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Representing future generations in the political process

by Tobias Baumann. First published in 2020.

Introduction

Our actions and decisions clearly affect future generations. Climate change is the canonical example, but this is also true for social norms, values, levels of economic growth, and many other factors. Indeed, if we give equal weight to future individuals, it is likely that the effect of our actions on the long-term future far outstrip any short-term impacts.

However, future generations do not hold any power – as they do not yet exist – so their interests are often not taken into account to a sufficient degree. To fix this problem, we could introduce some form of representation of future generations1 in our political system. (See e.g. 1, 2, 3 for previous discussion.) In this post, I will consider different ways to empower future generations and discuss key challenges that arise.

Improved representation of future generations could be valuable for many reasons:

  • Political decisions would more adequately consider long-term impacts, rather than deferring to short-term interest groups. 
  • A larger set of values would be part of democratic compromise. This tends to be beneficial because it becomes more likely that the “right” values are in the mix, and because it is often possible to achieve outcomes that are good from many perspectives. This also reduces the risk of conflicts arising from some generations feeling like they got the rough end of the stick.
  • Taking future generations into account may reduce the risk of a large-scale moral catastrophe: even if contemporary public opinion sanctions such an atrocity, one would wonder whether future generations would disapprove. Consider, for instance, our strong disapproval of slavery (which past generations did not take into account). Likewise, future generations may (depending on moral progress) condemn our factory farms and slaughterhouses. 
  • Uncertainty about the values of future generations would hopefully nudge decision-makers to try and steer the world in a robustly positive direction, e.g. by promoting global cooperation and careful reflection on the risks of emerging technologies. 

That said, representing future generations is not without drawbacks. Future generations are not necessarily wiser or more compassionate than we are. They may well be more nationalist and balkanised, or have values that are very alien to us. On a pessimistic view of future values, and from a suffering-focused perspective in particular, there is a risk that future generation are empowered to create more suffering, e.g. through having more resources in general (cf. how economic and technological progress enabled factory farming). Realistically, we can only represent future moral agents, who may not adequately consider the interests of future moral patients (such as nonhuman animals or nonbiological beings). Nevertheless, I think the benefits of greater representation of future generations are likely to outweigh these risks, especially if we take care to avoid these risks.

Short-termism in politics

The idea that politics is too focused on the short-term is quite widespread. However, we should distinguish between different factors:

  1. Perhaps the political process creates bad incentives that result in an excessive focus on short-term issues. For instance, a common complaint is that politicians are concerned with re-election and therefore take actions that are popular in the short-term (but arguably bad in the long run) to win votes. 
  2. Perhaps the political process is subject to other distortions, such as being driven by media attention on certain topics, that tend to correlate with being more focused on the short-term. 
  3. Perhaps democratic processes do accurately represent people’s preferences, but people just don’t care much about outcomes in the distant future (say, beyond their own lifespan or that of their children).
  4. Perhaps people care about long-term outcomes, but follow their own contemporary values rather than deferring to what future generations will want, which might be quite different. For instance, it is often thought that the most important issue for future generations is climate change, but it may well be that future generations have different priorities. 

For purposes of this post, I will mostly bracket a) and b). These are important issues, but I view them as distinct to the idea of representing future generations. I’m also sceptical about many of those narratives: for instance, many politicians do not need to worry about elections (e.g. US presidents in their second term) but this does not seem to result in noticeably more long-term priorities. 

I am mostly interested in the idea of (partially) deferring to future generations by explicitly representing their interests in our political system. This can be seen as moral cooperation across time if future generations return the favor and also consider our preferences.2 Compared to having each generation follow their own values, there is potential for significant gains from trade. From this perspective, we should consider the interests of the future because we would want the past to have considered ours as well.

How could we represent future generations?

For now, let’s assume that we have the political buy-in to represent future generations. How could this be achieved?

Institutions for Future Generations3 contains an overview of 33 distinct institutions and policies, including but not limited to:

  • Changing voting systems, e.g. age-weighted voting, in ways that (supposedly) result in more longtermism.4
  • Setting up political entities that are explicitly dedicated to future generations, such as a Commission, Ombudsperson, or Ministry for Future Generations. (In the UK, there is already the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Future Generations and a Future Generations Commissioner for Wales.)
  • Expressing political commitment to future generations, e.g. entrenched in the Constitution or comparable documents, in the hope that considering impacts on future generation becomes a norm.

Unfortunately, such institutions often do not wield much power, and political commitments are often weak in practice. For instance, in 2002, Germany included the protection of animals (who are also not directly represented in political processes) as an official goal of the state in the Constitution, but this has not led to significant change. (Source, in German.)

