Intergenerational Population EthicsPaolo Piacquadio
1 December 2022
Paolo Piacquadio (University of St. Gallen), 17:15 - 18:45, presents his project in the Interdisciplinary Research Seminar of the GRK "Collective Decision-Making”.
This seminar will take place in person. Please register (if you haven’t already) here if you want to attend the seminar. We invite everyone interested to attend!
Location: Room 0079, Von-Melle-Park 5
Abstract
In less than half a century, the world's human population has doubled in size to the current 8 billion. Yet, despite the importance of population change for growth, resource scarcity, and climate change, there is no “reasonable” welfare criterion to assess alternatives with different number of individuals. We reexamine the evaluation of intergenerational allocations with endogenous population dynamics. Our proposal identifies a new balance between the well-being and the size of generations, obtained by respecting the fertility preferences of parents. The axiomatic characterization singles out a simple and intuitive family of recursive welfare criteria, which generalize discounted utilitarianism and avoid the most controversial implications of existing criteria.
Find the abstract as PDF here.