I.
A. Expain briefly what it means to say that a change increases efficiency.It means that if you measure gains and losses to those affected in dollars by willingness to pay and add them all together, the sum is positive.
B. Give two examples of ways in which a change might increase efficiency and yet be regarded by many people as undesirable.
It might benefit a rich person by slightly more than it injured a poor person.
It might benefit someone by giving him something that he wanted but that other people thought he ought not to want--heroin, for example, or marijuana.
It might give people what they wanted but what many people thought God did not want them to have--legalizing homosexual acts, for example, or polygamy, or incest.
In any such case, the disvalue to people who disapprove counts in determining what is efficient. But one can easily imagine a case where the people who disapprove would be willing to pay a total of a million dollars to prevent something, the people who wanted to do it would be willing to pay a hundred million to be permitted to, everyone agreed on these numbers, hence everyone agreed that the change increased efficiency--but the opponents thought it was a bad idea anyway.
The same argument can be made substituting mother nature for God--a small change. Many environmentalist might argue that even if the people who wanted things they could get by clearing the Amazon rain forest were willing to pay more for those things than the environmentalists were willing to pay to keep the forest, clearing the rain forest was still an inherently wicked act.
Of course, many environmentalists would argue that cutting down the rain forest would have long term effects that would make everyone worse off. But many, perhaps most, of them, if pressed, would agree that their opposition to doing it did not depend on such arguments, and would still hold even if those arguments were wrong--because nature is an end in itself, not merely a means to human ends.