Bullet Point Book Review #2

Book title: What We Owe the Future
Author: William MacAskill

Three takeaways from the book that capture some of the main ideas.

Longtermism is about radically taking future lives into account when making decisions today.

• In numbers: If the human species will continue to roam the earth for the average mammalian lifespan of one million years, even when the population size remains constant, 80 trillion lives are yet to be lived. This is 800 times more than all humans born over the last 300’000 years. Or said differently, 99.8% of all human life is yet to come.
• We can make a difference because we are living at a moment of incredibly rapid change: Small tweaks in policy today will reverberate far into the future. This was not the case for most of humanity’s history, where changes were slow and global interconnection non-existent.
• Today, we cannot know whether there exists a set of moral or cultural values that is superior to our present one. Therefore, we would not want to set our current values into stone, making them unchanging for future generations. Looking back, we are indeed quite relieved that previous generations didn’t do so as well. To prevent such a value lock in, we should radically allow for experimentation. This is also what our ancestors did to get to where we are today.
  An example are charter cities, places where the laws and social structure are different from surrounding country. In 1979 Shenzen was made as a charter city with more liberal economic policies. After its apparent success, it was used as a template for national policies, lifting 100 million people out of poverty across China.

Fun Fact:

In almost all languages the future is proverbially in front of us, while the past is behind. However, in the Aymara language, spoken by indigenous people in northern South-Africa, the past and present are respectively before and behind them. You cannot see the future (or what’s behind you), but you know the past (so it must be in front of you).

Personal Critique:

By focusing our actions too much from present living conditions to future generations, we effectively eradicate the feedback loop to gauge whether our efforts have the impact we want. This leaves too much room for thought experiments and unresolved issues.