Posts Tagged ‘planning’
“The question isn’t ‘what can an economy produce today?’, but ‘what can it learn to produce?'”*…
… and how we do we create the conditions to encourage that learning? Industrial policy, one possible answer, is making a comeback. But as Henry Farrell explains, that raises another challenge…
… For decades, economists have argued that state policy makers lack the requisite knowledge to intervene appropriately in the economy. Accordingly, decisions over investments and innovation ought be taken by market actors. Now, the “market knows best” paradigm is in disrepair. It isn’t just that “hyperglobalization” has devoured its own preconditions, so that it is increasingly unsustainable. It is also that some goals of modern industrial policy are in principle impossible to solve through purely market mechanisms. To the extent, for example, that economics and national security have become interwoven, investment and innovation decisions involve tradeoffs that market actors are poorly equipped to resolve. There are good reasons why Adam Smith did not want to see defense policy handled through the market’s division of labor.
What we now face is a quite different kind of knowledge problem. We lack the kinds of expertise that we need to achieve key goals of industrial policy, or to evaluate the tradeoffs between them. This lack of knowledge is in large part a perverse by-product of the success of Chicago economists’ rhetoric. Decades of insistence that economic decisions be handed off from the state to markets has resulted in a remarkable lack of understanding among government policy makers about how markets, in fact, work. This has a variety of consequences. Policy mistakes are more likely. Market actors find it easier to manipulate the understanding of government policy makers, e.g. as to the extent and kind of subsidies required in particular sectors or for particular purposes.
One way to remedy this is to rethink the kinds of specialist education that public administrators receive, both to ensure that low and mid-level functionaries are better equipped to take the decisions they need to take, and to signal increased prestige for non-traditional forms of policy knowledge. As the sociological literature suggests, elite US policy schools such as the Harvard Kennedy School, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and Georgetown University (to name three entirely random examples) play a key role not simply in directly imparting knowledge through education, but in disseminating norms about the kinds of knowledge that are considered to be appropriate for policy decisions. These schools have by and large converged on a framework derived from a watered down version of neoclassical [indeed. one might suggest, neoliberal] economics. I argue that new skills, including but not limited to network science, material science and engineering, and use of machine learning would be one useful contribution towards solving the new knowledge problem…
Assuring access to the right tools and techniques: “Industrial policy and the new knowledge problem,” from @henryfarrell in @crookedtimber.
* Joseph Stiglitz (@JosephEStiglitz)
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As we retool, we might send thoughtfully calculated birthday greetings to Paul Collier; he was born on this date in 1949. An economist who specializes in development, he is a professor at Oxford and director of the International Growth Centre.
Collier is a specialist in the political, economic and developmental predicaments of low-income countries, and is probably best known for his 2007 book, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. His philosophy, developed there and in his 2010 The Plundered Planet, is encapsulated in his formulas:
- Nature – Technology + Regulation = Starvation
- Nature + Technology – Regulation = Plunder
- Nature + Technology + Regulation (good governance) = Prosperity
“By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities”*…
… yes, but in what, Christopher Moon-Miklaucic asks, does that wisdom inhere?
