejected my argument one would still have to think that they were harmed by being brought into existence. Secondly, those who advance this argument fail to see that it could apply as readily to human babies that are produced only to be eaten. Here we see quite clearly that being brought into existence only to be killed for food is no benefit. It is only because killing animals is thought to be acceptable that the argument is thought to have any force. — David Benatar

[The Freedom of Information Act is] the Taj Mahal of the Doctrine of Unanticipated Consequences, the Sistine Chapel of Cost-Benefit Analysis Ignored. — Antonin Scalia

Nine holes of golf will take you one-and-a-half, two hours. I run in 20 minutes, I feel better off. So the cost benefit made me drop golf. — Lee Kuan Yew

Little changes cost you. Big changes benefit you by changing the game, but only if you go first. — Seth Godin

The key thing, the one thing that almost every current and former federal prosecutor who lived through this period talks about, is that in the early years of the Obama administration, a huge premium was placed on not losing. Breuer and Holder acted like the corporate stewards they were and gravitated toward a bottom-line strategy of prosecution. They became attracted to a cost-benefit-analysis vision of law enforcement, where the key questions weren't Who did what? and What the hell should we do about it? but Will we win? and How badly will the press screw us if we lose? — Matt Taibbi

Persuading through Simplifying - Using computing technology to reduce complex behavior to simple tasks increases the benefit/cost ratio of the behavior and influences users to perform the behavior. — B. J. Fogg

He's a politician, Tomas; he looks at every situation as to how it will benefit himself, and cares little of the cost to others." "You — Jan Stryvant

Julianne, if one were doing a cost-benefit analysis, I would be a high-cost, high-risk, low-benefit venture. — Sylvain Reynard

It costs a lot of money to go into cafes to breastfeed when out in public. Not everyone has the money to do that. Yet, at the same time, it is often people with the least money and accompanying health inequalities that are most likely to benefit from breastfeeding — Jill Johnston

But everything is a cost-benefit analysis, isn't it? 'Do I want this badly enough to pay the price? — Kit Rocha

It seems to me morally a decent society will try to take some of the increased benefit and use that to alleviate the pain of the few who are bearing the cost that made it possible. — Tim Bishop

Emotion is not a defect in an otherwise perfect reasoning machine. Reason, unfettered from human feeling, has led to as many horrors as any crusader's zeal. What use is pity in a world devoted to maximizing efficiency and productivity? Scientific husbandry tells us to weed out the sick, the infirm, the weak. The ruthless efficiency of euthanasia initiatives and ethnic cleansing are but the programmatic application of Nietzsche's point: from any quantifiable cost-benefit analysis, the principles of animal husbandry should apply to the human race. Charles Darwin himself acknowledged that strict obedience to "hard reason" rather than sympathy for fellow humans would represent a sacrifice of "the noblest part of our nature."6 It is the human heart resonating with empathy, not the logical brain attuned to the mathematics of efficiency, that revolts at cruelty and inhumanity. In — Terryl L. Givens

Nature is an expert in cost-benefit analysis,' she says. 'Although she does her accounting a little differently. As for debts, she always collects in the long run ... — Margaret Atwood

According to Becker's logic, if we're short on cash and happen to drive by a convenience store, we quickly estimate how much money is in the register, consider the likelihood that we might get caught, and imagine what punishment might be in store for us if we are caught (obviously deducting possible time off for good behavior). On the basis of this cost-benefit calculation, we then decide whether it is worth it to rob the place or not. The essence of Becker's theory is that decisions about honesty, like most other decisions, are based on a cost-benefit analysis. — Dan Ariely

At the end of World War II, we had wage and price controls. Under wartime inflationary conditions, many employers found it difficult to recruit employees. To get around the limitations of wage control, many began to offer health care as a fringe benefit to attract workers. As a new benefit, it took some years for the Internal Revenue Service to get around to requiring the cost of the medical care to be included in the reported taxable income of the employees. By the time it did, workers had come to regard nontaxable medical care provided by the employer as a right - or should I say entitlement? They raised such a big political fuss that Congress legislated nontaxable status for employer-provided medical care. — Milton Friedman

Modern medicine has presented us with a Faustian bargain: Our aging bodies can bankrupt our children and grandchildren. We have run into the 'law of diminishing returns' in health care, where we are often doing more and more, with higher and higher technology, at more and more cost, for less and less benefit. — Richard Lamm

That is, while we believe that cost-benefit analysis is an important tool to inform agency decision making, the results of the cost-benefit analysis do not trump existing law. — Fred Thompson

Weighing benefits against costs is the way most people make decisions - and the way most businesses make decisions, if they want to stay in business. Only in government is any benefit, however small, considered to be worth any cost, however large. — Thomas Sowell

Moreover, they who returned, if any, would be flogged, as seemed proper, after due examination. And though the news of their beatings might help all others to hesitation, ere they did foolishly, in like fashion, yet was the principle of the flogging not on this base, which would be both improper and unjust; but only that the one in question be corrected to the best advantage for his own well-being; for it is not meet that any principle of correction should shape to the making of human signposts of pain for the benefit of others; for in verity, this were to make one pay the cost of many's learning; and each should owe to pay only so much as shall suffice for the teaching of his own body and spirit. And if others profit thereby, this is but accident, however helpful. And this is wisdom, and denoteth now that a sound Principle shall prevent Practice from becoming monstrous. — William Hope Hodgson

