Intergenerational equity under catastrophic climate change
Aurélie Méjean (CNRS, Paris), Antonin Pottier (Centre d’Economie de la Sorbonne), Stéphane Zuber (Paris School of Economics - CNRS) and Marc Fleurbaey (Princeton University)
GPI Working Paper No. 5-2020, published in Climatic Change
Climate change raises the issue of intergenerational equity. As climate change threatens irreversible and dangerous impacts, possibly leading to extinction, the most relevant trade-off may not be between present and future consumption, but between present consumption and the mere existence of future generations. To investigate this trade-off, we build an integrated assessment model that explicitly accounts for the risk of extinction of future generations. We compare different climate policies, which change the probability of catastrophic outcomes yielding an early extinction, within the class of variable population utilitarian social welfare functions. We show that the risk of extinction is the main driver of the preferred policy over climate damages. We analyze the role of inequality aversion and population ethics. Usually a preference for large populations and a low inequality aversion favour the most ambitious climate policy, although there are cases where the effect of inequality aversion is reversed.
Other working papers
Economic inequality and the long-term future – Andreas T. Schmidt (University of Groningen) and Daan Juijn (CE Delft)
Why, if at all, should we object to economic inequality? Some central arguments – the argument from decreasing marginal utility for example – invoke instrumental reasons and object to inequality because of its effects…
It Only Takes One: The Psychology of Unilateral Decisions – Joshua Lewis (New York University) et al.
Sometimes, one decision can guarantee that a risky event will happen. For instance, it only took one team of researchers to synthesize and publish the horsepox genome, thus imposing its publication even though other researchers might have refrained for biosecurity reasons. We examine cases where everybody who can impose a given event has the same goal but different information about whether the event furthers that goal. …
The evidentialist’s wager – William MacAskill, Aron Vallinder (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University) Caspar Österheld (Duke University), Carl Shulman (Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University), Johannes Treutlein (TU Berlin)
Suppose that an altruistic and morally motivated agent who is uncertain between evidential decision theory (EDT) and causal decision theory (CDT) finds herself in a situation in which the two theories give conflicting verdicts. We argue that even if she has significantly higher credence in CDT, she should nevertheless act …