The [Robert] Moses and [Jane] Jacobs debate begins as a disagreement over the future of New York City but ends up becoming a much larger representation of two divergent views of the fate of cities. If Jacobs saw in cities, life, diversity, and complexity, Moses saw infrastructure, efficiency, and the act of building. Robert Caro famously dubbed him the “Power Broker”, symbolizing a top-down, large-scale approach to planning, while Jacobs was seen as the “eye on the street”, in many ways epitomizing a much smaller-scale reading of the city as viewed from the handlebars of her bicycle. Despite looking at the city from different angles, and offering wildly different solutions to improving city life, both Jacobs and Moses were ultimately critics of utopian planners such as Ebenezer Howard, Daniel Burnham, Le Corbusier and other “order obsessed” types. Unsurprisingly, planners have long been fascinated by these two characters, who have been simultaneously celebrated and polarizing. Their disagreements have often served as a proxy of both the power and importance of citizen participation, but also its striking limitations. Today, the debate is being reassessed because despite the romantic allure of Jacobs, the efficiency of the planning process and its ability to strive for change while taking into account a wide variety of needs is still in question, and a longing for Moses’ adept ability to navigate bureaucracies seems to be resurfacing…
[The author unpacks the history of the disagreement, and unpacks the duelling principles/imperatives at work on each side…]
…It might be too simple to say that Jacobs’ view was ethically and morally correct. Clearly, planners should strive to ensure that the will of the people is represented adequately and equally in the plans put forth by developers and local governments. The issue, though, is that Jacobs criticized city planning, but not the “big economic and social forces” that originated many of the projects she opposed. In other words, Moses wasn’t completely alone in his undertaking to shape New York City. There were powerful vested interests behind his actions as well, and his accomplishment was the ability to “get things done” in a manner that most wouldn’t expect of municipal government. If planning is often criticized for being too slow, and even when communities are involved the equity results remain suboptimal, Moses seems to represent an alternative, more efficient approach.
Skepticism of a perfunctory model of citizen participation, which still often rests in procedural and consultative arrangements, may be the reason behind the rehabilitation of Moses and the shifting of the narrative underlying the debate. Perhaps within a context of an ever-changing world that is obsessed with instant gratification, Moses as “America’s greatest builder” is seen as the type of planner needed in order to quickly and efficiently improve current conditions, whereas Jacobs is seen as the “champion of stasis”, content with the status quo and seeking to stifle inevitable change and progress. To some, the Jacobean ideology of community-based planning might represent a decline in the authority and influence of the planner, leading to a nostalgic longing for the golden age of Moses, when planners were considered masters of their domain and free from the bureaucratic shackles that often limit large-scale developments.
Ultimately, the Moses and Jacobs debate remains relevant to planners today because it serves as a proxy for the power and limitations of citizen participation. If the planning sphere often links Jacobs’ life and work to a recently emerging style of communicative action planning, the criticisms of the approach are part of the reason Moses’ legacy is being rewritten. To some, Jacobs’ ideologies have led to a style of city planning that is too cautious and self-reflective, and Moses’ top-down methods symbolize planning that asserts itself in order to focus less on process and more on outcomes. If not slightly alarming, this shift in narrative should lead the planning profession to ask itself a difficult question which lurks within the shadows of this debate: what do we value more, the effects planning decisions have on communities and people, or the physical act of building and getting things done?
A half-century-old debate about New York City’s urban development continues to evoke a multitude of controversies in planning: “Robert Moses, Jane Jacobs, and the Ever-Changing Role of the Planner,” from @chris_moonm in @TDocumentarian.
* Socrates
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As we ponder planning, we might that it was on this date in 1781 that El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles (“The town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels”; in common use, Pueblo de los Ángeles) was settled. By the 20th century it became known simply as Los Angeles.
“Do for the future what you’re grateful the past did for you. (Or what you wish the past had done for you.)”*…
A love letter to infrastructure…
The Nobel Prize–winning developmental economist Amartya Sen describes income and wealth as desirable “because, typically, they are admirable general-purpose means for having more freedom to lead the kind of lives we have reason to value. The usefulness of wealth lies in the things that it allows us to do—the substantive freedoms it helps us to achieve.” This is also a fairly good description of infrastructural systems: they’re a general-purpose means of freeing up time, energy, and attention. On a day-to-day basis, my personal freedom doesn’t come from money per se—it mostly comes from having a home where these systems are built into the walls, which became abundantly clear during the coronavirus pandemic. Stable housing and a salary that covered my utility bills meant that, with the exception of food and taking out the trash, all of my basic needs were met without my ever even having to go outside. It’s worth noting that this is an important reason why guaranteed housing for everyone is important—not just because of privacy, security, and a legible address, but also because our homes are nodes on these infrastructural networks. They are our locus of access to clean water and sewage, electricity, and telecommunications.
