Not all approaches to measuring social value answer the same question. As interest in social value grows across infrastructure, transportation, energy, housing, and public policy, understanding what different methodologies capture—and what they miss—is critical to making informed decisions.
This commentary explores the limitations of weighted benefit-cost approaches, including their treatment of wellbeing, causal pathways, counterfactuals, system-wide interactions, and unintended consequences, and demonstrates how CANCEA’s empirical, bottom-up methodology addresses these limitations to provide a more comprehensive, transparent, and defensible evidence framework for consequential investment and policy decisions.
