Choosing the future: Markets, ethics and rapprochement in social discounting
Antony Millner (University of California, Santa Barbara and National Bureau of Economic Research) and Geoffrey Heal (Columbia University and National Bureau of Economic Research)
GPI Working Paper No. 13-2021, published in Journal of Economics Literature
This paper provides a critical review of the literature on choosing social discount rates (SDRs) for public cost-benefit analysis. We discuss two dominant approaches, the first based on market prices, and the second based on intertemporal ethics. While both methods have attractive features, neither is immune to criticism. The market-based approach is not entirely persuasive even if markets are perfect, and faces further headwinds once the implications of market imperfections are recognised. By contrast, the ‘ethical’ approach – which relates SDRs to marginal rates of substitution implicit in a single planner’s intertemporal welfare function – does not rely exclusively on markets, but raises difficult questions about what that welfare function should be. There is considerable disagreement on this matter, which translates into enormous variation in the evaluation of long-run payoffs. We discuss the origins of these disagreements, and suggest that they are difficult to resolve unequivocally. This leads us to propose a third approach that recognises the immutable nature of some normative disagreements, and proposes methods for aggregating diverse theories of intertemporal social welfare. We illustrate the application of these methods to social discounting, and suggest that they may help us to move beyond long-standing debates that have bedevilled this field.
Other working papers
The Shutdown Problem: An AI Engineering Puzzle for Decision Theorists – Elliott Thornley (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
I explain and motivate the shutdown problem: the problem of designing artificial agents that (1) shut down when a shutdown button is pressed, (2) don’t try to prevent or cause the pressing of the shutdown button, and (3) otherwise pursue goals competently. I prove three theorems that make the difficulty precise. These theorems suggest that agents satisfying some innocuous-seeming conditions will often try to prevent or cause the pressing of the shutdown button, even in cases where it’s costly to do so. I end by noting that…
Once More, Without Feeling – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
I argue for a pluralist theory of moral standing, on which both welfare subjectivity and autonomy can confer moral status. I argue that autonomy doesn’t entail welfare subjectivity, but can ground moral standing in its absence. Although I highlight the existence of plausible views on which autonomy entails phenomenal consciousness, I primarily emphasize the need for philosophical debates about the relationship between phenomenal consciousness and moral standing to engage with neglected questions about the nature…
The Conservation Multiplier – Bård Harstad (University of Oslo)
Every government that controls an exhaustible resource must decide whether to exploit it or to conserve and thereby let the subsequent government decide whether to exploit or conserve. This paper develops a positive theory of this situation and shows when a small change in parameter values has a multiplier effect on exploitation. The multiplier strengthens the influence of a lobby paying for exploitation, and of a donor compensating for conservation. …