Can You Cut a Budget Pie?

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Abstract
How assess a study which shows, for example, that city police expenditures increased and fire expenditures were held constant? Or how respond to a public official who asks how better to allocate a budget? Can we systematize, at least partially, such elusive concepts as the ‘quality of life’? Consultants may comment, with varying success, from personal experience and ideology. Others may undertake cost-benefit analyses. This paper considers procedures which can bring more sophistication to traditional cost-benefit work. A first step is adequate conceptualization of public policy outputs. One basic dimension is who benefits? To answer who benefits from public policy one can analyze correspondence between a policy and the value configurations of different social sectors in the affected population. Here we define a sector as benefiting from a policy insofar as the policy is consistent with the sector’s values. Thus the greater the disparity between a policy and a sector’s values, the less the sector benefits. Sectors are defined by whatever criteria (income, political party, etc.) are significant in the social unit in question. Crucial to answering who benefits, therefore, are precise conceptualization and measurement of values. These issues we consider first.

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