I obviously am a fan of this post! A few thoughts.
I don’t think sin taxes is the best phrase here. Sin taxes usually refer to internalities like cigarettes, but this is an externality more like a climate tax.
I like the soft institutions like research commissions and cabinet members but suspect the harder institutions like a veto or additional legislator or even a court will get captured and perverted. Almost all of these institutions rely on norms to actually care about future generations, and norms collapse every so often when there’s a reason to subvert them. Maybe this is just me looking at the current political moment, bit since we are talking about long time horizons, moments like this will recur, and I think it takes longer to salvage norms than it does to erode them. For example, claims I could see being made to justify any particular political agenda:
“We need to preserve our religious values for the sake of future generations”
“We need to do [insert radical policy] to address the present crisis so that our civilization survives for future generations”
“We must completely halt resource usage to preserve the earth for future generations”
“We must maximize resource usage so that we grow as much as possible for future generations”
Etc.
For things like term lengths there’s a real literature on things like that in political economy that could help get a pretty good sense of expected impact.
I obviously am a fan of this post! A few thoughts.
I don’t think sin taxes is the best phrase here. Sin taxes usually refer to internalities like cigarettes, but this is an externality more like a climate tax.
I like the soft institutions like research commissions and cabinet members but suspect the harder institutions like a veto or additional legislator or even a court will get captured and perverted. Almost all of these institutions rely on norms to actually care about future generations, and norms collapse every so often when there’s a reason to subvert them. Maybe this is just me looking at the current political moment, bit since we are talking about long time horizons, moments like this will recur, and I think it takes longer to salvage norms than it does to erode them. For example, claims I could see being made to justify any particular political agenda:
“We need to preserve our religious values for the sake of future generations” “We need to do [insert radical policy] to address the present crisis so that our civilization survives for future generations” “We must completely halt resource usage to preserve the earth for future generations” “We must maximize resource usage so that we grow as much as possible for future generations”
Etc.
For things like term lengths there’s a real literature on things like that in political economy that could help get a pretty good sense of expected impact.