We also asked him some simple questions to help us better understand the issue.
What do you consider to be the most important aspect of your presentation, and what needs to be emphasized in connection with the resonant topic of our time-intergenerational justice?
With my co-authors, I show that people’s choices among life stories can reveal what matters to them. We use it to estimate tradeoffs that different groups of people would be willing to make between fundamental life attributes, and to express these tradeoffs in Dollar or Euro terms. This information can allow policymakers to allocate scarce resources in line with the preferences of the populations they represent. For example, we find that a typical American, earning $80,000/year, would be willing to give up roughly $7,000 each year (~$270,000 in total consumption) to extend their life in good health from 80 to 81 years. This has implications for how much money should be spent on priorities that promote longevity, e.g., healthcare, innovation, or pollution abatement. Going forward, it is desirable to extend the analysis to European countries and to also understand how much people value other life attributes. For example, if we can quantify the value of social contacts, we may be able to make better informed tradeoffs between social isolation and health or longevity in a future pandemic.
I would draw a parallel between intergenerational justice and – what I would label as – „interpersonal justice“, i.e., to what extent a younger „me“ should take into account the well-being of an older „me“, some 10, 20, 30 years down the line. In my research, I noticed that people’s preferences change over time. If we ask a 60-year-old what life they would like to live if they could start over, they will, on average, give a different answer than if we ask a 20-year-old. For example, we find that 70-year-old individuals would be willing to sacrifice about twice as much consumption during their working years to gain an extra year of life in good health – if they could start from scratch – than people under 40 would. The question then becomes: whose preferences should the policy/decision-maker take into account when deciding how to allocate scarce resources? The answer is relatively easy if we think the difference in a person‘s preferences over time can be attributed to them learning progressively more about themself and about the world, and thus gaining a better understanding of what truly matters. An alternative is to consider that, as a person evolves over time, they become so different from their former self that we could essentially consider the 20-year-old and the 70-year-old version as two different individuals – if we imposed the older self‘s preferences on the younger self, the 20-year-old might become quite miserable and vice versa. We therefore see a tradeoff appear, similar to that between the well-being of different generations. How we wish to make these trade-offs depends on how much we care about the future selves/generations (how patient we are and how much we empathize with them) and to what extent we can predict their preferences. If inefficiencies exist which prevent us from achieving our preferred outcomes, for example, because we are present-biased, we need to evaluate how to correct these inefficiencies and what the cost would be.
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