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A Path Through the Wilderness: Time Discounting in Growth Models

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  • Pedro Garcia Duarte

Abstract

Although economists have recognized long ago that “time enters into all economic questions”, the ways they treated and modeled time has varied substantially in the last century. While in the 1930s there was a distinctive Cambridge tradition against discounting utilities of future generations, to which Frank Ramsey subscribed, postwar neoclassical growth economists (of the “Ramsey-Cass-Koopmans model”) applied the discount factor either to individual’s or to social planner’s decision-making as a technical requirement of dynamic general equilibrium models. My goal in this article is to shed some historical light on how a practice that was condemned as ethically indefensible when applied to intergenerational comparisons became a technical requirement in dynamic models of either a consumer or a planner deciding the intertemporal allocation of resources.

Suggested Citation

  • Pedro Garcia Duarte, 2013. "A Path Through the Wilderness: Time Discounting in Growth Models," Working Papers, Department of Economics 2013_18, University of São Paulo (FEA-USP).
    • Handle: RePEc:spa:wpaper:2013wpecon18
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    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. To discount or not to discount?
      by Economic Logician in Economic Logic on 2013-12-13 00:09:00

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    1. Franco, Marco P.V. & Gaspard, Marion & Mueller, Thomas, 2019. "Time discounting in Harold Hotelling's approach to natural resource economics: The unsolved ethical question," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 163(C), pages 52-60.
    2. Matheus Assaf & Pedro Garcia Duarte, 2018. "Utility Matters: Edmond Malinvaud and growth theory in the 1950s and 1960s," Working Papers, Department of Economics 2018_03, University of São Paulo (FEA-USP).

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    time discount; growth models; Ramsey-Cass-Koopmans model; economic dynamics;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • B22 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought since 1925 - - - Macroeconomics
    • B23 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought since 1925 - - - Econometrics; Quantitative and Mathematical Studies
    • E32 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Business Fluctuations; Cycles

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