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  1. Sustainability and the Infinite Future: A Case Study of a False Modeling Assumption in Environmental Economics.Daniel Steel - 2017 - Erkenntnis 82 (5):1065-1084.
    This essay examines the issue of false assumptions in models via a case study of a prominent economic model of sustainable development, wherein the assumption of an infinite future plays a central role. Two proposals are found to be helpful for this case, one based on the concept of derivational robustness and the other on understanding. Both suggest that the assumption of an infinite future, while arguably legitimate in some applications of the model, is problematic with respect to what I (...)
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  • Fundamental utilitarianism and intergenerational equity with extinction discounting.Graciela Chichilnisky, Peter J. Hammond & Nicholas Stern - forthcoming - Social Choice and Welfare.
    Ramsey famously condemned discounting “future enjoyments” as “ethically indefensible”. Suppes enunciated an equity criterion which, when social choice is utilitarian, implies giving equal weight to all individuals’ utilities. By contrast, Arrow accepted, perhaps reluctantly, what he called Koopmans’ :287–309, 1960) “strong argument” implying that no equitable preference ordering exists for a sufficiently unrestricted domain of infinite utility streams. Here we derive an equitable utilitarian objective for a finite population based on a version of the Vickrey–Harsanyi original position, where there is (...)
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