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reason, is that "costs" and "benefits" cannot be defined in a cultural vacuum.46 For example, what is valued as a benefit, what about it is valued, and how that value is to be realized depend upon cultural understandings and meanings. But cost-benefit analyses, even in their more sophisticated variants, cannot legitimately assign these understandings and meanings where they are controversial: only democratic politics can. Indeed, the very structure of cost-benefit analysis versy, 91 HARV. L. REv. 1833, 1835 (1978) (using figures of 7 to 12 times the number of deaths from coal plants and 4 to 6 times as much sickness and injury); Sunstein, Paradoxes of the Regulatory State, 51 U. CHI. L. REv. 407, 418 (1990). The reliance of public law scholars on such analyses of this problem is ironic, because even public policy analysts generally disposed toward cost-benefit techniques have begun to view them as inappropriate for decisionmaking about generating electricity through nuclear power. See, e.g., Leonard & Zeckhauser, Cost-Benefit Analysis Applied to Risks: Its Philosophy and Legitimacy, in VALUES AT RISK, supra note 41, at 31, 42 ("Because of its associations with worldwide devastation, the question of whether to use nuclear power appears at this point, at least in many circles, to be beyond the realm of analysis of costs and benefits."). 44. See, e.g., Huber, The Old-New Division in Risk Regulation, 69 VA. L. REV. 1025 (1983). 45. See Strauss & Sunstein, The Role of the President and OMB in Informal Rulemaking. 38 ADMIN. L. REV. 181 (1986). 46. See supra note 40 for a more structured, specific set of descriptions of this failing. 958 Michigan Law Review [Vol. 89:936 runs roughshod over these understandings, for it requires that they be reduced to some single, common dimension before being aggregated, commensurated, and weighed against costs. These general points can be elaborated in three more specific ways. First, no objective value ("the" value of clean air, or a workplace free of a particular risk) inheres in any state of affairs. Things are valued as parts of social contexts; their value cannot be abstracted from these contexts. But the appropriate context and its meaning is a matter of clutural understandings, to be settled through collective choice. Thus, it makes little sense to ask how much we ought to spend or forgo in general to avoid "the risk" of exposure to a particular pollutant, or toxic chemical, or type of injury. The same objective level of risk will have different meanings in distinct contexts. As people actually experience it, the nature and value of reducing any risk will vary with the setting in which it arises. For example, even if the marginal health/cost tradeoff is the same for equivalent reductions in particulates emitted by woodburning stoves and electric utility plants, people might not only value the harms differently, but resist regulation of the first while demanding it of the second. At stake in these choices, in part, is how much the activities of woodburning stoves and electric power production are valued in themselves (as well as how much other activities associated with them are valued). Generating heat through burning wood might be particularly valued socially, perhaps because it is associated with values such as self-reliance, or types of social relationships such as community-based rural life, that are viewed as distinctly worth respecting or preserving. If so, reducing emissions from such sources might simply be viewed differently than similar reductions from largescale utilities. These views are hardly "irrational,'' for beyond the cost and benefits of achieving "the same" level of risk reduction, the choice among these alternatives will construct different social landscapes. Such culturally constitutive dimensions of choice cannot be assessed through the incremental tools of cost-benefit analysis; political settings are required to socially define what is at stake and how those stakes ought to be understood and valued. Taking seriously people's own accounts of how they value various risks makes clear that social contexts are central to the actual experience of risk. Extensive interviews with a variety of workers, for example, suggest that their valuations of workplace risks depend upon such matters as the nature of their jobs and the overall structure of workFebruary 1991] Cultural Consequences of Public Policy 959 place relations.47 When workers view themselves as pursuing highly valued callings and exercising significant control over the risks facing them, they interpret those risks differently. For example, the same objective level of exposure to certain chemicals is understood and valued differently by research scientists, exposed during the course of carrying out basic research, than by laboratory assistants, who clean the hazards up after an experiment is complete. To the form.er, the risk's association with professional work that is highly valued socially, personally rewarding, voluntarily assumed, and connected to traditions of scientific inquiry might make eliminating that risk less pressing particularly if the methods needed to do so (such as wearing certain equipment) would undermine valued aspects of a research career. From the external perspective of a policy analyst, the risk might seem the same, but from the inside, the risk involved has a different meaning,· as a result, its reduction is valued differently. In general, inter-

The Unintended Cultural Consequences of Public Policy: A Comment on the Symposium