But the real difference between money and infrastructural systems as general-purpose providers of freedom is that money is individual and our infrastructural systems are, by their nature, collective. If municipal water systems mean that we are enduringly connected to each other through the landscape where our bodies are, our other systems ratchet this up by orders of magnitude. Behind the wheel of a car, we are a cyborg: our human body controls a powered exoskeleton that lets us move further and faster than we ever could without it. But this freedom depends on roads and supply chains for fuels, to say nothing of traffic laws and safety regulations. In researcher Paul Graham Raven’s memorable formulation, infrastructural systems make us all into collective cyborgs. Alone in my apartment, when I reach out my hand to flip a switch or turn on a tap, I am a continent-spanning colossus, tapping into vast systems that span thousands of miles to bring energy, atoms, and information to my household. But I’m only the slenderest tranche of these collective systems, constituting the whole with all the other members of our federated infrastructural cyborg bodies.
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The philosopher John Rawls once offered up a thought experiment, building on the classic question: How best should society be ordered? His key addition was the concept of a “veil of ignorance”: not just that you would live in the society you designed, but that you wouldn’t know ahead of time what role you would have within it. So, while you might want to live in a world where you are an absolute ruler whose every whim is fulfilled by fawning minions, the veil of ignorance means that there is no guarantee you wouldn’t be one of the minions—in fact, given the numerical odds, it’s a lot more likely. Positing a veil of ignorance is a powerful tool to consider more equitable societies.
Seen from this perspective, shared infrastructural systems provide for the basic needs of—and therefore grant agency to—members of a community in a way that would satisfy Rawls. Universal provision of water, sewage, electricity, access to transportation networks that allow for personal mobility, and broadband internet access creates a society where everyone—rich or poor, regardless of what you look like or believe—has access to at least a baseline level of agency and opportunity.
But here’s the kicker: it’s not a thought experiment. We’ve all passed through Rawls’s veil of ignorance. None of us chooses the circumstances of our birth. This is immediate and inarguable if you’re the child of immigrants. If one of the most salient facts of my life is that I was born in Canada, it’s also obvious that I had nothing to do with it. But it’s equally true for the American who proudly traces their family back to ancestors who came over on the Mayflower, or the English family whose landholdings are listed in the Domesday Book. Had I been born in India, my infrastructural birthright would have been far less robust as an underpinning for the life of agency and opportunity that I am fortunate to live, which stems in large part from the sheer blind luck (from my perspective) of being born in Canada.
…
Our infrastructural systems are the technological basis of the modern world, the basis for a level of global wealth and personal agency that would have been unthinkable only a few centuries ago. But those of us who have been fortunate enough to live as part of a collective cyborg have gained our personal agency at an enormous moral cost. And now anthropogenic climate change is teaching us that there are no others, no elsewhere.
For millennia, these systems have been built out assuming a steady, predictable landscape, allowing us to design long-lived networks where century-old aqueducts underlay new college campuses. But this predictability is becoming a thing of the past. More heat in the atmosphere means warmer weather and shifting climates, with attendant droughts, wildfires, and more frequent and severe hurricanes. But it also increases uncertainty: as the effects of greenhouse gases compound, we may reach tipping points, trigger positive feedback loops, and face other unprecedented changes to climates. Engineers can’t design systems to withstand hundred-year storms when the last century provides little guide to the weather of the next. No matter where in the world you reside, this is the future we will all have to live in. The only question that remains is what kind of world we want to build there.
Our shared infrastructural systems are the most profound and effective means that we’ve created to both relieve the day-to-day burdens of meeting our bodies’ needs and to allow us to go beyond their physiological limits. To face anthropogenic climate change is to become a civilization that can respond to this shifting, unpredictable new world while maintaining these systems: if you benefit from them today, then any future in which they are compromised is recognizably a dystopia. But that “dystopia” is where most of the world already lives. To face anthropogenic climate change ethically is to do so in a way that minimizes human suffering.
Mitigation—limiting the amount of warming, primarily through decarbonizing our energy sources—is one element of this transition. But the true promise of renewable energy is not that it doesn’t contribute to climate change. It’s that renewable energy is ubiquitous and abundant—if every human used energy at the same rate as North Americans, it would still only be a tiny percentage of the solar energy that reaches the Earth. Transforming our energy systems, and the infrastructural systems that they power, so that they become sustainable and resilient might be the most powerful lever that we have to not just survive this transition but to create a world where everyone can thrive. And given the planetwide interconnectedness of infrastructural systems, except in the shortest of short terms, they will be maintained equitably or not at all.
