longtermist anti-capitalism

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Disclaimer: I’m not an anti-capitalist. Sorry. I’m not really much of an econ person. That said, it recently dawned on me that I’d probably fail

Bryan Caplan

’s ideological Turing Test if called on to make the case for socialism to a smart, well-informed socialist (i.e., if I talked for too long, they’d quickly realise I’m not one of them, which would prove my own ignorance of anti-capitalist ideas.) Due to the malign influence of

Chris Freiman

, and his terrific book, Why It’s OK To Ignore Politics, I’ve mostly been ignoring politics for the past couple of years — however, I think I’ll find public policy debates fun, so I want to get more into them, starting with views I don’t have an adequate handle on. In the short-term future, you’ll probably see me dabble in anti-capitalist ideas. Don’t take this as me endorsing those ideas. For now, I’m mostly just playing around.

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Here’s an observation: future people have no spending power. They can’t buy things or own things — as a result, if market transactions serve the interests of future people, they do so largely by accident.

I say ‘largely’ because, in principle, there are times when capitalism incentivises traders to care about future people. E.g., suppose I’m selling you saplings. I offer you

Oak

or redwood. Whichever species you plant, it’ll be in the ground for centuries.

You intend to sell your trees before you die: as a result, your choice of which trees to buy will hinge on how much you think you can sell them for. In all likelihood, the person who’ll buy from you will also intend to sell before they die, and so on down the line.

Many generations in the future, someone will buy the trees, fell them, and sell them off for timber. Of course, they’ll pay more for the trees if others will pay more for the timber. As a result, which trees you buy now should hinge on whether, in your best guess, future people will value oak or redwood more.

Toy examples like this can be multiplied.

In practice, though, there are two reasons that the possibility of incentives like this won’t do future people much good:

1. Most things aren’t like redwoods: the vast majority of goods aren’t (a) things whose economic utility only kicks in generations down the line, and (b) things the buyer plans to sell in her lifetime, to a buyer who plans to sell in her lifetime, and so on.

2. We don’t know if future people will even boogie with redwoods: it’s very hard to predict the fine-grained consumer preferences of future people. Hence, even in transactions of this structure, the market won’t do anywhere near as well at serving future people’s interests.

If capitalism serves the interests of future people, then, that’ll be largely a positive externality; a happy accident. Happy accidents happen all the time, of course, but one of the main reasons to expect capitalism to serve people’s interests — consumer preferences — doesn’t carry over to future people.

If capitalism does serve the interests of future people well, that would be fairly surprising.

Who cares about future people?

Answer: your mum cares about future people.

And so, I think, should you.

Suppose I can smash a glass jar on a mountain path knowing, somehow, that a hundred years on, a small child will accidentally slice her foot on them.

Assuming there are no other benefits to smashing the jar, would it be wrong to do it anyway? Intuitively, yes. Even though she doesn’t exist yet, the interests of the future child seem to count for something, morally, and they bind how I should act in the present.

Intuitively — at least to me — the interests of actual people don’t seem to matter more, intrinsically, than the interests of future people. Suppose there are two paths: one reserved for actually existing children, one reserved for future children, who will exist in a decade. (Suppose, for the sake of the hypo, that future children definitely will walk down the future children path, and that I know that with perfect certainty; suppose, also, that if I smash a jar on either path, it won’t get cleaned up, and one child will slice her foot on the shards.)

To my mind, smashing a jar on either path is just as bad: the future child isn’t here yet, but her pain is just as important.

In practice, it makes sense to serve the interests of actual people more than future people, because which actions will serve the interests of future people is a hellavulot harder to predict.

Also, it might be that just as we have special moral reason to concern ourselves with friends, close family-members, etc., we have special moral reason to concern ourselves with the actual people around us.

Still, future people matter. And, since there might be a lot of them, we should care about their interests a lot.

Enter Nikhil Ventakesh, philosopher at King’s College London.

you can read his papers here.

In “Capitalism and the Very Long Term”, just out in Moral Philosophy and Politics, Venkatesh tries to defend two claims:

1. Considerations of long-term welfare support anticapitalism in a weak sense: reducing the extent to which the economy is capitalistic.

2. Considerations of long-term welfare support anticapitalism in a stronger sense: establishing an alternative economic structure in which capitalism is not predominant.

Here is the gist of his argument.

As I’ve already mentioned, benefits to future people are, by and large, a positive externality of capitalism: future people have no spending power, because they can’t go back in time.

Additionally, firms tend to have a high discount rate on future interests. That is, because corporate boards tend to demand proof of short term gains, corporate leaders are incentivised to prioritise the short term over the long term, even with respect to their own company’s profits.

As a result, there are structural reasons to expect capitalism not to care about the interests of future people, and, from the armchair, be unlikely to serve them well.

To make this more concrete: many of the most important threats we pose to future people — from AI gone rogue, man-made climate change, and new, horrifying advances in factory farming technology — are mostly in the hands of industry.

Moreover, in a free-market system, trying to mitigate these risks democratically is extremely difficult: the more wealth inequality there is, ceteris paribus, the more disproportionate political power those at the top will have: to lobby regulators, bribe officials, donate to campaigns, steer the public conversation, etc. Hence, insofar as these industries’ interests are at loggerheads with the interests of future people (and animals), capitalism — or, at least, many corners of capitalism — makes promoting these interests much harder.

The most powerful objection to Venkatesh’s way of thinking is growth: indisputably, capitalism is an engine of economic growth, and, for future people, a solid foundation of prosperity is a good thing for them to have in some respects. Since future people are enriched by the stuff we invent and build in the present — albeit mostly by accident — capitalism is, in some respects, good for future people.

Venkatesh concedes that “[c]apitalism has coincided with an unprecedentedly fast period of growth”. “But”, he avers, “it is disputable whether capitalism was the chief cause of that, whether it could continue to be in the future, and whether fast growth is good or bad for future people.”

This is the step of the argument I’m most skeptical of, but his arguments that modern-day economic growth is overrated when it comes to welfare promotion (since growth is (a) responsible for factory farming and increased pandemic risks, (b) climate change [which, as

Glenn

argues here, may be the most important welfare issue of our time], and (c) subjective well-being is only positively correlated with economic growth past a point) don’t seem completely crazy.

On the assumption that capitalism will produce class-based power hierarchies, and that economic elites under capitalism — when their interests are out of synch with those of future people — will use their power to frustrate longtermist policies, Ventakesh argues that small reforms aren’t enough to safeguard the interests of future people, given how many of them there are likely to be and given that the threats to them are so great. Hence, he thinks, longtermist considerations should steer us towards democratic socialism, social democracy, or something along those lines.

Now, Venkatesh undoubtedly has independent arguments for socialism: from reduced inequality, negative externalities of the free-market, the benefits of X, Y, and Z public goods, or whatever. But I don’t see why his argument from the interests of future people favours anti-capitalism across the board, rather than anti-capitalism with respect to AI, industries that produce excessive amounts of greenhouse gas, and factory farming.

Still, at the very least, there’s an interesting line of argument here for less capitalism — possibly in some fairly dramatic ways — from the interests of future people, which I haven’t heard spelled out before. If you’re some flavour of anti-capitalist, this style of argument seems like a promising tack to take.

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