Word: cost-benefit
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Just as those who try to the cost-benefit grid brought punks than in "beat...
...does prcisely what he scores his subjects for doing. By abstracting business from the unavoidable reality of money, common ambition and greed, he becomes too cerebral. By dealing solely with psychological impulses, he over-analyzes as badly as the Gamesman who cannot allow compassion to enter his own careful cost-benefit analyses. Perhaps this was intentional--the Gamesman Maccoby portrays is certainly an interesting figure, and interesting figures sell books--but more likely it was simply the product of an understandable enthusiasm to make a careful scholarly presentation as entertaining as possible. Given the subject matter's potential for sheer...
...right level of aggression. Too little, and the organism may be muscled out by competitors. Too much, and it may die in battle without reproducing, or use up time and energy in fighting while competitors steal its food or mate. Aggression, in other words, pays off only when the cost-benefit ratio makes it a workable strategy...
Military ventures get a similar cost-benefit analysis. A Rand researcher in 1973 suggested that efficiency could be determined by defining military output in terms of "the capability to destroy 1000 tanks in a 90-day Central European war scenario, or the capability to deliver a given amount of bomb tonnage in Southeast Asia." His formulas did not include significant variables representing such factors as a ravaged European countryside or a decimated village in Vietnam...
...Attica and Walpole were not carried out by coddled criminals. Yet Wilson said last week, "Believe me, there is no evidence" that prisons will turn an offender into a criminal. "On the average, they come out the same as they went in." If Wilson understood some of these incarcerated cost-benefit analysts on a personal level, he would hold different views...