Ursula Franklin wrote, “Central to any new technology is the concept of justice.” We can commit to developing the technologies and building out new infrastructural systems that are flexible and sustainable, but we have the same urgency and unparalleled opportunity to transform our ultrastructure, the social systems that surround and shape them. Every human being has a body with similar needs, embedded in the material world at a specific place in the landscape. This requires a different relationship with each other, one in which we acknowledge and act on how we are connected to each other through our bodies in the landscapes where we find ourselves. We need to have a conception of infrastructural citizenship that includes a responsibility to look after each other, in perpetuity. And with that, we can begin to transform our technological systems into systems of compassion, care, and resource-sharing at all scales, from the individual level, through the level of cities and nations, all the way up to the global.
Our social relationships with each other—our culture, our learning, our art, our shared jokes and shared sorrow, raising our children, attending to our elderly, and together dreaming of our future—these are the essence of what it means to be human. We thrive as individuals and communities by caring for others, and being taken care of in turn. Collective infrastructural systems that are resilient, sustainable, and globally equitable provide the means for us to care for each other at scale. They are a commitment to our shared humanity.
Bodies, agency, and infrastructure: “Care At Scale,” from Debbie Chachra (@debcha), via the indispensable Exponential View (@ExponentialView). Eminently worth reading in full.
See also: “Infrastructure is much more important than architecture“; and resonantly, “Kim Stanley Robinson: a climate plan for a world in flames.”
* Danny Hillis’ “Golden Rule of Time,” as quoted by Stewart Brand in Whole Earth Discipline
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As we build foundations, we might recall that it was on this date in 1904 that the first balloon used for meteorologic research in the U.S. was released near St. Louis, Missouri. The balloon carried instruments that measured barometric pressure, temperature, and humidity, that returned to Earth when the balloon burst.
The first weather balloon was launched in France in 1892. Prior to using balloons, the U.S. used kites tethered by piano wire– the downsides being the limited distance kites could ascend (less than 2 miles), the inability to use them if the wind was too light or too strong, and potential for the kites to break away.
Since this first launch, millions of weather balloons have been launched by the National Weather Service and its predecessor organizations.
“Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace”*…
We tend dramatically to underestimate the role of randomness in the world…
Arkansas was one out away from the 2018 College World Series championship, leading Oregon State in the series and 3-2 in the ninth inning of the game when Cadyn Grenier lofted a foul pop down the right-field line. Three Razorbacks converged on the ball and were in position to make a routine play on it, only to watch it fall untouched to the ground in the midst of them. Had any one of them made the play, Arkansas would have been the national champion.
Nobody did.
Given “another lifeline,” Grenier hit an RBI single to tie the game before Trevor Larnach launched a two-run homer to give the Beavers a 5-3 lead and, ultimately, the game. “As soon as you see the ball drop, you know you have another life,” Grenier said. “That’s a gift.” The Beavers accepted the gift eagerly and went on win the championship the next day as Oregon State rode freshman pitcher Kevin Abel to a 5-0 win over Arkansas in the deciding game of the series. Abel threw a complete game shutout and retired the last 20 hitters he faced.
The highly unlikely happens pretty much all the time…
We readily – routinely – underestimate the power and impact of randomness in and on our lives. In his book, The Drunkard’s Walk, Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow employs the idea of the “drunkard’s [random] walk” to compare “the paths molecules follow as they fly through space, incessantly bumping, and being bumped by, their sister molecules,” with “our lives, our paths from college to career, from single life to family life, from first hole of golf to eighteenth.”
Although countless random interactions seem to cancel each another out within large data sets, sometimes, “when pure luck occasionally leads to a lopsided preponderance of hits from some particular direction…a noticeable jiggle occurs.” When that happens, we notice the unlikely directional jiggle and build a carefully concocted story around it while ignoring the many, many random, counteracting collisions.
