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By Root 529 0

virtually all societies throughout history have organized governmental means to ensure support for the poorest among them.12 Most have also placed a special responsibility on the rich to pay their share. Until the last two centuries, however, the extent of poverty was so pervasive that there was often not much that society could really do for the poor beyond emergency relief (in the case of a famine, for example). Now, with our great affluence, we can do much more. Indeed, I argued in The End of Poverty that we can actually end extreme poverty once and for all in our generation if the rich will accept their share of the effort to help raise the education, health, and productivity of the poor.

Just as free markets do not guarantee fairness for the citizens of a generation, they do not guarantee sustainability for future generations. There are two reasons for this. The first is that much of any society’s natural capital—the air, water, climate, biodiversity, forests, oceans, and the like—is the common property of the entire society (or even the world) and is therefore vulnerable to abuse unless it is properly managed through political choices. Right now, for example, the earth’s atmosphere is a free “dumping ground” for carbon dioxide, which is dangerously changing the earth’s climate. The world’s major estuaries are a free dumping ground for chemical fertilizers that run off from millions of farms into the major rivers flowing to these estuaries and on to the open seas. Unless the world’s governments agree to regulate the use of the environmental commons, private economic activity will inevitably undermine and eventually destroy these vital life-supporting ecosystems.

The second reason is the small matter of the market interest rate. Interest rates are positive because people are impatient, preferring present consumption to future consumption. The more impatient income earners are, the more today’s income is used for current consumption and the less is used for saving, thereby driving up interest rates. Yet because of positive interest rates, profit-oriented resource holders (of timber, fisheries, oil, freshwater aquifers, and the like) tilt their production toward the present rather than the future, since $1 today is worth more than $1 in the future. This causes a deep tendency to eventual depletion of scarce resources, even the extinction of species, unless we pay attention and put our thumb on the scale to protect the environment. We need to say that yes, we are impatient, but we are also stewards of future generations whose views are not directly represented in the marketplace.

Like it or not, we have the fate of future generations in our hands. There is little within the logic of a free-market economy that forces us to take their interests seriously. True sustainability therefore requires that each generation protect the future even beyond its own shortsighted consumption preferences. We need to reflect not only on our personal wants and desires but also on our responsibilities as the planetary stewards. Innovations such as the National Park Service and the Endangered Species Act are examples of ways that we can prevent our own short-term temptations from endangering the well-being of later generations. We’ve still not faced that challenge squarely when it comes to long-term energy supplies, freshwater, and climate safety.

How Efficiency and Fairness May Reinforce Each Other

A few Americans, perhaps no more than 10 to 20 percent, believe that the market outcome is always fair. In this unforgiving view, if people are poor, it is their own fault. Most Americans don’t believe this.13 They know that circumstances matter. They remember the stories of their own parents or grandparents suffering through the Great Depression or through a tragic bout of illness that left them incapacitated and unable to work, of a factory in the town closing down, or of the impossibility of paying college tuition and therefore having to drop out of school and accept a low-paying job. Americans want the poor to make maximum efforts on their