A Psychological Study about the Effects of Inter-Generational Economic Discounting — Not Surprisingly Demonstrates that We Are Not Going to Do Anything about Global Warming — We Cynics Are Probably Correct in Our Gloomy Predictions

25 October 2013

Citation — to study

Jennifer Jacquet, Kristin Hagel, Christoph Hauert, Jochem Marotzke, Torsten Röhl, and Manfred Milinski, Intra- and intergenerational discounting in the climate game, Nature Climate Change, DOI:10.1038/nclimate2024 (20 October 2013)

Citation — to Time magazine article explaining how the study worked

Bryan Walsh, Why We Don’t Care About Saving Our Grandchildren From Climate Change, Time (21 October 2013)

Foresight and reward-absent sacrifice are not prominent parts of the human genome

More than a year ago, I wrote:

Humanity is not going to proactively deal with climate change. Our present-moment self-interest and our inability to imagine a genuinely hostile future collude to keep us mired in non-action.

Though my heart is with the climate alarmists, I am near positive that humanity is going to witness itself having to cope with whatever our profligate impact on the planet mischiefs up.

We will almost certainly be rolling with the punches, not throwing any of our own.

Jacquet et al.’s study confirms this pessimism

Time reporter Bryan Walsh wrote a masterful lay summary of Jacquet et al.’s experiment:

Each subject in groups with six participants was given a $55 operating fund.

The experiment went 10 rounds, and during each round, they were allowed to choose one of three options: invest $0, $2.75 or $5.50 into a climate account.

If at the end of the 10 rounds, the group reached a target of $165 — or about $27 per person — they were considered [via a process that reporter Walsh explains] to have successfully averted climate change, and each participant was given an additional $60 dollars.

As a group, members would be better off if they collectively invested enough to reach that $165 target — otherwise they wouldn’t get the payout — but individually, members could benefit by keeping their money to themselves while hoping the rest of the group would pay enough to reach the target.

(That’s the so-called free-rider phenomenon, and it’s a major challenge for climate policy.)

[The] $60 dollar endowment was paid out on three different time horizons.

In one treatment, the cash was given to the groups the next day. In the second treatment, it was given seven weeks later. And in the third treatment, the cash was instead invested in planting oak trees that would sequester carbon — but since those trees wouldn’t be fully grown for years, all the benefit would accrue to future generations, not the current players in the experiment.

The difference between that third treatment and the first and second is what’s known as “intergenerational discounting,” which happens when the benefits of an action in the present are highly diluted and mostly spread among many people in the future.

The experiment’s findings — gloomy doom

As most honest folks would predict, we don’t really care about future generations, when it comes to having to make perceptible sacrifices today:

We find that intergenerational discounting leads to a marked decrease in cooperation; all groups failed to reach the collective target.

© 2013 Jennifer Jacquet, Kristin Hagel, Christoph Hauert, Jochem Marotzke, Torsten Röhl, and Manfred Milinski, Intra- and intergenerational discounting in the climate game, Nature Climate Change, DOI:10.1038/nclimate2024 (20 October 2013) (at Abstract)

According to reporter Walsh — of the intra-generational group (the one day and seven weeks folks) — only seventy percent made the necessary investment to prevent climate change under the terms of the experiment.

Take a moment to put this in its eye-opening context — selfish, even in the 1 day and 7 weeks to profit groups

Two points about the overwhelming power of selfishness in destroying community-oriented cooperation:

(1) Thirty percent of the 6-person groups effectively refused to invest $27 today, so as to harvest a high probability profit of $43 only 1 day to 7 weeks from now.

That pretty much sums up the state of American government — where we cannot do even the obvious things to benefit ourselves next month.

(2) None of the groups could cooperate enough to benefit their kids an "oak tree generation" down the road — presumably, I infer, about 70 years.

The study’s authors conclude

Glumly that:

Our results experimentally confirm that international negotiations to mitigate climate change are unlikely to succeed if individual countries’ short-term gains can arise only from defection.

The moral? — Humanity still has not found a way to prevent the tragedy of the commons

The freer people are to do whatever they want, the less likely society is to do anything with an eye toward the future of the Whole. The fecal-heads among us consistently wield the power to bring us all down.

This is one of global authoritarianism’s strongest arguments for its virtue. And it explains why autocratic China is (for now) running circles around the United States in planning and implementing for the economic medium term.

Cynics (sadly) rejoice.

PeteFree.com

A Psychological Study about the Effects of Inter-Generational Economic Discounting — Not Surprisingly Demonstrates that We Are Not Going to Do Anything about Global Warming — We Cynics Are Probably Correct in Our Gloomy Predictions