In the context of future generations, it is also quite hard to know what exactly their interests are. This may undermine such institutions because it is easy to claim that one’s political agenda is also good for future generations even if it in fact isn’t; who’s to judge?

Getting more objective information about the interests of future generations (who can’t directly tell us about their interests) is therefore a key problem. 

Paul Christiano proposes prediction markets to solve this:

Run periodic surveys with retrospective evaluations of policy. For example, each year I can pick some policy decisions from {10, 20, 30} years ago and ask “Was this policy a mistake?”, “Did we do too much, or too little?”, and so on.

Subsidize liquid prediction markets about the results of these surveys in all future years. For example, we can bet about people in 2045’s answers to “Did we do too much or too little about climate change in 2015-2025?”

We will get to see market odds on what people in 10, 20, or 30 years will say about our current policy decisions. For example, people arguing against a policy can cite facts like “The market expects that in 20 years we will consider this policy to have been a mistake.”

Such prediction markets could offer a lot of interesting information, although it is not clear how well this would work for predictions that are further out (e.g. 100 years) and how much weight people would give to such predictions. 

Based on such markets, we could also create direct financial incentives:

We give every contemporary citizen shares in a newly created security. This security settles in, say, 100 years (in 2119), and its settlement value will be based on the degree to which 2119 people approve of the actions of people in the 2019-2119 timespan, as determined by a standardised survey – say, on a scale from 0 to 10. This gives contemporary people a direct financial incentive to do what future people would approve of, and uses market mechanisms to generate accurate judgments.

Last, this paper by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Future Generations proposes various measures to improve incentives, tools, and oversight mechanisms for policy-making processes in the UK.

Key challenges

Philosophical issues

One potential problem is that the values of future generations may depend on our actions, creating a circularity. Suppose the world is divided into proponents of the Red political ideology and the Blue political ideology, and is at a crossroads where one can lock-in either the Red or the Blue ideology (by permanently vanquishing the opposing side). Future Red proponents will want us to choose Red, but future Blue proponents will want us to choose Blue. If we choose Red, future Red proponents will approve of our decision, if we choose Blue, future Blue proponents will approve of our decision. So, is it fine to choose either?

In general, the problem with notions like the approval or consent of future generations is that this can be obtained by the “wrong” means, such as by brainwashing and propaganda.5 (A more speculative possibility is the use of genetic engineering to radically change human nature.) One possible solution is to instead use a combination of metrics, including not only approval of past actions but also, say, the well-being of future individuals or metrics that capture their “deliberative autonomy”, i.e. whether their judgments are genuinely “free”.  

By increasing or decreasing the probability that humanity goes extinct, our actions may even affect whether or not future generations exist at all. That raises the question of whether we should also cooperate with “merely possible” generations that would only (probabilistically) be brought into existence by our actions. Related questions are frequently discussed (in the context of individuals rather than generations) in the field of population ethics.

Political will and tractability

In practice, the biggest challenge is to get the necessary buy-in to take steps towards representation of future generations. One could argue that if there is the political will to seriously consider future generations, it’s unnecessary to set up additional institutions to do so. And on the flip side, if people do not care about the long-term future, why would they ever agree to such measures? Giving more power to future generations will inevitably be at odds with (short-term) interests of contemporary people. (It is also worth noting that we may well consider the values of future generations repugnant, especially if serious value drift occurs.)

Perhaps the causation is that caring about X results in commitments and institutions for X, not the other way around. In the case of non-human animals, who are also not usually represented in the political process, similar ideas (e.g. commissions for animal welfare) have been implemented. This can be valuable, but it isn’t a silver bullet and the real-world impact is often limited.

Conclusion

Enshrining concern for future generations seems important and quite neglected, but also poses serious challenges with no obvious solution. However, given that there is currently very little consideration of future generations, there is still room for useful work in this space. It seems plausible that enshrining some kind of concern for future generations is valuable, even if we do not have a convincing answer to the philosophical questions outlined above. I’m most excited about facilitating objective information regarding the interests of future generations (e.g. through setting up prediction markets).

  1.  It could be argued that representation of future individuals would be more appropriate, as generations are not monolithic blocks.[↩]
  2. One could go further and argue that we should also cooperate with the past. (Something along the lines of “honor your ancestors” is actually a fairly widespread idea.) However, this only works if we can benefit them. Most values care mainly about what happens in their time, which means that we can only benefit future generations, but not past generations.[↩]
  3. See also here for more details.[↩]
  4. I’m quite sceptical about this particular proposal. “One man, one vote” is a strong Schelling point, and probably for a good reason; there is a lot of potential for misuse if you start giving unequal weight to votes.[↩]
  5. This is similar to problems in AI alignment. The idea of maximising human approval may create bad incentives to achieve such approval through manipulative means.[↩]