As Tversky and Kahneman have explained, “Chance is commonly viewed as a self-correcting process in which a deviation in one direction induces a deviation in the opposite direction to restore the equilibrium. In fact, deviations are not ‘corrected’ as a chance process unfolds, they are merely diluted.”
…
As Stephen Jay Gould famously argued, were we able to recreate the experiment of life on Earth a million different times, nothing would ever be the same, because evolution relies upon randomness. Indeed, the essence of history is contingency.
Randomness rules.
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Luck matters. A lot. Yet, we tend dramatically to underestimate the role of randomness in the world.
The self-serving bias is our tendency to see the good stuff that happens as our doing (“we worked really hard and executed the game plan well”) while the bad stuff isn’t our fault (“It just wasn’t our night” or “we simply couldn’t catch a break” or “we would have won if the umpiring hadn’t been so awful”). Thus, desirable results are typically due to our skill and hard work — not luck — while lousy results are outside of our control and the offspring of being unlucky.
Two fine books undermine this outlook by (rightly) attributing a surprising amount of what happens to us — both good and bad – to luck. Michael Mauboussin’s The Success Equation seeks to untangle elements of luck and skill in sports, investing, and business. Ed Smith’s Luck considers a number of fields – international finance, war, sports, and even his own marriage – to examine how random chance influences the world around us. For example, Mauboussin describes the “paradox of skill” as follows: “As skill improves, performance becomes more consistent, and therefore luck becomes more important.” In investing, therefore (and for example), as the population of skilled investors has increased, the variation in skill has narrowed, making luck increasingly important to outcomes.
On account of the growth and development of the investment industry, John Bogle could quite consistently write his senior thesis at Princeton on the successes of active fund management and then go on to found Vanguard and become the primary developer and intellectual forefather of indexing. In other words, the ever-increasing aggregate skill (supplemented by massive computing power) of the investment world has come largely to cancel itself out.
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After a big or revolutionary event, we tend to see it as having been inevitable. Such is the narrative fallacy. In this paper, ESSEC Business School’s Stoyan Sgourev notes that scholars of innovation typically focus upon the usual type of case, where incremental improvements rule the day. Sgourev moves past the typical to look at the unusual type of case, where there is a radical leap forward (equivalent to Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shifts in science), as with Picasso and Les Demoiselles.
As Sgourev carefully argued, the Paris art market of Picasso’s time had recently become receptive to the commercial possibilities of risk-taking. Thus, artistic innovation was becoming commercially viable. Breaking with the past was then being encouraged for the first time. It would soon be demanded.
Most significantly for our purposes, Sgourev’s analysis of Cubism suggests that having an exceptional idea isn’t enough. For radical innovation really to take hold, market conditions have to be right, making its success a function of luck and timing as much as genius. Note that Van Gogh — no less a genius than Picasso — never sold a painting in his lifetime.
As noted above, we all like to think that our successes are earned and that only our failures are due to luck – bad luck. But the old expression – it’s better to be lucky than good – is at least partly true. That said, it’s best to be lucky *and* good. As a consequence, in all probabilistic fields (which is nearly all of them), the best performers dwell on process and diversify their bets. You should do the same…
As [Nate] Silver emphasizes in The Signal and the Noise, we readily overestimate the degree of predictability in complex systems [and t]he experts we see in the media are much too sure of themselves (I wrote about this problem in our industry from a slightly different angle…). Much of what we attribute to skill is actually luck.
Plan accordingly.
Taking the unaccountable into account: “Randomness Rules,” from Bob Seawright (@RPSeawright), via @JVLast
[image above: source]
* James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
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As we contemplate chance, we might spare a thought for Oskar Morgenstern; he died on this date in 1977. An economist who fled Nazi Germany for Princeton, he collaborated with the mathematician John von Neumann to write Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, published in 1944, which is recognized as the first book on game theory— thus co-founding the field.
Game theory was developed extensively in the 1950s, and has become widely recognized as an important tool in many fields– perhaps especially in the study of evolution. Eleven game theorists have won the economics Nobel Prize, and John Maynard Smith was awarded the Crafoord Prize for his application of evolutionary game theory.
