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[quote user="Railway Man"] [quote user="Bucyrus"] Well that is another question different from my question.  And my question is only my interpretation of the question posed by Aricat.  Your question of determining the best value that can be delivered for the input seems like a rational approach, but I don’t know how anybody can trust the answer to a question arrived at by such a complex formula.   How can you measure benefits delivered when comparing the power efficiency of public transportation with the freedom and convenience of the private automobile, for instance?  And how can you factor in all of the competing agendas and special interests of the public and private sectors that will skew the argument?  There are lawmakers who already have an irrational view of the private automobile.  Trying to come up with an objective assessment of the best value for the input seems like that proverbial example of scientifically predicting how the weather is affected on one side of the earth by a butterfly flapping its wings on the other side.  [/quote]  Lawmakers are elected by the public, so in my view, my saying that a lawmaker is irrational is like my blaming the cloth for the poor taste of the dressmaker.  The public gets to change out its lawmakers regularly, and they have 100% power to do so, one particular Supreme Court perhaps notwithstanding.  If we say that a particular choice made by the public is irrational, don't we really mean, "I don't like the choice a majority of my fellow citizens made"?  Because by definition the public can do whatever it wishes, and "irrationality" is only in relation to an arbitrary set of values chosen by someone else.  I don't think we have a stone tablet handed down to us from on high that defines "rational" and "irrational," except in religious texts. Above that, I think you're saying it's impossible to make this comparison.  I didn't say it was easy, but it's not impossible.  It's a matter of breaking it down into pieces that can be quantified and evaluated.  For example, the value of the personal choice afforded by the automobile can be captured in real-estate values, job creation, tax revenues, air emissions, and a good methodology assigns reasonable values to each, whether positive or negative.  I can (or the people I work with, actually) measure each of these, and through various retrospective studies we can determine that if auto transportation is encouraged the net present value of all these inputs becomes X, and if public transportation is encouraged the net present value of these inputs becomes Y.  It isn't rocket surgery though there is a lot of work involved, and it's defensible. I think where you might be having trouble (and you're not alone by any means) is with economic accountings that assign a value to things that strike you as personal preference, particularly preferences you regard as foolish or irrational or unnecessary.  Bothers me too.  But that's all economic analysis is: a summation of how people will vote with their money.  For example, people prefer cars with top speeds 2x or 3x the legal speed limit.  Economic analysis will tell us the price points at which people will relinquish this preference and settle for a car with a top speed of 75 mph.  But saying that personal preferences we disagree with are "irrational or silly" has no basis in objective fact.  The assignment of any personal preference to the categories "rational" or "irrational" is nothing but more personal preference.  Economic analysis says this:  "Given the way humans think or act, this is how they will spend their money and this is the economic results that will happen."  If we want to change the way humans think or act, economic manipulation is actually an extremely blunt and ineffective instrument -- witness the taxation of "sins" which do not make sins go away.  Religion and ideology are vastly more effective, as any long-term labor organizer knows.  People in this country and other country vote far more strongly for their ideological beliefs than for their own pocketbooks. Allow me to summarize.  If we are going to say, "the decision to encourage or discourage high-speed rail should rise and fall only on its economic merits," then we are submitting ourselves to the authority of secular, scientific, economic analysis and we had better be prepared to accept a decision that we might not like.  The alternative to selecting on the basis of economic merits is to decide on the basis of personal preference.  If personal preference is going to be the final and only authority, then claims that a particular personal preference is "better" because it has economic superiority, but that economic superiority argument is based on a selective application of personal preference, that's cynical and damaging.  I get pretty hot when I see any interest group make claims ostensibly based on "science" that in fact are selective or smokescreen. RWM [/quote] I understand your points about rational and irrational, and I agree that the decisions of lawmakers are ultimately the decisions of the citizens.  But I should explain what I meant by irrational lawmaker.  I used the term in contrast to your method of determining the best value that can be delivered for the input, which I see as being rational.  As I understand it, you are describing a comparative measure of actual numerical quantities of value versus cost, like a business plan.  I would characterize that method as objective, logical, scientific, or mathematical.  I used the term rational to mean all of those attributes.  And I agree, that many of the inputs could be easily measured. And the more the inputs are broken down and subdivided, the more accurate the analysis will be. <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p></o:p> However if lawmakers provide inputs to the calculation based on their personal philosophical dislike of the private automobile, I saw that as an irrational influence of what would otherwise be a rational calculation.  And I assumed that lawmakers would be involved because we are talking about public projects.  But I suppose, in the final analysis, a philosophical disdain for the automobile is an expression of part of the population, so it is an objective component that can be factored in without distorting the objectivity of the analysis.   <o:p></o:p> But, aside from lawmakers reflecting the will of the people, we are still left with trying to assign numerical values to subjective things such as how much people prefer the privacy of the automobile, and their philosophical views on expanding socialized transportation.  And then these individual personal preferences have to be averaged and collectivized in a way that trades the freedom of the individual for the greater good of society.   <o:p></o:p> I would speculate that if you commissioned ten of these objective, scientific studies to determine the cost/benefit of HSR, you would get ten substantially different results.  I am convinced that if government in general had the funds, they would connect every town with rail transit.  I think this preference represents the majority view of government in general.  So if they were to commission a study to discover whether HRS was in our economic interest, their study would say that it is.      I would say that if HSR were a 100% private sector endeavor, then the value/input analysis could be logical, objective, and rational.  But if such an analysis is developed to judge the viability of public transportation, I think that the result will be a biased, subjective, agenda-driven conclusion that favors the expansion of public transportation mainly as a pretext for the expansion of the public sector for its own self-interest.
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