Handing the world over to future generations is a transaction without reciprocity. It violates a basic principle of contract law, which is fundamental to a market economy. So if the handover to the future is governed by the market, the present generation will grab all it can and leave nothing for its descendants. That’s the general theory in the abstract. However, a team of game theorists at Harvard led by Martin Nowak have demonstrated that, as a rule, it’s only one or two big grabbers who pre-empt the resources meant for the future. If a mechanism is put in place to curb the big grabbers, then resources can be successfully passed on to following generations, even to the fourteenth iteration.
A short YouTube video produced by Nature magazine, the international weekly journal of science, visualizes the research results. Here it is, for what it may be worth. All relevance of the findings to our current political economic realities is in the eye of the beholder.
You must be logged in to post a comment.