Uncertainty and the Philosophy of Climate Change by Bunzl Martin

Author:Bunzl, Martin [Martin Bunzl]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781317643043
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Finally, although the choice does not involve giving up something we have now for something in the future, loss aversion still engages when we imagine giving up something we could have now (see Mellers 2000).

V

Even if these biases are universal among us, the circumstances of decision making are not, and make for a difference again between the poor and the rest of us. Lack of slack, as we have seen is a two-edged sword. It forces greater attention to tradeoffs between choices in the here and now but in doing so limits the (cognitive) resources available for attending to tradeoffs between the here and now and the future. Moreover there are other psychological elements of the circumstances of the poor in play as well, like low literacy and the associated stigma of it. Adkins and Ozanne (2005, 104) report that “When consumers accepted the stigma of low literacy, market interactions were perceived to be risky because one’s identity was vulnerable to potential assaults.” Moreover, as Barr (2012, 4825–4832) reports the poor are more likely to find themselves in situations that are distracting and tense which in and of themselves consume cognitive resources and degrade decision making.

But if this suggests a potentially unsystematic approach to decision making that such circumstances can precipitate, one consistent feature of decision making that we have seen is that poverty is associated with an increased aversion to risk taking. Now you might think that when it comes to avoiding climate risk, generalized risk aversion ought to work in its favor. But I want to argue that in this calculus, even if the poor are more risk averse than the rest of us, their circumstances undermine this consequence.

For most of us there is a meaningful tradeoff between reducing the well-being of our immediate offspring to reduce the risk of harming future generations, all the more so if they are genetically related. But notice also the trade is not all or none for us. Our wealth means that the reduction we might visit on our immediate offspring will only slightly reduce their well-being. Maybe they will have smaller cars and houses than we have had. Or maybe they will have to live in denser urban settings close to work. Or maybe they will not be able to heat and cool their homes with the sense of abandon that we have had the luxury to do in our lifetimes. But these are trivial sacrifices. None of them endanger the survival of our offspring. That would make no sense. If your immediate offspring don’t survive, nor do future generations.

But consider this tradeoff through the eyes of the world’s poor. If you are poor, survival of your offspring is really in question in a way that it is not for you and me. For them, there is no tradeoff in the sense that there is for us, since (as we noted earlier) the road to the survival of future generations goes through the road to the survival of their immediate offspring.

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