Follow-up on "Institutions for Future Generations"

3.5 years ago I wrote a post called “Institutions for Future Generations” indicating that I had started a project to figure out what institutions and policies could help better represent future generations’ interests in government and soliciting help coming up with ideas.

I finished the research for this project in 2020, and had expected to spend more time wrapping it up and making it pretty for public consumption, but I’ve never come back to the project and don’t expect to. It’s possible that some of the research will be useful to people thinking about policy and institutional reform, so I wanted to at least share the (messy!) Google doc with my work in it for consumption on the EA Forum.

Here’s the Google doc.*

I pulled out many of the most useful things I learned and published them in a few stand-alone papers, which are probably more helpful than the Google doc overall:

Longtermist Institutional Reform, with William MacAskill
- A general paper on what gives governments short time horizons and some of the more promising things we can do about this
Securing Political Accountability to Future Generations with Retrospective Accountability (with help from Charlotte Siegmann)
- A mechanism design paper proposing one way we might incentivise current generations to promote the interests of future generations, by making policymakers financially dependent on the decisions future generations make about how successful they were at promoting long-term interests
Empowering Future People by Empowering the Young?
- A short paper, the most important part of which is that empowering the young doesn’t seem to do all that much for future generations, though there’s some positive evidence from the finding that age is a significant determinant of pro-environmentalist attitudes, to the point that a 20-year-old voter is 10 per cent more likely to vote favourably to the environment than an 80-year-old voter
Want politics to be better? Focus on future generations, with William MacAskill (and lots of help from Fin Moorhouse)
- Popular-audience piece on the Japanese Future Design movement, extinction risk, integrating forecasting and technology expertise into government, and representing future generations in government

My takeaways from this research:

Overall, I’ve come to think that this research is less valuable than I thought it was when I started the project. There’s very little strong literature on building future-oriented institutions and policy, I didn’t find a lot of great success stories of policymakers doing this, and it actually just seems pretty hard to get right. I think there are a few great things people can do to generally make governments more future-oriented, like lowering the discount rate and infusing better technology expertise into governance, but most of these things are technocratic, moderate, and look less like “representing future generations” than I initially expected. I also increasingly find abstract institutional design work less relevant than policy work. I’m still optimistic that someone could find ideas better than the ones that I found, and I would still be excited if a huge number of economists and political scientists spent much more time thinking about these mechanism design issues, but I think marginal resources are better invested in existential risk policy, especially AI policy.

I’ll try to answer any questions, but it’s been a few years since I’ve thought about these things much and I’m unsure how much of the doc I still endorse today!

*I make no guarantee that the scoring system used in the doc is accurate, internally consistent, or informative. I meant to spend more time developing a useful scoring system, but because I didn’t manage to do that it’s best to think of the scoring system as notes for me rather than informative for general readers.

Follow-up on “Institutions for Future Generations”