ABSTRACT
The habit of looking at investment and resource use policy from the viewpoint of the community has engendered sophisticated techniques of cost-benefit analysis for measuring what have come to be called social benefits and costs, to distinguish them from individual benefits and costs. This chapter suggests that more perspicacious judgements and assessments of the results of public and other forms of investment and land use can be made and costs and benefits brought closer to real responses by seeing the allocation of land and resources as set within a proprietary-structure framework. Proprietary land use analysis is of immediate relevance to cost-benefit analysis because in any actual or proposed land use pattern it identifies the points where motives can be discerned and true benefits and actual costs made known. The value of consumer’s surplus to a particular consumer can never be known unless the recipient reveals voluntarily his own desires and satisfactions.