Game theory’s roots date back (at least) to the 1654 letters between Pascal and Fermat, which (along with work by Cardano and Huygens) marked the beginning of probability theory. (See Peter Bernstein’s marvelous Against the Gods.) The application of probability (Bayes’ rule, discrete and continuous random variables, and the computation of expectations) accounts for the utility of game theory; the role of randomness (along with the behavioral psychology of a game’s participants) explain why it’s not a perfect predictor.
“Be a good ancestor”*…
Even though– especially because– it’s hard…
… Mental time travel is essential. In one of Aesop’s fables, ants chastise a grasshopper for not collecting food for the winter; the grasshopper, who lives in the moment, admits, “I was so busy singing that I hadn’t the time.” It’s important to find a proper balance between being in the moment and stepping out of it. We all know people who live too much in the past or worry too much about the future. At the end of their lives, people often regret most their failures to act, stemming from unrealistic worries about consequences. Others, indifferent to the future or disdainful of the past, become unwise risk-takers or jerks. Any functioning person has to live, to some extent, out of the moment. We might also think that it’s right for our consciousnesses to shift to other times—such inner mobility is part of a rich and meaningful life.
On a group level, too, we struggle to strike a balance. It’s a common complaint that, as societies, we are too fixated on the present and the immediate future. In 2019, in a speech to the United Nations about climate change, the young activist Greta Thunberg inveighed against the inaction of policymakers: “Young people are starting to understand your betrayal,” she said. “The eyes of all future generations are upon you.” But, if their inaction is a betrayal, it’s most likely not a malicious one; it’s just that our current pleasures and predicaments are much more salient in our minds than the fates of our descendants. And there are also those who worry that we are too future-biased. A typical reaction to long-range programs, such as John F. Kennedy’s Apollo program or Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is that the money would be better spent on those who need it right now. Others complain that we are too focussed on the past, or with the sentimental reconstruction of it. Past, present, future; history, this year, the decades to come. How should we balance them in our minds?
Meghan Sullivan, a philosopher at the University of Notre Dame, contemplates these questions in her book “Time Biases: A Theory of Rational Planning and Personal Persistence.” Sullivan is mainly concerned with how we relate to time as individuals, and she thinks that many of us do it poorly, because we are “time-biased”—we have unwarranted preferences about when events should happen. Maybe you have a “near bias”: you eat the popcorn as the movie is about to start, even though you would probably enjoy it more if you waited. Maybe you have a “future bias”: you are upset about an unpleasant task that you have to do tomorrow, even though you’re hardly bothered by the memory of performing an equally unpleasant task yesterday. Or maybe you have a “structural bias,” preferring your experiences to have a certain temporal shape: you plan your vacation such that the best part comes at the end.
For Sullivan, all of these time biases are mistakes. She advocates for temporal neutrality—a habit of mind that gives the past, the present, and the future equal weight. She arrives at her arguments for temporal neutrality by outlining several principles of rational decision-making. According to the principle of success, Sullivan writes, a rational person prefers that “her life going forward go as well as possible”; according to the principle of non-arbitrariness, a rational person’s preferences “are insensitive to arbitrary differences.” A commitment to being rational, Sullivan argues, will make us more time-neutral, and temporal neutrality will help us think better about everyday problems, such as how best to care for elderly parents and save for retirement.
Perhaps our biggest time error is near bias—caring too much about what’s about to happen, and too little about the future. There are occasions when this kind of near bias can be rational: if someone offers you the choice between a gift of a thousand dollars today and a year from now, you’d be justified in taking the money now, for any number of reasons. (You can put it in the bank and get interest; there’s a chance you could die in the next year; the gift giver could change her mind.) Still, it’s more often the case that, as economists say, we too steeply “discount” the value of what’s to come. This near bias pulls at us in our everyday decisions. We tend to be cool and rational when planning for the far-off future, but we lose control when temptations grow nearer in time.
