Can individuals caring little about future generations serve as their representatives?

Abstract

KUT-SDE working papers are preliminary research documents published by the School of Economics and Management jointly with the Research Center for Social Design Engineering at Kochi University of Technology. To facilitate prompt distribution, they have not been formally reviewed and edited. They are circulated in order to stimulate discussion and critical comment and may be revised. The views and interpretations expressed in these papers are those of the author(s). It is expected that most working papers will be published in some other form.

Intergenerational Bubbles of Beliefs for Sustainability

“…The authors in [16,17] indicate that those who recognize themselves as logical and curious can act as an imaginary future generation. In reality, such people do not constitute the majority of the population.…”

Future Design: Bequeathing Sustainable Natural Environments and Sustainable Societies to Future Generations

“…In this case, the question to be answered becomes: What type of people possess these characteristics? Within the same framework as the fiscal experiment in Nakagawa et al [47], Nakagawa et al [51] have tried to answer this using critical thinking and generativity for testing purposes. Critical thinking measures "whether you tend to always think logically," and "whether you tend to be curious about everything all the time" (see also [52]).…”