I liked your post! But I don’t find the claim that Ramsey was the first “explicit” longtermist very plausible
. The quote about discounting being “ethically indefensible and arises merely from the weakness of the imagination” echoes points made earlier by other economists, e.g. Pigou:
Generally speaking, everybody prefers present pleasures or satisfactions of given magnitude to future pleasures or satisfactions of equal magnitude, even when the latter are perfectly certain to occur. But this preference for present pleasures does not—the idea is self-contradictory—imply that a present pleasure of given magnitude is any greater than a future pleasure of the same magnitude. It implies only that our telescopic faculty is defective, and that we, therefore, see future pleasures, as it were, on a diminished scale
This is from The Economics of Welfare, published when Ramsey was a teenager, and eight years before the essay in which the quote appears.
I was very unclear about what justifies that claim, pardon:
Ramsey deriving the form of the intertemporal decision and then setting δ=0 seems much clearer than Pigou (or Sidgwick, who waved in the direction of the position much earlier than either).
Ah, right. Yes, regardless of what we call him, this is undoubtedly a significant milestone in the historical development of longtermism. (I’m not personally comfortable with calling Ramsey or anyone else the “first” [qualification] longtermist because I think longtermism involves multiple claims, not just an endorsement of a zero discount rate, although that claim is clearly a central one.)
I’d love to see more posts exploring early longtermist or proto-longtermist thinking!
it is good to omit doing what might perhaps bring some profit to the living, when we have in view the accomplishment of other ends that will be of much greater advantage to posterity.
On Frank Ramsey, the first explicit longtermist
I liked your post! But I don’t find the claim that Ramsey was the first “explicit” longtermist very plausible
. The quote about discounting being “ethically indefensible and arises merely from the weakness of the imagination” echoes points made earlier by other economists, e.g. Pigou:
This is from The Economics of Welfare, published when Ramsey was a teenager, and eight years before the essay in which the quote appears.
I was very unclear about what justifies that claim, pardon:
Ramsey deriving the form of the intertemporal decision and then setting δ=0 seems much clearer than Pigou (or Sidgwick, who waved in the direction of the position much earlier than either).
“First quantitative longtermist”? “First strong longtermist”?
Ah, right. Yes, regardless of what we call him, this is undoubtedly a significant milestone in the historical development of longtermism. (I’m not personally comfortable with calling Ramsey or anyone else the “first” [qualification] longtermist because I think longtermism involves multiple claims, not just an endorsement of a zero discount rate, although that claim is clearly a central one.)
I’d love to see more posts exploring early longtermist or proto-longtermist thinking!
- Descartes (1637)