Kaldor-Hicks unsurprisingly comes for particular criticism as anchoring policy analysis in a market framework that pays little attention to the distributional issues often at the heart of public policy Remember that Kaldor-Hicks describes a potential Pareto, an outcome where the winners could conceivably compensate the losers to the point where they become indifferent to the policy. This raises immediate distributional concerns. Post-positivists are quite right to point out that political conflict is often about just such distributional concerns; that the winners gain more benefits than the cost incurred by the losers will not make that political conflict any less intense Just because a policy is efficient under Kaldor-Hick does not make a political decision any less political; it certainly does not stop the potential losers from expending their political capital to prevent the policy from being adopted.
The crux of the post-positivist critique is that the rationalist approach seeks to divorce policy analysis from politics to set up policy analysis as a neutral and objective generator of knowledge that stands independent of politics. Post-positivists argue that the rationalist approach fails miserably on all counts. Its methods and theories promote a particular set of values (typically those of science and the market) while elevating technocrats and experts into privileged positions of policy influence. The end result is a form of policy analysis that promotes fundamentally