Audio/Video: Levmore on "Climate Change and the Battle of the Generations"

Why have we taken so few precautions in the face of threatening climate change? In a February Chicago's Best Ideas talk entitled "Climate Change and the Battle of the Generations" Dean Saul Levmore focused on the difficulty of dealing with a long-off threat in our political system.

The question, he says, is how voters and their politicians can be encouraged to care about problems that can be deferred for consideration by a different electorate or set of taxpayers – but at much higher cost. We know that we should solve most long term problems sooner rather than later, but there are pressures that put off painful solutions. Dean Levmore draws on what we know about “median voters” and median citizens in order to hazard guesses about the coming battle among generations. In this “battle,” young voters will grow increasingly concerned about what is likely to occur as they age – but these voters do not yet have sufficient political power. In turn, arrangements among countries will be seen to depend in part on the disparate age profiles of countries. The topic, in other words, is global warming and the public choice problem of intergenerational bargaining.

Unfortunately, technical difficulties are preventing us from embedding the video in this blog post, but Video of the event is embedded below, or you can download and/or view a Quicktime (.mov) file. If video isn't your thing, you can download/listen to an .mp3 file.

Comments

[Atika]

Global warming has become an unavoidable issue now days. Its effects can be seen broadly everywhere. No doubt that government should think seriously about it as it can turn very dangerous in the near future.

[Uzair Kayani]

This was an excellent talk. I think there are three roundabout ways to get intergenerational bargaining.

First, we could abolish the minimum voting age. I expect that people in high school might vote much more than people in college, or those who have newly entered the work force (because the latter are too mobile etc). Doing away with the voting age might create some perverse incentives in other areas (e.g. support for subsidizing video games) but those may be countered by interest groups (parents?), or if not, they may be worth the cost, especially if they replace other perverse programs (some present subsidies, for example).

Second, we would reach the same result by having a maximum voting age (say under 60)- we could replace the age floor with an age ceiling. But that is less likely to fly.

A third possibility would be enabling online or phone-based voting- the same way that some people pay their bills. The idea would be to make the process of voting less costly for young people. This should also reduce the age of the median voter, at least in the near future.

All three ways should increase support for tackling climate change. The immediate effect may not be large, but the median voter at each point in the future (2040, 2060) could be significantly younger in these scenarios.

[Settlement Loan]

"First, we could abolish the minimum voting age. I expect that people in high school might vote much more than people in college"

You do realize the minimum voting age is there to prevent issues with young people being swayed into voting for someone beyond the politics itself