“Ensuring Future Prosperity by Governing for Generations to Come”

Sociologists worry that we often think only of ourselves.

“There has been a growing recognition that over the past few decades the economy and society have become incredibly focused on the individual, to the detriment of our social fabric,” says Lily L. Tsai, MIT professor of political science.

Tsai, who is also director and founder of the MIT Governance LAB (MIT GOV/LAB) and current chair of the MIT faculty, is interested in distributive justice — allocating resources fairly across different groups of people. Usually, this would mean dividing resources between different socioeconomic groups, or between different countries.

But in an article in the magazine DaedalusTsai discusses policies and institutions that consider people’s needs in the future when determining who is entitled to which resources. That is, it expands our concept of a collective society to include people who have not yet been born and who will bear the brunt of future climate change.

Some groups of people take into account the needs of future people when making decisions. For example, Wales has a Commissioner for Future Generations who monitors whether the government’s actions are detrimental to the needs of future generations. The Norwegian Petroleum Fund invests parts of its oil profits for future generations. Tsai says the MIT scholarship is “explicitly mandated” to ensure that future students are in as good a condition as current students.

But in other ways, societies place less value on the needs of their descendants. For example, to determine total return on investment, governments use something called a discount rate that puts more value into the current return on investment than the future return on investment. And humans are currently consuming the planet’s resources at an unsustainable rate, which in turn is raising global temperatures and making the Earth less habitable for our children and our children.

The purpose of Tsai’s article is not to suggest how governments might, for example, set discount rates that more fairly consider future people. She says, “I’m interested in things that make people care about lowering the discount rate, and therefore value the future more.” “What are the ethical obligations and types of cultural practices or social institutions that make people care the most?”

Tsai believes that the variability of the modern world and anxiety about the future – say, the future habitability of the planet – make it difficult for people to consider the needs of their descendants. In Tsai’s 2021 book When People Want Punishment, she argues that this volatility and restlessness cause people to seek more stability and order.

“The more uncertain the future, the less you can be sure that saving for the future will be of value to anyone,” she says. Therefore, part of the solution may be to make people feel less anxious and more stable, which Tsai says can be done with the institutions we already have, such as welfare systems.

She also believes that the rate at which things are changing in the modern world has damaged our ability to think in the long term. “We no longer think the way we used to think in terms of decades and centuries,” she says.

MIT/MIT is working with partners to figure out how to conduct experiments in a lab setting while developing democratic practices or institutions that might better distribute resources among current and future people. This will allow researchers to assess whether structuring interactions or making decisions in a certain way encourages people to save more for people in the future.

Tsai believes that getting people to care for their grandchildren is a problem that researchers can work on, and that humans have a natural tendency to look into the future. People have a desire to be entrusted with things of importance, to leave a legacy, and to preserve.

“I think many humans actually naturally preserve things that are valuable and rare, and there’s a strange way society has eroded human instinct in favor of a culture of consumption,” she says. She adds that we need to “reimagine the kinds of practices that encourage conservation rather than consumption.”

This story is republished with permission from MIT News (web.mit.edu/newsoffice/), a popular site covering news related to research, innovation, and teaching at MIT.