Appropriate discounting of future utilities need not be the dictatorship of the present: A note on Chichilnisky

Yew-Kwang Ng ()

Social Choice and Welfare, 2003, vol. 21, issue 1, 113-116

Abstract: Positive, but non-excessive discounting of future utilities to take account of possible non-realization/survival is not the dictatorship of the present, contrary to Chichilnisky's argument which is ingenious but contains a slip due to the improper treatment of infinity. As the probability of people existing a trillion to the power of a trillion years from now is close to zero, the fact that their voice now is also close to zero should not be regarded as the dictatorship of the present. Correspondingly, Chichilnisky's criterion which gives the welfare of people in year infinity some extra weight over-and-above their due weight in accordance to the realization probability, is not acceptable. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2003

Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00355-003-0204-3 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sochwe:v:21:y:2003:i:1:p:113-116

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... c+theory/journal/355

DOI: 10.1007/s00355-003-0204-3

Access Statistics for this article

Social Choice and Welfare is currently edited by Bhaskar Dutta, Marc Fleurbaey, Elizabeth Maggie Penn and Clemens Puppe

More articles in Social Choice and Welfare from Springer, The Society for Social Choice and Welfare Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().