Charles C. Mann: evaluation

Transcript context

…Say you have no discount rate. So you think future people matter exactly as much as current people. Does that shift you more towards the prophet side or the wizard side? Not in absolute terms, but from where you're starting out? I have to say, I'm uncomfortable with this entire thing and this reason is something Will McCaskill talks about. From what I've read of his work, he takes it seriously enough to question how we don't actually know what those future people will want. There's no question that what we want today would have seemed abhorrent to most people in the 1800s. So the idea that we can have any other idea other than they probably want to be alive? It seems much more questionable than I think it does. So, there's two ways to look at it. One is the wizards say-–– we have an idea: “they're going to want to live in this certain kind of utopia and live their longest lives and have the maximum possible physical comfort.” Which is generally what the wizards say. And that seems perfectly reasonable to me. But the prophets might say, “Well, we should be more epistemologically humble. We don't know what they want so let's preserve as many options as possible for them.” That doesn't seem crazy. I personally probably lean more towards the wizards on this. But if a prophet said that to me, I wouldn't say “Oh, you're wrong.” Because that's the same argument about burying nuclear waste, which I also think is very powerful. We should probably not bury it in some system where it can't be gotten rid of for 10,000 years, we should just make sure that we can track it for a couple 100 years, and there'll be more options for people 200 years from now than there are today. Okay. What’s wrong with the basic free market objection to the carrying capacity arguments, which goes: let's say we do reach the ends of some resource? Then its price would just increase until you reached some sort of sustainable equilibrium, and people would just decrease their consumption and keep it constant or something. An example: people are concerned that as the developing world gets richer, people are going to eat more meat. But if it's true that it consumes 10 times the energy than the grain that's just like feeding them directly, then that will be represented in the price and so the trend lines might be mistaken because the price of meat will increase or something.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.