IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/ecnphi/v34y2018i02p221-241_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Efficiency And Future Generations

Author

Listed:
  • Broome, John

Abstract

Standard lessons from economics tell us that an externality creates inefficiency, and that this inefficiency can be removed by internalizing the externality. This papers considers how successfully these lessons can be extended to intergenerational externalities such as emissions of greenhouse gas. For intergenerational externalities, the standard lessons involve comparisons between states whose populations of people differ, either in their identities or their numbers. Common notions of efficiency break down in these comparisons. This paper supplies a new notion of efficiency that allows the lessons to survive, but at the cost of reducing their practical significance.

Suggested Citation

  • Broome, John, 2018. "Efficiency And Future Generations," Economics and Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, vol. 34(2), pages 221-241, July.
  • Handle: RePEc:cup:ecnphi:v:34:y:2018:i:02:p:221-241_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0266267118000020/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Bruner, Justin & Kopec, Matthew, 2018. "No harm done? An experimental approach to the non-identity problem," OSF Preprints aw9fm, Center for Open Science.
    2. Frikk Nesje & Moritz A. Drupp & Mark C. Freeman & Ben Groom, 2022. "Philosophers and Economists Can Agree on the Intergenerational Discount Rate and Climate Policy Paths," CESifo Working Paper Series 9930, CESifo.

    More about this item

    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:cup:ecnphi:v:34:y:2018:i:02:p:221-241_00. 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: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/eap .

    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.