Time and the Generations

Population Ethics for a Diminishing Planet

Partha Dasgupta

• Verlag: Columbia University Press
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780231550031
• Thema: Economics
• Thema: Environmental Economics

How should we evaluate the ethics of procreation, especially the environmental consequences of reproductive decisions on future generations, in a resource-constrained world? While demographers, moral philosophers, and environmental scientists have separately discussed the implications of population size for sustainability, no one has attempted to synthesize the concerns and values of these approaches. The culmination of a half century of engagement with population ethics, Partha Dasgupta's masterful Time and the Generations blends economics, philosophy, and ecology to offer an original lens on the difficult topic of optimum global population.

With careful attention to global inequality and the imbalance of power between genders, Dasgupta provides tentative answers to two fundamental questions: What level of economic activity can our planet support over the long run, and what does the answer say about optimum population numbers? He develops a population ethics that can be used to evaluate our choices and guide our sense of a sustainable global population and living standards. Structured around a central essay from Dasgupta, the book also features a foreword from Robert Solow, incisive commentaries from Kenneth J. Arrow, Joseph Stiglitz, Eric Maskin, and Scott Barrett, and a joint paper with Aisha Dasgupta on inequalities in reproductive decisions and the idea of reproductive rights. Taken together, Time and the Generations represents a fascinating dialogue between world-renowned economists on a central issue of our time.

Birth and Death

Arrow Lecture

PARTHA DASGUPTA

PEOPLE HAVE children for many reasons. The mix of motivations depends on the customs and institutions we inherit, as well as on our character and circumstances. That children are valuable in themselves is emotionally so compelling that it may seem too obvious to require acknowledgement, but social anthropologists have shown that children are not just valuable to us because of the innate desire we have to bear and rear them, but also because they represent the fulfillment of tradition and religious dictates, and because they are the clearest avenue open to self-transcendence. A common refrain, that our children are priceless, is an expression of how innately valuable they are to us.¹

In places where formal institutions are underdeveloped, children also substitute for other assets and are thus valuable for the many benefits they bring to their parents. This is most apparent in the poorest regions of the world. Children serve as security in old age in places that have neither pension schemes nor adequate capital and land markets. They are also a source of labor in households possessing few labor-saving devices. Children mind their siblings, tend to domestic animals, pick berries and herbs, collect firewood, draw water, and help with cooking. Children in poor countries are valued by their parents also as capital and producers of goods.²

1. Economic Demography

Those childhood activities are so unfamiliar today in the West that they direct us to study the motivations governing procreation by contrasting rich regions from poor regions. There are notable exceptions of course, but broadly speaking fertility rates and mortality rates are high and health status and education attainment are low in poor countries, whereas the corresponding statistics in rich countries read the other way. Table 1, which presents a snap shot (roughly, the period 2014–2015), speaks to that by displaying data published by the World Bank, where countries are classified according gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. I have labeled the two categories “rich” (the World Bank labels them “high-income countries”) and “poor” (the World Bank labels them “low-income countries”). Countries have been known to make a transition from the latter category to the former category (that’s what economic development is usually taken to mean), and there are regions that were prosperous once but have since declined; moreover, the bulk of the world’s population and a majority of the world’s poorest people live in neither rich nor poor countries, and international statistics say there are enormously rich people in poor countries. It nevertheless pays to study sharp contrasts, as in Table 1.

TABLE 1

Social Statistics from Rich and Poor Regions (Year 2014–15)

	Rich	Poor
Population (millions)	1,420	620
Gross domestic product per capita (international dollars)	41,000	1,570
Total fertility rate*	1.7	4.9
Under-5 mortality rate (per 1,000)	7	76
Life expectancy at birth (years)	80	60
Youth literacy	100	68
Civil liberties	High	Low
Political liberties	High	Low
Government corruption	Low	High

* Total fertility rate is the number of births that a woman expects to have during her reproductive years. The number 2.1 is usually taken to be the total fertility rate that, over the long run, would lead to a stable population.

