Excerpt

The Limits of Quantification. Cass Sunstein, April 14, 2014, Paper. "The difficulty of quantifying benefits and costs is a recurrent one in both public policy and ordinary life. Much of the time, we cannot quantify the benefits of potential courses of action, or the costs, or both, and we must nonetheless decide whether and how to proceed. Under existing executive orders, agencies are generally required to quantify both benefits and costs, and (to the extent permitted by law) to show that the former justify the latter. But agencies are also permitted to consider factors that are difficult or impossible to quantify, such as human dignity and fairness, and also to consider factors that are not quantifiable because of the limits of existing knowledge..." Link