Cost Benefit Analysis And Its Uses CBA and Injustice, section 10.5. The use of cost benefit analysis as a tool to determine public policy has many shortcomings we would prefer to avoid. The topic of this section is the lack of justice inherent to CBA and comparing it to other types of measuring systems. The Pareto Criterion is based on the idea that a policy is acceptable if it benefits at least one person and harms no person. That is a nice idea but is far too strict to be useful in the real world. The article gives examples of just how impractical this criterion would be for us to use in any field