Sources: World Bank (2016), UNPD (2015), Freedom House (2017)

Reproductive decisions and our use of the natural environment have consequences for others, including our descendants, that are unaccounted for under prevailing institutions and social mores (e.g., markets, government policy, communitarian engagements, religious injunctions). Economists use the term externalities to denote those consequences of our decisions for others that are not accounted for. The qualifier “not accounted for” means that the consequences in question follow without prior engagement with those who are, or who will be, affected. The required engagements don’t have to be face-to-face. Many of our actions can be expected to have consequences for our descendants, but if the actions were taken with due care and concern (we take many actions—for example, saving for the future—with our descendants very much in our mind), they would not give rise to externalities. We begin to engage with future people when we deliberate whether current rates of carbon emissions into the atmosphere will place an unjust burden on our descendants. The presence of externalities explains why and how it can be that a people are settled on a pattern of reproductive behavior and environmental-resource use they would all prefer to alter but do not because no one has the necessary motivation to change their behavior unilaterally. Externalities raise deep ethical issues. Not only do they extend to contemporaries and can be expected to extend to future people, it is also that some people will be born in consequence of the decisions we take, while some conceptions that would have taken place had we acted otherwise will not take place.³

Caldwell (1981, 1982) drew on an idea that is suggested by Table 1, that the intergenerational transfer of wealth is from parents to children in rich countries but from children to parents in poor societies. The suggestion has been easier to confirm in rich countries, where the rate of investment in children’s education has been found to be as high as 6–7 percent of GDP (Haveman and Wolfe, 1995). Because a vast range of activities in poor societies are undertaken outside the institution of markets, it is especially hard to identify the direction in which resources there flow across the generations. Nevertheless, the Caldwell hypothesis has been questioned for poor societies. Studies have found that, even there, the direction is from the old to the young (Lee, 2000, 2007). Further investigations may find hidden transfers from the young to the old in poor societies that confirm Caldwell’s thesis, but as of now it would seem that throughout the world intergenerational resource transfers are made by the old to the young.

Differences in the social statistics in Table 1 are striking. They are traceable to kinship structures, marriage practices, and rules of inheritance. The implied line of thinking says that over the long run it is differences in institutions, beliefs, and social norms of behavior that lie behind differences in reproductive behavior among peoples.⁴ Theoretical models have been built on that premise. Causality isn’t traced to differences in income or wealth. It is not that fertility and mortality rates are high and health status and education attainment are low in poor regions because people there are poor; rather, it is that very low incomes go hand in hand with those features of life. The variables are mutually determined over time.⁵

Table 1 is a snapshot. It says that, in comparison to people in rich countries, people in poor countries receive less basic education, have more children, die younger, enjoy fewer political and civil liberties, and suffer from greater failure in governance. There is no suggestion that poor societies will remain poor, nor that rich countries may not find their place reversed in the long run. Regional differences in fertility, education, and output per capita were slight until the start of the Early Modern era (roughly, 1500 CE). Global aggregates of earlier eras look much the same as their regional aggregates.⁶ Although regional aggregates have diverged since then, global aggregates (a weighted average of regional statistics) have shown a steady move toward and beyond “fertility transition,” that is, transition from high fertility and mortality rates to low fertility and mortality rates.

Economists have offered a number of explanations for the historical experience.⁷ What is common to them is a presumption that parental choices over fertility, consumption, and investment determine long-run outcomes. The models trace the relative urgencies of parental needs, desires, and obligations to the constraints on choices faced by parents in each generation.⁸ Some authors stress economic constraints, and others pay attention to social and ecological constraints. A few (as in Dasgupta and Dasgupta, 2017, reproduced here) speak especially to the pervasiveness of reproductive and environmental externalities. Economic demographers have commonly avoided moral theories in their study of reproductive behavior.

In contrast, philosophical discourses on population have been built on normative reasoning, directed at four questions: (i) What are the nature, ground, and limits of parental responsibility for existing children? (ii) Does producing a child interfere with the rights of children the couple already have? (iii) Do individuals have a duty not to have children whose lives are likely to be bad for them (negative well-being)? Do they have a duty to have children whose lives are likely to be good for them (positive well-being)? (iv) How should one value possible populations so as to decide which would be best?

One...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents 
• In Memoriam: Kenneth Joseph Arrow (1921–2017)
• Foreword
• Preface
• Random Thoughts on “Birth and Death,” by Kenneth J. Arrow
• Birth and Death: Arrow Lecture
• Appendix One: Socially-Embedded Well-Being Functions
• Appendix Two: Common Property Resources and Reproductive Choices
• Appendix Three: Notes on Rawls’ Principle of Just Saving
• Appendix Four: Modeling the Biosphere
• Appendix Five: Inclusive Wealth and Social Well-Being
• Appendix Six: Valuing Freedom of Choice
• References
• Commentary on Birth and Death, by Scott Barrett
• Commentary on Birth and Death, by Eric Maskin
• Commentary on Birth and Death, by Joseph Stiglitz
• Response to Commentaries
• Epilogue
• Socially Embedded Preferences, Environmental Externalities, and Reproductive Rights, with Aisha Dasgupta—Reprinted from Population and Development Review (September 2017)
• Contributors
• Author Index
• Subject Index