![]() “We no longer think in terms of decades and centuries the way in which we used to,” she says. She also thinks the rate at which things change in the modern world has hurt our ability to consider the long view. ![]() So, part of the solution could be making people feel less unsettled and more stable, which Tsai says can be done with institutions we already have, like social welfare systems. “The more uncertain the future is, the less you can be sure that saving for the future is going to be valuable to anybody,” she says. In Tsai’s 2021 book “ When People Want Punishment,” she argues that this volatility and anxiety make people seek out more stability and order. ![]() Tsai thinks the volatility of the modern world and anxiety about the future - say, the future habitability of the planet - make it harder for people to consider the needs of their descendants. “What are the moral commitments and the kinds of cultural practices or social institutions that make people care more?” “I’m interested in the things that make people care about setting the discount rate lower and therefore valuing the future more,” she says. The purpose of Tsai’s essay is not to suggest how, say, governments might set discount rates that more fairly consider future people. And humans are currently using up the planet’s resources at an unsustainable rate, which in turn is raising global temperatures and making earth less habitable for our children and our children’s children. For example, to determine the total return on an investment, governments use something called a discount rate that places more value in the present return on the investment than the future return on the investment. And MIT’s endowment “is explicitly charged” with ensuring that future students are just as well-off as current students, Tsai says.īut in other ways, societies place a lower value on the needs of their descendants. Norway’s Petroleum Fund invests parts of its oil profits for future generations. For example, Wales has a Future Generations Commissioner who monitors whether the government’s actions compromise the needs of future generations. Some groups of people do actually consider the needs of future people when making decisions. That is, they broaden our concept of a collective society to include people who haven’t been born yet and will bear the brunt of climate change in the future. Typically, that might mean splitting resources between different socioeconomic groups, or between different nations.īut in an essay in the journal Dædalus, Tsai discusses policies and institutions that consider the needs of people in the future when determining who deserves what resources. Tsai, who is also the director and founder of the MIT Governance LAB (MIT GOV/LAB) and is the current chair of the MIT faculty, is interested in distributive justice - allocating resources fairly across different groups of people. Tsai, the Ford Professor of Political Science at MIT. “There’s been an increasing recognition that over the last few decades the economy and society have become incredibly focused on the individual, to the detriment of our social fabric,” says Lily L. ![]() Social scientists worry that too often we think only of ourselves.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |