Pocket Change: What do we owe the future?
Pocket Change is a monthly series of notes on disruption, authored by 18 Coffees co-founder Caleb Gardner. Be the first to read Pocket Change — subscribe to the email newsletter here.
My wife and I famously have different time orientations. I love sitting down to dinner with her and talking about the future: where our kids are going to go to college, adventures we’re going to go on together when they are out of the house. Meanwhile, she’s nodding along and thinking more about how we’re going to get them to their first day of school next week.
Time is funny like that: we never quite experience it in the same way. We’re taught to measure it in mathematical increments, and yet we can experience time more qualitatively, depending on its significance. The ancient Greeks had two words to describe time: chronos, which described sequential time, and kairos, which translated closer to “the opportune moment”: a time to act.
I’ve been thinking about time orientations as I’ve been digging into What We Owe the Future by Oxford professor William MacAskill, a staunch utilitarian philosopher and one of the founders of effective altruism. In the book, MacAskill argues that “longtermism”—positively impacting our long-term future—is the most moral good we can do right now. And when he says long-term, he means long-term. Reversing climate change, for example, could be seen as a short-term priority if one considers the future of humanity millions of years from now.
Effective altruism started with the idea of using data to maximize the good you can do with your time, your career, and your giving—which made it myopic in its utilitarian goals. So I find the shift toward the long-term both encouraging and oddly myopic in itself. The movement has begun to deprioritize human suffering today because of the needs of an infinite amount of future generations, even though we don’t have full visibility into what those needs may be.
In No Point B, I argue that our ability to predict the future is often awful, and that the best we can do is recognize the ways in which the future is collapsing in on our decisions today. Building adaptive capability is about recognizing we need to always be working on multiple time horizons, right now. MacAskill makes a compelling case that one of those horizons should be longer term than we realize, but I don’t think that means the needs of our present world are any less important.
The urgency of the moment we are in now requires our attention and requires us to act urgently in kind. But we can do it with an eye toward the long-term, knowing that our actions today have consequences that reverberate far into the future.
I want my kids (and their kids, and their kids) to have happy, fulfilled lives. But my first step is still getting them to school right now.
Keeping an eye on:
GOOD NUDGES — “Nudge theory” has been gaining steam as a way to tackle some of societies most pressing problems. (But does it work?)
CORPORATE POLITICS — The fight over so-called “woke” business continues to play out in several ways – but traditionally progressive companies like Ben & Jerry’s are starting to see internal pushback.
TECH CONSEQUENCES — A mother and daughter face charges because of Facebook. A dad faces charges because of Google. Big Tech’s cooperation with law enforcement is increasingly dystopian.
YOUNGER SNIPS — Vasectomies are on the rise among young men, especially after the fall of Roe v. Wade. (Maybe they’re trying to ejaculate responsibly?)
DIFFERENT RTOS — The “return to office” vs. “work from home” debate is mostly a large city phenomenon. Workers in small and mid-sized cities are already back in the office.
GLOBAL MOVES — In news beyond the U.S., Scotland is making period products free, and Australia is moving to enshrine its climate targets into law.
