I’m a skeptic, sure, but I’m a skeptic with a can-do temperament who realizes how paralyzing skepticism can be.
If you are the kind of reader I want, you will feel I have not pushed hard enough on the tough questions, no matter how hard I push.
we tend to visualize future events very poorly and with a deficit of proper imagination.
the average civilization endured for 402.6 years. He also finds that decline comes more rapidly over time; since the collapse of the Roman Empire, the average duration of a civilization has been only 304.5 years.
The correct conclusion is not that Kenyan hospitals possess hidden virtues or that malaria is absent in Kenya, but rather that Kenyans have recalibrated their use of language to reflect what they can reasonably expect from their daily experiences. In similar fashion, people in less happy situations or less happy societies often attach less ambitious meanings to the claim that they are happy. Evidence based on questionnaires will therefore underrate the happiness of people in wealthier countries.
Better cars really do make us better off. To put it another way: it is better to envy your neighbor’s Mercedes than to envy his horse and buggy. Envying his supersonic transport would be better still.
happiness measures cannot pick up the benefits of greater life expectancy. The dead and incapacitated cannot complain about their situation from the grave, at least not on questionnaires.
At the social level, the discount rate pertains to questions of how hard we should be fighting climate change and how much we should invest in preserving biodiversity. If we dismiss the importance of the distant future, action will not seem imperative. But if we pay heed to the distant future, we will see these as major concerns.
If you own a Rembrandt painting, you’ll probably keep it in decent shape, even if you’re a selfish, uncultured bastard who doesn’t care about the artistic patrimony of the Dutch.
The branch of economics known as welfare economics holds up perfect markets as a normative ideal, yet future generations cannot contract in today’s markets. If we were to imagine future generations engaging in such contracting, current decisions might run more in their favor.
Circa 2018, the future people of 2068 can’t express their preferences across a lot of the choices we are making today, such as how rapidly to boost future wealth or how much to mitigate the risk of serious catastrophes.
if we discount the future by five percent, a person’s death today is worth about thirty-nine billion deaths five hundred years from now. Alternatively, at that same discount rate, one death two hundred years from now is equal in value to 131.5 deaths three hundred years from now. Upon reflection, few people, putting aside their selfish interest in the current time period, would share these conclusions as a basis for ethical decision-making.
forgive me for a page or two because this becomes slightly technical.
We should believe that the end of the world is a truly terrible event, even if that collapse comes in the distant future.
Market economies and market reforms look better as more weight is placed on the relatively distant future. A free society is better today than a corrupt and totalitarian one.
Martin Luther King Jr. brought much good to the world with respect to both justice and long-term economic growth. It would be fair to say that King did the right thing in choosing to pursue higher ideals rather than playing golf all day, even though he lost his life in doing so.
When confronted with global poverty or other forms of calamity, many (or most) people express something along the lines of, “Well, someone ought to do something.” At the same time, they do not feel strongly that this “someone” ought to be themselves.
they match up to one of the realities of this game. Yes, someone ought to do something, but the game itself does not make clear who that someone is.
To put it more concretely, today in the United States we are spending too much on the elderly and not enough on the young.
given that the elderly are the ones who vote with greatest frequency, and the young often do not or cannot, that mistake should hardly come as a surprise. Governments should focus on investment, but in the United States, at least, government spending on investment is falling; in recent years, government investment has fallen below its postwar average of about five percent. Similar patterns can be observed in many European national budgets.9 Unfortunately, when government spending needs to be limited or cut, investment is often the first area to go, while entitlements for the elderly remain intact.
contrary to what other frameworks might suggest, we should pay greater heed to the storms and less heed to the relocation costs.
Individuals who believe in the increasing returns model should be much more skeptical of non-growth-enhancing redistribution than individuals who believe in the Solow catch-up model.
Try to figure out whether Rembrandt or Velazquez was the better painter. You might judge the two as being of roughly the same quality and import, or at least decide that neither should be placed above the other. If we then discover one new sketch by Rembrandt, we don’t suddenly have to conclude that he was in fact the better artist. We still can hold the two to be roughly equal in quality and importance.
As a general rule, we should not pat ourselves on the back and feel that we are on the correct side of an issue. We should choose the course that is most likely to be correct, keeping in mind that at the end of the day we are still more likely to be wrong than right.
On the purely practical side, it is unlikely that democratic real-world decision-makers will think too big.
it is an implication of political competition within relatively short electoral cycles relative to the time horizons over which policy matters. (The U.S. House of Representatives has a two-year voting cycle for policies which may have effects over twenty or thirty years, or, in the case of environmental policies, longer still.)
Relative to what we should be doing, we are currently living in an investment drought.
I would therefore like to be more suspicious of our little voice in favor of supreme short-run pragmatism. I wish to suggest that it is a vice, the thinking man’s equivalent of the savage’s short-run gratification.
It is our latest adaptive mechanism for feeling good about ourselves, at the expense of letting Rome burn