Neil H. Buchanan (George Washington University Law School) has posted What Do We Owe Future Generations? Framing the Issues, with an Application to Budget Policy on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
In the United States, it is common for legal scholars, economists, politicians and others to claim that we are selfishly harming “our children and grandchildren” by running large government deficits. This article first asks two broad questions: (1) Do we owe future generations anything at all as a philosophical matter? and (2) If we do owe something to future generations, how should we balance their interests against our own? The short answers are “Probably” and “We really are not sure.”
Finding only general answers to these general questions, I then look specifically at U.S. fiscal policy and its effects on conventionally-measured living standards, exploring a set of issues that can be captured in the following question: If we knew that our grandchildren were going to have incomes 100% higher than current incomes, how would we feel about changing our policies today such that our grandchildren’s incomes would be only 93% higher (or, for that matter, 107% higher)? This is, surprisingly, the essence of the fiscal policy question that we face in the U.S. today, as even pessimistic forecasts indicate that living standards over the next 75 years will more than double (if not triple or quadruple).
Using standard utilitarian and Rawlsian analyses, it turns out that people facing this situation would either stop worrying about future generations’ economic well-being or might even enact policies to shift economic well-being from the future to today. I then argue that a better approach to analyzing intergenerational issues is to view them as simple matters of distributive justice, focusing on how policies change the distribution of incomes across time as well as currently. Such an approach simplifies the analysis and allows us to protect the interests of our children and grandchildren in a more meaningful and long-lasting sense.
And a bit more from the text:
Even continuing to set aside non-domestic concerns and non-economic issues like environmental justice, analysis of intergenerational obligations can be enriched and significantly transformed by thinking about intergenerational issues applying concepts of distributive justice to questions of poverty within and across generations. The analysis to this point, after all, has treated each generation as an undifferentiated whole, with average GDP per capita used as a measure of how one generation’s well-being compares to another’s. Given that incomes within a living generation are unequal, we can and should ask whether the concepts of distributive justice that are typically applied to intragenerational analysis can tell us anything useful about intergenerational obligations.
The question of intergenerational justice can thus be analyzed not only by comparing average living standards across time but by disaggregating living standards within current and future generations. The more committed we are to egalitarian principles, the more important it is to focus on the living standards of the poorest people at any give time rather than relying on averages.
Recommended! Buchanan’s paper is very useful–in this area almost any analysis is likely to be contested, but Buchanan makes some interesting and helpful moves that move the debate forward, especially in the tax policy context.