Lawrence Zelenak · September 2009
77 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 1358 (2009)
In his provocative and insightful contribution to this symposium, What Do We Owe Future Generations?, Neil Buchanan takes issue with the conventional wisdom that the United States is harming its future generations by running large and persistent federal budget deficits. He focuses particular attention on the claim, which has “often been couched in the language of intergenerational justice,” that “currently-living generations are harming future generations by refusing to change [Social Security] policies that will ultimately require large changes in future benefits or taxes.” In response to those critics, he points out that even under the most pessimistic of the long-term scenarios envisioned in the 2009 Social Security Trustees’ Report, material standards of living in the United States are expected to more than double over the next seventy-five years.
With this projection in mind, Buchanan posits the question: “If future generations will almost certainly be significantly richer than current generations, why must current generations make still more sacrifices to prevent any erosion at all in the (much higher) living standards of future generations?” Buchanan offers, somewhat tentatively,
a surprising and potentially unsettling conclusion: we might want to make the deliberate choice to lower the living standards of future generations in order to raise current living standards. Because future Americans are highly likely to have much higher living standards than current Americans, we are arguably moving in the wrong direction when we call for current sacrifice in the name of intergenerational justice.
Whether or not one agrees with Buchanan’s conclusion, his paper makes an important contribution by questioning the common assumption that the anticipated improvements in living standards in the absence of budget deficits establish a normative baseline, such that any government action which would reduce improvements below that baseline must overcome a strong presumption of illegitimacy. Although he does not cite them in this connection, Buchanan’s argument on this point closely resembles the claim of Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel that the pretax distribution of income has no moral significance, and that there should be no presumption against the fairness of government tax-and-spending programs that alter the pretax distribution of economic resources. Just as pretax income is a myth (as Murphy and Nagel explain) because there could be no income in the absence of the social structure provided by tax-financed government, so it is a myth that there is some natural level of growth in living standards in the absence of government action. In both cases, it makes no sense to imagine some mythical natural condition—of income distribution or of economic growth—in the absence of government, and then to impose a heavy burden of justification on any government policy (such as taxation in the one case, or budget deficits in the other) which interferes with that supposed state of nature.
Buchanan does not go so far as to argue that present generations would be justified in pursuing a policy of no per capita economic growth (and thus of no improvement across generations in standards of living). He does not need to go that far to defend the direction of current fiscal policies, which are likely merely to slow growth compared with the assumed baseline of a no-deficit policy, rather than to eliminate growth. Nevertheless, his analysis suggests the further question of whether a no-growth policy might be justifiable. In this paper, I examine whether justification for such a policy can be found in either the political theory of John Rawls or in the application of utilitarian principles to intergenerational ethics. I conclude that under a Rawlsian analysis there is a strong argument that the current generation of Americans has no obligation to strive for higher standards of living for future generations, but that under utilitarian principles there is such an obligation.
Part II of this paper explains, in broad outline, how a society which rejects the goal of increasing living standards for future generations might arrange its economy so as to produce a constant standard of living across generations. Part III considers whether the actions of such a society would be compatible with Rawlsian principles of justice, and Part IV asks the same question with respect to utilitarian principles. Part V briefly concludes.
