Social bias, not time bias

People seem to have pure time preferences about trade-offs concerning their own pleasures and pains, and such preferences contribute to estimates of people's individual time discount rate. Do pure time preferences also matter to interpersonal welfare trade-offs, including those concerning the w...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Greene, Preston
Other Authors: School of Humanities
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/171819
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
id sg-ntu-dr.10356-171819
record_format dspace
spelling sg-ntu-dr.10356-1718192023-11-09T01:41:27Z Social bias, not time bias Greene, Preston School of Humanities Humanities::Philosophy Time Bias Time Discounting People seem to have pure time preferences about trade-offs concerning their own pleasures and pains, and such preferences contribute to estimates of people's individual time discount rate. Do pure time preferences also matter to interpersonal welfare trade-offs, including those concerning the welfare of future generations? Most importantly, should the intergenerational time discount rate include a pure time preference? Descriptivists claim that the intergenerational discount rate should reflect actual people's revealed preferences, and thus it should include a pure time preference. Prescriptivists claim that the intergenerational discount rate should be based on moral analysis, and thus they (often) claim that the rate of pure time preference should be zero. I argue that regardless of which view is correct, a focus on pure time preference is misplaced. First, the most plausible interpretation of descriptive preferences for intergenerational trade-offs is that people are socially biased and not time biased. Second, social bias is superior to time bias as a prescriptive reason to discount the welfare of future people. Third, recent advances in measuring social bias as a social discount rate make social bias a viable replacement for time bias in economic analyses of intergenerational welfare trade-offs. Ministry of Education (MOE) This work was supported by the Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 1 (grant number RG134/19(NS)). 2023-11-09T01:41:27Z 2023-11-09T01:41:27Z 2023 Journal Article Greene, P. (2023). Social bias, not time bias. Politics, Philosophy & Economics. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1470594X231178506 1470-594X https://hdl.handle.net/10356/171819 10.1177/1470594X231178506 2-s2.0-85162962350 en RG134/19(NS) Politics, Philosophy & Economics © 2023 The Author(s). All rights reserved.
institution Nanyang Technological University
building NTU Library
continent Asia
country Singapore
Singapore
content_provider NTU Library
collection DR-NTU
language English
topic Humanities::Philosophy
Time Bias
Time Discounting
spellingShingle Humanities::Philosophy
Time Bias
Time Discounting
Greene, Preston
Social bias, not time bias
description People seem to have pure time preferences about trade-offs concerning their own pleasures and pains, and such preferences contribute to estimates of people's individual time discount rate. Do pure time preferences also matter to interpersonal welfare trade-offs, including those concerning the welfare of future generations? Most importantly, should the intergenerational time discount rate include a pure time preference? Descriptivists claim that the intergenerational discount rate should reflect actual people's revealed preferences, and thus it should include a pure time preference. Prescriptivists claim that the intergenerational discount rate should be based on moral analysis, and thus they (often) claim that the rate of pure time preference should be zero. I argue that regardless of which view is correct, a focus on pure time preference is misplaced. First, the most plausible interpretation of descriptive preferences for intergenerational trade-offs is that people are socially biased and not time biased. Second, social bias is superior to time bias as a prescriptive reason to discount the welfare of future people. Third, recent advances in measuring social bias as a social discount rate make social bias a viable replacement for time bias in economic analyses of intergenerational welfare trade-offs.
author2 School of Humanities
author_facet School of Humanities
Greene, Preston
format Article
author Greene, Preston
author_sort Greene, Preston
title Social bias, not time bias
title_short Social bias, not time bias
title_full Social bias, not time bias
title_fullStr Social bias, not time bias
title_full_unstemmed Social bias, not time bias
title_sort social bias, not time bias
publishDate 2023
url https://hdl.handle.net/10356/171819
_version_ 1783955552161759232