Cost-Benefit Analysis Quotes

The fact is, there's no single magic number that defines profitability for a game.

Even an ideal set of trade-offs must—and should—leave a whole spectrum of unmet needs, because the cost of wiping out the last vestige of any problem is leaving other problems in more dire condition. In short, trade-offs must be incremental rather than categorical, if limited resources are to produce optimal results in any social system as a whole.

Everything has its price - and if that price is not paid, not that thing but something else is obtained... it is impossible to get anything without this price.

Obviously, consideration of costs is key, including opportunity costs. Of course capital isn't free. It's easy to figure out your cost of borrowing, but theorists went bonkers on the cost of equity capital. They say that if you're generating a 100% return on capital, then you shouldn't invest in something that generates an 80% return on capital. It's crazy.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

There is no such thing as Something for nothing.

Anything free is worth what you pay for it

Count the cost first. Don’t pay too big a price for pursuing minor values.

Sunk costs? We pay too much attention to them.

As a producer or financier, you are going to go where you get the best bang for your buck.

In investing, you get what you don't pay for. Costs matter. So intelligent investors will use low-cost index funds to build a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds, and they will stay the course. And they won't be foolish enough to think that they can consistently outsmart the market.

If the price of a burger goes up 5 cents, and the minimum wage that you have received is going up from $7.25 to $15 an hour - and there have been a number of studies that document just how much the price of a burger might go up if you increase the minimum wage. You match the costs, and the benefits far outweigh the costs.

Throwing money after security turns out to be a classic example of the law of diminishing marginal utility.

I can observe the game theory is applied very much in economics. Generally, it would be wise to get into the mathematics as much as seems reasonable because the economists who use more mathematics are somehow more respected than those who use less. That's the trend.

Unfortunately, in rich-world health, innovation is both your friend and your enemy. Innovation is inventing organ replacement, joint replacement. We're inventing ways of doing new things that cost $300,000 and take people in their 70s and, on average, give them an extra, say, two or three years of life. And then you have to say, given finite resources, should we fire two or three teachers to do this operation?

When I was a kid, I reckoned things in Hershey bars. Is this worth three Hershey bars to me?

If there is no price to be paid, it is also not of value.

Yes, the cost is high, but the price of neglect would be infinitely higher.

You learn in the pros that errors can be costly.

A focus on regulatory overreach, things that the benefit doesn't outweigh the cost, is probably the single greatest opportunity we have for having a positive impact on job creation.

The cost of deploying one U. S. soldier is the equivalent to the cost of deploying 70 Afghan soldiers.

The constant need for special waivers is symptomatic of poorly written public policy. It's a signal that the cost of compliance is unreasonably high; the benefits are hard to measure; and either legislators or regulators have failed to do their homework.

The least outlay is not always the greatest gain.

Actually, in my advanced, high-falutin' frontier economics, I often work with what I define as 'money metric utility,' and I ask people, 'Do you really want that? What are you willing to pay for that?'

My politics are: I'm a trustbuster. Very focused. And yeah, I'm pro-efficiency. I want the most economic activity at the lowest price possible. It's good for everybody; it's not red or blue.