Week 4: What We Owe the Future 

In Weeks 1 and 2 we discussed attempting to quantify the impact of altruistic interventions. However, most cost-effectiveness analyses can only take into account the short-run effects of the interventions, and struggle to take into account long-run knock-on effects and side effects. This criticism has been made against early effective altruist attempts to evaluate interventions based on cost-effectiveness.

This week we’ll explore a different approach to finding high-impact interventions - ‘longtermism’ - which attempts to find interventions that beneficially influence the long-run course of humanity. 

Organisation spotlight: All-Party Parliamentary Group for Future Generations

The All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Future Generations is a UK parliamentary group working to create cross-party dialogue on combating short-termism and identifying ways to internalise concern for future generations into today’s policy making.

They believe that political short-termism can cause topics with widespread consequences – like climate change, public health trends and catastrophic and existential risks – to be neglected from the political agenda in favour of urgent matters.

You can see their research aimed at informing Parliamentarians on catastrophic risks and potential policy options here. You can see their events bringing together policy, academic, and industry communities here. 

Core materials

Exercise (20 mins.) [to be done in session]

A commonly held view within the EA community is that it's incredibly important to start from thinking about what it really means to make a difference, before thinking about specific ways of doing so. It’s hard to do the most good if we haven’t tried to get a clearer picture of what doing good means, and as we saw in week 3, clarifying our views here can be quite a complex task.

One of the core commitments of Effective Altruism is to the ethical ideal of impartiality. Although in normal life we may reasonably have special obligations (eg. to friends and family), in their altruistic efforts aspiring effective altruists strive to avoid privileging the interests of others based on arbitrary factors such as their race, gender, or nationality.

Longtermism posits that we should also avoid privileging the interests of individuals based on when they might live.

In this week’s exercise we’ll be reflecting on some prompts to help you start considering what you think about this question, i.e. "Do the interests of people who are not alive yet matter as much as the interests of people living today?"

Spend a couple minutes thinking through each prompt, and note down your thoughts - feel free to jot down uncertainties, or open questions you have that seem relevant. We encourage you to note down your thought process, but feel free to simply report your intuitions and gut feelings.

1.  Imagine you could save 100 people today by burying toxic waste that will, in 200 years, leak out and kill thousands (for the purposes of the question, assume you know with an unrealistic level of certainty that thousands will die). Would you choose to save the 100 now and kill the thousands later? Does it make a difference whether the toxic waste leaks out 200 years from now or 2000?

2.  Imagine you donate enough money to the Against Malaria Foundation to save a life. Unfortunately, there’s an administrative error with the currency transfer service you used, and AMF aren’t able to use your money until 5 years after you donated. Public health experts expect malaria rates to remain high over the next 5 years, so AMF expects your donation will be just as impactful in 5 years time. Many of the lives that the Against Malaria Foundation saves are of children under 5, and so the life your money saves is of someone who hadn’t been born yet when you donated.

If you had known this at the time, would you have been any less excited about the donation?

3.  From the recent paper, ‘Car Seats as Contraception’, by Jordan Nickerson and David H. Solomon: 

‘Since 1977, U.S. states have passed laws steadily raising the age for which a child must ride in a car safety seat. These laws significantly raise the cost of having a third child, as many regular-sized cars cannot fit three child seats in the back. Using census data and state-year variation in laws, we estimate that when women have two children of ages requiring mandated car seats, they have a lower annual probability of giving birth by 0.73 percentage points. Consistent with a causal channel, this effect is limited to third child births, is concentrated in households with access to a car, and is larger when a male is present (when both front seats are likely to be occupied). We estimate that these laws prevented only 57 car crash fatalities of children nationwide in 2017. Simultaneously, they led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000.’ 

Therefore, in this episode of the Freakonomics podcast, Solomon suggests that, ‘For every child’s life that’s saved by these laws, somewhere between 57 and 141 children aren’t born.’

If this analysis is correct, would you judge these laws to have an overall positive or negative effect (considering only the factor of the number of children saved/not born)?

Recommended reading 

Criticisms

More to explore