Oxford economist Paul Collier is the author of the wonderful book The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. And today Paul offers an insightful examination of the economic logic of the Stern Report et al. Excerpt:
…Personally, I doubt whether the utilitarian calculus is the right ethical framework in which to think about global warming. It gives us numerical answers, but it just does not feel as though the calculus captures my concerns. Take the valuation of the future: are we radically undervaluing the interests of future people?
Of course, we cannot tell how the future will feel, but one simple test is to ask ourselves how we feel about the past – are we angry that our great-grandparents did not live more frugally so that we would now be richer? Personally, of all the things I would have liked my great-grandparents to do differently, this is not one of them. However, you may feel differently.
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It is fairly obvious that adequately compensating the future for letting it fry is likely to be a more expensive undertaking than curbing our carbon emissions. Remember that future people are likely to be much richer than we are, and so what they would regard as fair compensation would be prodigious. Note how, if obligation rather than utility is to be our ethical guide, the fact that the future is likely to be richer is an argument to curb our emissions, not an argument for neglect.
Ultimately, in a democracy our policy decision rules must rest on ethical principles that are widely shared by citizens. I suspect that most people feel that they should reduce carbon emissions, but the key issue is why? Is their motivation better captured by the utilitarian calculus used by economists, or by a sense of custodial obligation towards our natural legacy, of which carbon is but one instance?
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