140 
makers are adequately equipped to act in the public interest? Another 
point of view is that of willingness to pay, which holds that the 
maximum amount of resources that consumers are willing to pay for 
a good is a good measure of its value. This can be expressed as a 
willingness to pay additional taxes, user fees, and other charges, to 
give up the consumption of certain goods, or to pay a higher price 
for other goods. The primary objection ot this scheme is based on the 
difficulty in measuring the willingness to pay for public goods that are 
not ‘‘unitized’’ and whose benefits to an individual are hard to deter- 
mine. Cost-benefit analysis uses willingness to pay and appears to 
have some potential for effective simulation of the working of a 
properly functioning market in the allocation of public resources on a 
project-by-project basis. 
Such an analysis has been demonstrated and recommended, in a 
report » to the Water Resources Council by the Special Task Force on 
Evaluation Procedures, as a way to improve the policies and procedures 
followed by Federal agencies in the formulation and evaluation of 
projects for the use and development of water and related land re- 
sources. More recently, a report * on economic factors in the develop- 
ment of a coastal zone has described a preliminary effort at the de- 
velopment and application of such analysis to particular coastal zone 
development proposals: 
The basic premise of this report is that economics in a sense wide enough to 
cover all significantly important values, both market and nonmarket, can be use- 
fully applied to coastal zone allocation, that is, to the problem of determining the 
mix of uses of a particular coastal zone which is most consistent with the values of 
the economy which uses that coastal zone. 
Given the inefficiency of the private market with respect to the coastal zone and 
the inefficiency of local control, the only feasible alternative appears to be control 
at the State level with some Federal influence to prevent secondary benefits from 
being used against an entire State. We strongly support the Stratton Commission’s 
recommendations concerning the establishment of State coastal zone management 
authorities. 
However, the establishment of such bodies implies some rather heavy responsi- 
bilities. Once the discipline of the private market is abandoned, coastal zone 
analysis requires conscious economic analysis, for it is not enough to show that 
the present system is seriously nonoptimal. One must also argue that the proposed 
changes in the allocation process will result in coastal zone usage which is more 
consistent with the economy’s values than the old. 
Insofar as coastal zone allocation can be regarded on a project-by-project 
basis, the methodology for inplementing this conscious economics is cost-benefit 
analysis. Unfortunately, the present state of the art with respect to cost-benefit 
analysis and the coastal zone leave much to be desired and, until a State coastal 
zone authority can reliably determine the use of the coastal zone most consistent 
with people’s values, it cannot promise to do much better than the private market 
or local political entities. 
Another problem with locational cost-benefit analysis is that, if performed too 
narrowly, seriously inefficient suboptimization can occur. The problem is to 
approach coastline allocation comprehensively while, at the same time, retaining 
analytical feasibility. Given the compromises that must necessarily occur, the 
results of cost-benefit analysis must be used with some judgment. 
While there seem to be no clear-cut indications that any method of 
determining the public interest is superior to the others, this is no 
excuse for inaction—attempts must be made to determine the public 
interest. Perhaps the answer lies in some combination of the viewpoints 
of representative political consensus (based on overall social priorities) 
55 “Procedures for Evaluation of Water and Related Land Resource Projects,” Report to the Water 
Resources Council by the Special Task Force on Evaluation Procedures, June 1969. 
56 Thid., reference 45, 
