I think it’s really not clear that reforming institutions to be more longtermist has an outsized long run impact compared to many other axes of institutional reform.
We know what constitutes good outcomes in the short run, so if we can design institutions to produce better short run outcomes, that will be beneficial in the long run insofar as those institutions endure into the long run. Institutional changes are inherently long-run.
The part of the article that you are referring to is in part inspired by John and MacAskills paper “longtermist institutional reform”, where they propose reforms that are built to tackle political short-termism. The case for this relies on two assumptions:
1. Long term consequences have an outsized moral importance, despite the uncertainty of long-term effects. 2. Because of this, political decision making should be designed to optimize for longterm outcomes.
Greaves and MacAskill have written a paper arguing for assumption 1: “Because of the vast number of expected people in the future, it is quite plausible that for options that are appropriately chosen from a sufficiently large choice set, effects on the very long future dominate ex ante evaluations, even after taking into account the fact that further-future effects tend to be the most uncertain…“. We seem to agree on this assumption, but disagree on assumption 2. If I understand your argument against assumption 2, it assumes that there are no tradeoffs between optimizing for short-run outcomes and long-run outcomes. This assumption seems clearly false to us, and is implied to be false in “Longtermist institutional reform”. Consider fiscal policies for example: In the short run it could be beneficial to take all the savings in pension funds and spend them to boost the economy, but in the long run this is predictably harmful because many people will not afford to retire.
No I agree on 2! I’m just saying even from a longtermist perspective, it may not be as important and tractable as improving institutions in orthogonal ways.
I think it’s really not clear that reforming institutions to be more longtermist has an outsized long run impact compared to many other axes of institutional reform.
We know what constitutes good outcomes in the short run, so if we can design institutions to produce better short run outcomes, that will be beneficial in the long run insofar as those institutions endure into the long run. Institutional changes are inherently long-run.
The part of the article that you are referring to is in part inspired by John and MacAskills paper “longtermist institutional reform”, where they propose reforms that are built to tackle political short-termism. The case for this relies on two assumptions:
1. Long term consequences have an outsized moral importance, despite the uncertainty of long-term effects.
2. Because of this, political decision making should be designed to optimize for longterm outcomes.
Greaves and MacAskill have written a paper arguing for assumption 1: “Because of the vast number of expected people in the future, it is quite plausible that for options that are appropriately chosen from a sufficiently large choice set, effects on the very long future dominate ex ante evaluations, even after taking into account the fact that further-future effects tend to be the most uncertain…“. We seem to agree on this assumption, but disagree on assumption 2. If I understand your argument against assumption 2, it assumes that there are no tradeoffs between optimizing for short-run outcomes and long-run outcomes. This assumption seems clearly false to us, and is implied to be false in “Longtermist institutional reform”. Consider fiscal policies for example: In the short run it could be beneficial to take all the savings in pension funds and spend them to boost the economy, but in the long run this is predictably harmful because many people will not afford to retire.
No I agree on 2! I’m just saying even from a longtermist perspective, it may not be as important and tractable as improving institutions in orthogonal ways.