What do we owe to future generations?

One of the ideas most often repeated, without generally understanding its scope, is to extol the need to take into account the interests of future generations. But in fact, that's not how we behave: we live in the moment, not worrying about leaving future generations with abysmal debts and a rotten environment. We believe, like the English economist JM Keynes, that only the present counts because, “in the long term, we are all dead”; and we actually agree with Groucho Marx when he asks, "Why should I worry about future generations?" What have they done for me? ".

The answers to Groucho Marx's devastating questions are not simple and they lead to the essential: to understand what we owe to the following generations, we must imagine a world where they would not exist. That is to say, a world where, from the precise second you read this text, there would be no longer, on the whole planet, the slightest birth. Nowhere. Otherwise perhaps the birth of all the children already conceived.

Such a shock would have immediate consequences: the end of any family project, the end of any projection into the future. And incidentally the closure of all maternity wards.

Twenty years later, the consequences will be much more terrible: about a quarter of today's humans will have disappeared; the last young people will enter the labor market. All schools, all colleges, all high schools, then all universities will be closed. .

From this moment, the number of workers will begin to decline irreparably. While the climate will continue to deteriorate, the general standard of living will drop inexorably. The financing of the pensions of all those, alive today, who will then be in retirement, will no longer be assured; nor will we be able to finance public services any longer; we will refuse to repay debts, to the detriment of lenders, or we will demand it, to the detriment of borrowers. In both cases, the assets of savers will be drained and will no longer have any reason to be kept, since there will be no one to pass it on to.

Over time, the consequences will become even darker for the last survivors of our contemporaries. We will witness an increasingly rapid decline in the standard of living of the last humans, who will have to fight to survive, in a world where there will be fewer and fewer people to run the economy, the administration, the system health and public services.

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— PrahranMarket Thu Sep 12 02:17:32 +0000 2019

Then, in a world increasingly in disarray, where nothing will work anymore, the last humans, among the living today, will fight to remain the last survivors.

Because this is what we must realize: Without the following generations, the life of all living people today is condemned to end in hell.

Groucho Marx's sentence can therefore only convince those who are victims of the tyranny of the immediate, who do not think about what future generations will bring to them in the essentials in the years to come.

So, out of selfishness at least, let's protect the well-being of our descendants, like the apple of our eye. And for that, let's innovate, let's eliminate carbon dioxide from our energy, let's reduce our debts, let's become harmonious and serene, let's master our desires and our follies, let's strengthen family policy. And above all: let's have children and love them. Let's understand that altruism is one of the most vital dimensions of selfishness. And reciprocally.

j@attali.com