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If near bias is irrational, Sullivan argues, so is future bias… Sullivan shares an example invented by the philosopher Derek Parfit. Suppose that you require surgery. It’s an unpleasant procedure, for which you need to be awake, in order to coöperate with the surgeon. Afterward, you will be given a drug that wipes out your memory of the experience. On the appointed day, you wake up in the hospital bed, confused, and ask the nurse about the surgery. She says that there are two patients in the ward—one who’s already had the operation, and another who’s soon to have it; she adds that, unusually, the operation that already happened took much longer than expected. She isn’t sure which patient you are, and has to go check. You would be greatly relieved, Parfit says, if the nurse comes back and tells you that you already had the operation. That is, you would willingly consign to your past self a long and agonizing procedure to avoid a much shorter procedure to come.
There is an evolutionary logic behind this kind of bias. As Caspar Hare, a philosopher at M.I.T., puts it, “It is not an accident that we are future-biased with respect to pain. That feature of ourselves has been selected-for by evolution.” In general, Hare writes, it seems likely that animals that focussed their attention on the future survived longer and reproduced more…
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In 1992, Parfit teamed up with the economist Tyler Cowen to argue, in a book chapter, that our governments are too eager to discount the fortunes of future people. Parfit and Cowen proposed that even a small bias in favor of the present over the future could have huge consequences over time. Suppose that a politician reasons that one life now is equal to 1.01 lives a year from now, and so embraces policies that favor a hundred people now over a hundred people next year. This hardly seems to matter—but this “discount rate” of one per cent per year implies that we would rather save a single life now, at the cost of a million lives in about fourteen hundred years. At a ten-per-cent discount rate, one life now would be worth a million in a mere century and half. Although no one in power thinks in exactly these terms, many of our decisions favor the present over the future.
In a 2018 book, “Stubborn Attachments,” Cowen expands on the idea, asking how we can fight near bias at a societal level and better further the interests of future people. There are “a variety of relevant values” that we might want to consider in our temporal rebalancing, he writes, “including human well-being, justice, fairness, beauty, the artistic peaks of human achievement, the quality of mercy,” and so on. Cowen concludes that the best way to maximize all of these things for the future is to increase economic growth. (He doesn’t go just by G.D.P.—he adds in various measures of “leisure time, household production, and environmental amenities.”)
The thing about economic growth, Cowen tells us, is that it has the potential to advance just about everything that people value. “Wealthier societies have better living standards, better medicines, and offer greater personal autonomy, greater fulfillment, and more sources of fun,” he writes. He concedes that, in recent decades, inequality has risen within wealthier nations, but also notes that, as a consequence of global economic growth, “recent world history has been an extraordinarily egalitarian time”: over all, countries are becoming more equal. In terms of happiness, Cowen shows that there is considerable evidence supporting the commonsense view that citizens of rich countries are happier than citizens of poor countries, and that, within rich countries, wealthier individuals are happier than poorer ones. The data actually understate the strength of the effect, Cowen writes, because many studies miss the happiness boost that comes from more years on the earth: “Researchers do not poll the dead.”
Cowen is sympathetic to the school of thought known as effective altruism, which holds that we should use data and research to figure out how to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people. But he worries that these sorts of altruists are too prone to think about the greatest good for people right now. An effective altruist might hold that, instead of spending money on some luxury for yourself, you should use it to help the poor. But, for Cowen, this sort of advice is too present-oriented. Even a small boost in the growth rate has enormous ramifications for years to come. “Our strongest obligations are to contribute to sustainable economic growth,” he writes, “and to support the general spread of civilization, rather than to engage in massive charitable redistribution in the narrower sense.” In general, Cowen thinks that policymakers should be more future-oriented. He suggests that we should put fewer resources into improving the lives of the elderly and devote correspondingly more resources to the young and the not-yet-born. Most politicians would balk at this suggestion, but, when they do the opposite—well, that’s a choice, too.
Cowen, to my mind, glosses over the problem of diminishing returns. Suppose that our prosperity increases a hundredfold. Life would be better, but would our happiness also increase by a multiple of a hundred? After a certain point, it might make sense to worry less about growth. Perhaps the most privileged of us are close to that point now. But these things can be hard to judge. The Babylonian kings might have thought that they were living the best possible lives, not realizing that, in the future, even everyday schmoes would be wiser and more pain-free, living longer, eating better, and traveling more.
