Every proposed law raises the question: Would its benefits outweigh its costs? To answer that question, lawmakers need a way of comparing seemingly
incommensurable things like health and buying power. The most common method is to ask how much people are willing to pay for goods. This approach is called cost-benefit analysis (CBA), and it has long been the dominant method of systematic analysis for evaluating government policy. Despite CBA’s prominence, it
has been criticized harshly from the moment it was first required by executive order to the present day, and countless times in between. In this Article, we propose an alternative method for comparing consequences of a law. This method, which we label “well-being analysis," directly analyzes effects of proposed laws on people’s quality of life.