IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/aecrev/v110y2020i3p760-75.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Nondogmatic Social Discounting

Author

Listed:
  • Antony Millner

Abstract

The long-run social discount rate has an enormous effect on the value of climate mitigation, infrastructure projects, and other long-term public policies. Its value is however highly contested, in part because of normative disagreements about social time preferences. I develop a theory of "nondogmatic" social planners, who are insecure in their current normative judgments and entertain the possibility that they may change. Although each nondogmatic planner advocates an idiosyncratic theory of intertemporal social welfare, all such planners agree on the long-run social discount rate. Nondogmatism thus goes some way toward resolving normative disagreements, especially for long-term public projects.

Suggested Citation

  • Antony Millner, 2020. "Nondogmatic Social Discounting," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 110(3), pages 760-775, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:aea:aecrev:v:110:y:2020:i:3:p:760-75
    DOI: 10.1257/aer.20161007
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/aer.20161007
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://doi.org/10.3886/E111681V1
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/aer.20161007.appx
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/aer.20161007.ds
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1257/aer.20161007?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Christopher P. Chambers & Federico Echenique & Alan D. Miller, 2023. "Decreasing Impatience," American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 15(3), pages 527-551, August.
    2. Rick Van der Ploeg, 2020. "Discounting And Climate Policy," OxCarre Working Papers 244, Oxford Centre for the Analysis of Resource Rich Economies, University of Oxford.
    3. Lee, Kyungho & Linton, Oliver & Whang, Yoon-Jae, 2023. "Testing for time stochastic dominance," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 235(2), pages 352-371.
    4. Feng, Tangren & Ke, Shaowei & McMillan, Andrew, 2022. "Utilitarianism and social discounting with countably many generations," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 98(C).
    5. Graeme Guthrie, 2021. "Discounting, Disagreement, and the Option to Delay," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 80(1), pages 95-133, September.
    6. Jasper N. Meya & Stefan Baumgärtner & Moritz A. Drupp & Martin F. Quaas, 2020. "Inequality and the Value of Public Natural Capital," CESifo Working Paper Series 8752, CESifo.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D61 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Allocative Efficiency; Cost-Benefit Analysis
    • H43 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Project Evaluation; Social Discount Rate

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:aea:aecrev:v:110:y:2020:i:3:p:760-75. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Michael P. Albert (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aeaaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.