On Method And Ethics In Rawlsian Investment Rules Designed to Achieve ‘Intergenerational Equity’ by John Brätland (U.S. Department of the Interior)
In his philosophical treatise, A Theory of Justice, John Rawls prescribed a ‘social investment agenda’ intended to maximize the ‘well-being’ of the ‘least well-off generation.’ With Rawls as their acknowledged catalyst, John Hartwick and Robert Solow have developed ‘investment rules’ designed to assure at least a constant level of ‘consumption’ for each generation. But Hartwick and Solow define ‘constant consumption’ differently. To the end of achieving constant consumption in a more traditional sense, Hartwick advocates governmental investment of Hotelling rents in ‘reproducible capital.’ For Solow, the requisite governmental investment is broadened to include amounts necessary to ‘repair or prevent environmental resource degradation.’ These investment rules have become paradigmatic but fail methodologically for reasons bearing on the praxeological nature of many of the central concepts. For example, income, saving, capital, depreciation, and depletion are grounded in the goal-seeking actions of individual owners of property rather than the imagined actions of generations of people. Ethical breaches found in these investment rules are evident principally in proposed assaults on rights of private property and upon confiscation of private property for public investment aimed at what is claimed to be intergenerational equity.
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