People use rewards expecting to gain the benefit of increasing another person's motivation and behavior, but in so doing, they often incur the unintentional and hidden cost of undermining that person's intrinsic motivation toward the activity. — Daniel H. Pink

Holmes cast himself as a demanding contractor. As workers came to him for their wages, he berated them for doing shoddy work and refused to pay them, even if the work was perfect. They quit, or he fired them. He recruited others to replace them and treated these workers the same way. Construction proceeded slowly, but at a fraction of the proper cost. The high rate of turnover had the corollary benefit of keeping to a minimum the number of individuals who understood the building's secrets. A — Erik Larson

The military-industrial complex corporations never complain of higher prices for bombs, planes, drones, and missiles. They benefit when prices rise and when cost overruns are covered with more money from the US Treasury. Those who profit are the greatest champions of the military readiness and armed conflict. They are represented by lobbyists who greatly influence both political parties. Corporate war profits and high union wages bring about remarkable cooperation between the two parties despite the political rhetoric suggesting passionate disagreement. And these militaristic policies are defended with patriotic zeal, and in appeals regarding our moral obligation to take care of all the world's needs and to meet our obligation to spread our "goodness" around the world. — Ron Paul

Investors frequently benefit from making decisions with less than perfect knowledge and are well rewarded for bearing the risk of uncertainty. The time other investors spend delving into the last unanswered detail may cost them the chance to buy into situations at prices so low they offer a margin of safety despite the incomplete information — Seth Klarman

We are all bounded with each other on the basis of our beliefs and values; when we question those values, we are certainly left alone, away from our families, friends and the dear one. And that is a cost benefit analysis we all make and we keep satisfying ourselves with the status quo of situations. — M.F. Moonzajer

In 2009 Southwest Airlines was the largest airline in the world based on the number of passengers that fly the airline each year,30 and in 2011 it was not only America's leading low-cost carrier but was also rated America's favorite airline by Consumer Reports.31 Joe Harris, a labor lawyer for Southwest, explains that the company's harmonious employee relations are no accident. "At Southwest, our employees come first; our customers come second; and our stockholders come third," he said. "The rationale is pretty simple. If we treat our employees right, they're going to treat our customers right. If our customers are treated right, they will come back and our stockholders will benefit."32 — Douglas Van Praet

Big construction companies, making millions on underground developments such as this, had initially gone to the bother of bringing in cranes to lift mechanical diggers, once their work was done, out of their excavations. Then they'd realized that the cost-benefit analysis actually tipped in the direction of just finding somewhere to hide the digger and leaving it entombed in a wall, the company sometimes going just a little bit beyond the planning permission they'd been given for the few days it took to do so. Ballard had slipped someone at City Hall some cash to get a look at the plans and realized that, yes, the only place the digger could have been entombed was right up against the bank. Its — Paul Cornell

The bottom line is, until we're helping people to stop smoking, screening for breast cancer, giving Pap smears, giving prenatal care to pregnant women, we should not go into publicly paying for the artificial heart, which will benefit at great cost only a few people. — Richard Lamm

I don't understand why people in this country are so bent on doing the 'perfect', when you have something that is good and makes sense from a cost-benefit point of view. — George Voinovich

Meaningful acts of leadership usually cause people to accept some short-term pain (extra cost or effort, delayed gratification) in order to increase the long-term benefit. We need leadership for this, because we all tend to be short-term thinkers. — Tom DeMarco

Now in business we do a cost benefit analysis before we make policy changes. Washington should as well. — Vicky Hartzler

For people who are depressed, and especially for those who do not receive enough benefit from medication of for whom the side effects of antidepressants are troubling, the fact that placebos can duplicate much of the effects of antidepressants should be taken as good news. It means that there are other ways of alleviating depression. As we have seen, treatments like psychotherapy and physical exercise are at least as effective as antidepressant drugs and more effective than placebos. In particular, CBT has been shown to lower the risk of relapsing into depression for years after treatment has ended, making it particularly cost effective. — Irving Kirsch

That would be getting up at 5 am ... I don't understand why film's shoot such brutal hours. I think it'd be worth it to not be so strictly cost-effective and have an 8 hour day. The film's would benefit in the end. — Terry Zwigoff

Our inability to share the gifts of nature causes much suffering in the world today... We mistakenly believe that a free market should allow people and corporations to profit from nature, yet we've failed to consider the immense cost to life that occurs whenever people are allowed to reap what they haven't sown at the expense of others. While the privatization of capital can lead to production efficiencies that benefit the entire market, the same can't be said for privatization of nature. Whenever the income stream from nature is privatized, human beings take for themselves the gifts that would better be freely shared with everyone. — Martin Adams

Productivity has to be defined as benefit divided by cost. The benefit is observed dollar savings and revenue from the work performed, and cost is the total cost, including replacement of any workers used up by the effort. — Tom DeMarco

A lot of men think they are doing women a favour by asking for her hand in marriage, but lets think about this :
She changes her name, changes her home, leaves her family, moves in with you, builds a home with you, gets pregnant for you, pregnancy changes her body, she gets fat, almost gives up in the labour room due to the unbearable pains of child birth, even the kids she delivers bear your name..
Till the day she dies ... Everything she does, (cooking, cleaning your house, taking care of your parents, bringing up your children, earning, advising you, ensuring you can be relaxed, maintaining all family relations, everything that benefit you ... Sometimes at the cost of her own health, hobbies and beauty..
So who is really doing whom a favor? Dear men appreciate the women in your lives always, because it is not easy to be a woman.
*Being a woman is priceless * — Anonymous