Intergenerational justice when future worlds are uncertain

Intergenerational Justice Review Foundation for the Rights of Future Generations

Sustainability and Intergenerational Justice

As temporary custodians of the planet, those who are alive at any given time can do a better or worse job of handing it on to their successors. I take that simple thought to animate concerns about what we ought to be doing to preserve conditions that will make life worth living (or indeed liveable at all) in the future, and especially in the time after those currently alive will have died (‘fut...

Three Conceptions of Intergenerational Justice

Poverty Orderings when Welfare Comparisons are Uncertain

In applied welfare economics, equivalence scales for household composition and size corrections, and appropriate price de‡ators are minimum requirements to perform interhousehold comparisons of welfare, measured via household income or consumption information. In practice, the information available is insu¢cient and only approximate price or household composition corrections are available. Pove...

How should the distant future be discounted when discount rates are uncertain?

It is not immediately clear how to discount distant-future events, like climate change, when the distant-future discount rate itself is uncertain. The so-called “WeitzmanGollier puzzle” is the fact that two seemingly symmetric and equally plausible ways of dealing with uncertain future discount rates appear to give diametrically opposed results with the opposite policy implications. We explain ...