Total Eclipse

Our Obligation to Future Generations, by Wilfred Beckerman

(c) Wilfred Beckerman, I hope he doesn’t mind me reposting it here. I found it fascinating.

The growing concern during the last three decades with the impact of economic growth on the environment has led to a widespread belief that we are failing to respect the constraints on our policies imposed by the imperatives of intergenerational justice.

This has been accompanied by calls to pursue policies of “sustainable development” or to respect the claims of intergenerational equity. I think all these beliefs and claims are fatally flawed and that, together with their background scare stories about imminent environmental catastrophe, they only distract attention from what ought to be our most important bequest to future generations, namely to bequeath to them a more decent society in which there is greater respect for basic human rights.
First, future generations cannot have rights. The basic reason for this is that future generations cannot have — in the present tense — anything. They cannot have long hair or a taste for Mozart. They will have interests when they are there, and they may well then have rights. But their rights will only be rights to what is available at the time; not to anything that is no longer available. It makes little sense to say that our right to see a live Dodo has been violated by the inhabitants of the Mauritius islands three centuries ago.
Secondly, since future generations cannot have rights, the interests that they will have cannot be covered by any coherent theory of justice. A crucial feature of all theories of justice is a set of principles that enables people to agree on the allocation of rights to whatever desirable assets or opportunities might be the source of conflict and be the subject of dispute. This enables people with conflicting interests to co-exist under conditions of some scarcity, without recourse to violence or other threats to life and liberty.
The banner of “sustainable development” under which innumerable international and national bureaucracies and commissions and research programmes have been set up and financed seems quite untenable. The most widely accepted definition is that sustainable development means that there must never be any decline in per capita welfare in the future. Welfare can go up, so presumably higher per capita welfare is a good thing. But it must never decline, since this would be a bad thing. But if periods of decline are needed in order that the subsequent increases are even greater why should this be ruled out?
It is often claimed that we must respect the objective of intergenerational egalitarianism. Now, in the first place, egalitarianism even at any point of time is a very difficult objective to defend. What matters is the relief of poverty. Few people — apart from those consumed by envy — would prefer a society in which total equality was achieved simply by bringing everybody down to the level of the most deprived. And egalitarianism between generations is an even more absurd objective. For we should hope that future generations will be better off than we are and that welfare will continue to increase indefinitely, thereby adding to the intergenerational inequality that has been increasing since time immemorial.
None of the above implies that we have no obligations to future generations. But “rights” do not exhaust the whole of morality, so we should still take account of the interests that future generations will have and of the way that our present actions will affect those interests. We have to try to predict which will be the most important interests that future generations will have and how they compare with the interests of the present generation.
As far as incomes are concerned, in the very long run the main source of economic strength is based on technological and scientific progress, and, above all, the rate at which the resulting inventions and innovations are diffused. This is a function of variables which are all tending to increase, some at a phenomenal rate. In particular, the number of highly educated people in the world — especially those having technological and scientific qualifications — is increasing so rapidly that it far surpasses the corresponding number of people having similar qualifications only two or three decades ago, and is likely to go on expanding rapidly. And there is no physical limitation on the growth of this human capital.
Secondly, the rate of international diffusion of innovation and technical progress — which many studies have shown to be decisive in determining growth rates — will continue to accelerate.
These two underlying forces for long-run growth suggest that the average annual long-run growth of output per head over the next century should be above that of the last forty years. And this has been 2.1 per cent per annum. So to be on the safe side, I shall assume that the annual average growth rate of real incomes per head over the next 100 years or so will be about 1.5 per cent. The power of compound interest being what it is, this means that world average real incomes per head in the year 2,100 or so would be 4.14 times as high as they are now!
This growth of incomes will eventually trickle down to the poorest nations, though, as has been seen during the post-war years, mis-management and corruption in some can often prevent this for very long periods of time. Of course, poverty, both absolute and relative, will no doubt always persist, even in democratic countries with flourishing economies Some people will always fall through what might have appeared to be more or less “foolproof” safety nets in the form of universal income maintenance programs. Others will remain poor on account of being trapped in a vicious circle of poverty — family breakdown, parental neglect or abuse, crime, drugs, and vicious environments that are features of many cities in affluent and democratic countries.
But leaving aside these sociological influences, there does not seem to be any economic mechanism that should make the overall distribution of incomes become markedly more unequal than it is today. In that case a continual rise in income levels must lead to a substantial reduction in ‘absolute poverty’ even if “relative poverty” might always persist. At least there are no insuperable material obstacles to the alleviation of poverty over the course of the long-term future in the same way that there are insuperable obstacles to the spread of universal peace and harmony and goodwill among all human beings. Human sensibilities do not keep pace with technical progress.
Climate change will not be an obstacle to increased prosperity. I am not qualified to talk about the scientific aspects of climate change since I am not a scientist or a film star or a politician or a member of the British Royal Family. But there are good reasons to believe that, for the world as a whole, the net economic effects will be significant by comparison with the vastly higher incomes that the world will enjoy by the end of the coming century.
As for any possible constraint on growth arising from material shortages, it may suffice to say that predictions to the effect that we cannot go on using up resources at the current rate because we shall run out of them have been made since the days of Ancient Greece. The basic reason why we shall never run out of any resource is that its price will always rise to prevent it. Insofar as we may go through periods in which demand for some material increases faster than supply, the rise in its price will set off innumerable favourable feed-backs, such as a greater search for new sources, technological improvements in extraction and refining, a shift to substitute materials, a shift away from use of the end-products embodying the material in question, and so on.
As I pointed out nearly thirty years ago, the world has managed very well without any supplies at all of Beckermonium, a product named after my grandfather who failed to discover it in the 19th Century. Of course, if the world were suddenly totally deprived of some major source of, say, energy overnight there would be chaos. But that sort of scenario only happens in science fiction.
The safest prediction that can be made for the long-term future is not in the field of economic growth or environmental change, but in the field of human conflict, namely that there will always be potential conflict between peoples for all sorts of different “reasons” and that can easily lead to horrific violations of basic human rights. At the same time one can also predict with great confidence that people will always want life and security, and freedom from fear, discrimination and humiliation. And the best guarantee that these permanent needs, which are the essence of what constitutes a human being, will be satisfied is a society that protects basic human rights and provides the maximum liberty compatible with similar liberty for others. Thus, by contrast with the long-term prospects for poverty and the environment, it seems virtually inconceivable that there will be any decline in the need for eternal vigilance in defense of basic human rights. It is for this reason that our most important obligation to future generations is to bequeath to them a “decent society” in which there is respect for basic human rights, tolerance for differences in conceptions of the good life, and democratic institutions and traditions that enable people to sort out their inevitable conflicts peacefully and free of fear of oppression and humiliation.

Tagged as economics, equality, ethics, Futurism, growth, intergenerational egalitarianism, intergenerational equity, intergenerational justice, moral philosophy, sustainability, sustainable development, Wilfred Beckerman + Categorized as Futurism, Philosophy, Social Politics