Whether or not one agrees with Cowen’s thesis, there are clearly good reasons for adopting temporal neutrality on a societal level. It’s less clear that we have an obligation to be rigorously time-neutral as individuals. If we can indulge our own time biases without making horrible errors in judgment, why shouldn’t we? Why not distribute our pleasures and pains unevenly throughout our lives, if we believe that, for us, doing so will contribute to “life going forward as well as possible”? For many people, as Seneca wrote, “Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember.” We undertake activities that we know to be difficult or unpleasant because we see them as part of a good life and wish to think back upon them in the future. We curate our presents to furnish our futures with the right kinds of pasts. If this benign bias encourages us to take on difficult things, isn’t it wise to indulge the bias?
Many people suspect that a good life might be one that’s ordered in a certain way. Psychologists find that people tend to prefer the idea of a wonderful life that ends abruptly to the idea of an equally wonderful one that includes some additional, mildly pleasant years—the “James Dean effect.” There’s also an appeal to starting with the worst and then seeing things improve. Andy Dufresne, the protagonist of the film “The Shawshank Redemption,” based on a novella by Stephen King, is convicted of double murder but maintains his innocence; he spends twenty-eight years in prison before stealing millions of dollars from his corrupt warden and escaping, then living out the rest of his life on a Mexican beach. It’s an exhilarating and powerful tale, but, if one flipped the order—coastal paradise, then brutal prison—it would be impossible to enjoy. Rags to riches beats riches to rags, even if the good and the bad are in precise balance. Maybe this is what Sullivan calls a structural bias—but, without structure, there’s no story, and stories are good things to have.
It’s true that time-biased thinking can mislead us. Imagine that you are listening to a symphony for a pleasurable ninety minutes—and then, at the end, someone’s cell phone goes off, to loud shushing and stifled laughter. You might say that these awful thirty seconds ruined the experience, even though the first ninety-nine per cent of it was wonderful, and think that, if the phone had rung at the start, it would have been less of a problem. But is a disruption in the finale really worse than an interruption in the overture? Sullivan’s arguments show that we should try reconsidering those kinds of intuitions—and that we should be wary, in general, of the strange places to which they can lead us. In a classic series of studies, Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues exposed volunteers to two different experiences—sixty seconds of moderate pain, and sixty seconds of moderate pain followed by thirty seconds of mild pain. When they asked people which experience they would rather repeat, most chose the second experience, just because it ended better. There is little good to be said about choosing more over-all pain just because the experience ends on the right note.
And yet giving up all our time biases is a lot to ask. We are, it seems, constituted to favor the here and now, to radically discount the distant future, and to give special weight to how experiences end. We can move in the direction of temporal neutrality, fighting against certain time biases just as we resist our other unreasonable biases and preferences. This may make us more rational, more kind to others, and, at times, more happy.
How much should we value the past, the present, and the future? “Being in Time,” from Paul Bloom (@paulbloomatyale)
* “Be a good ancestor. Stand for something bigger than yourself. Add value to the Earth during your sojourn.” – Marian Wright Edelman
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As we take the long view, we might recall that it was on this date in 356 BC that the second version of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus (which had replaced a Bronze Age structure) was destroyed by arson (by a man, Herostratus, set fire to the wooden roof-beams, seeking fame at any cost; thus the term “herostratic fame“).
Its third iteration was finished several decades later, and survived for six centuries. It was described in Antipater of Sidon‘s list of the world’s Seven Wonders:
I have set eyes on the wall of lofty Babylon on which is a road for chariots, and the statue of Zeus by the Alpheus, and the hanging gardens, and the colossus of the Sun, and the huge labour of the high pyramids, and the vast tomb of Mausolus; but when I saw the house of Artemis that mounted to the clouds, those other marvels lost their brilliancy, and I said, “Lo, apart from Olympus, the Sun never looked on aught so grand”.
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