Rationality and Future Discounting

Abstract

The best justification of time-discounting is roughly that it is rational to care less about your more distant future because there is less of you around to have it. I argue that the standard version of this argument, which treats both psychological continuity and psychological connectedness as reasons to care about your future, can only rationalize an irrational—because exploitable—form of future discounting.

Positive time-preference is a bias towards the present or near future at the expense of the more distant future. Most people exhibit at least positive time-preference for fixed monetary sums. For instance, you would prefer $100 now to $100 in a year’s time.¹

There are three natural justifications for this. The first is that the nominal interest rate is positive. This means that you could simply invest the $100 now for a return of more than $100 in a year’s time. So you are strictly better off taking the $100 now.

The second is the declining marginal utility of money. Every extra dollar matters less to you than the last—this is why rich people spend money on luxuries like taxi-rides that many poorer people could also afford but choose not to purchase. If you expect that your wealth will increase over time, an extra $100 is going to be worth less to you in a year’s time than it is now.

The third justification involves uncertainty. Many things other than an increase in wealth could happen over the next year that would also make $100 less valuable to you at the end of that period. For instance, you might die; or the monetary authority might impose currency controls. Factoring this uncertainty into your present decision may suppress the value of the future $100 relative to the present $100.

Distinguish monetary positive time-preference from pure positive time-preference, by which I mean time-preference for utility or well-being under conditions of certainty. For instance, suppose that you are offered a choice between two goods (sums of money, episodes of consumption etc.) at an early and a late time respectively; and that you are certain that the late good will be just as valuable to you when you get it as the early good when you get it. (So you are certain that you will not die over the period, or at least that death will not affect the good’s contribution to your welfare.) If you still prefer the early good then you are exhibiting pure time-preference.

None of the three suggested justifications for monetary time-preference could justify pure time-preference. Well-being unlike money cannot be invested for a future return, so positive interest rates cannot justify it. Every additional unit of well-being is by definition as valuable as the last, so an expected secular increase in well-being cannot justify it. And you are by hypothesis as certain to enjoy the late good if you choose it now as to enjoy the early good if you choose it now. So uncertainty about the future cannot justify pure time-preference either. Can anything justify it?

Many writers have thought not. For instance, Plato thought that discounting the future in this way involves a confusion something like that between what is small and what is far away.² Hume and Pigou have also traced time-preference to some (possibly similar) deficiency in our ways of thinking about the future.³

My target in this paper is one argument for pure positive time-preference that seems to have a chance of working. This is Parfit’s argument based on personal identity, or rather on what he thinks matters about personal identity. In brief, his view is that what gives me special reason for concern about my future is the degree of psychological connection between me now and me then. Since this degree subsides, I am rational to care less about my more distant future.⁴

I argue that this rationale for time-preference faces a severe pragmatic difficulty that does not seem to have been noticed. Given plausible assumptions about the rate at which connections attenuate, anyone who rationalizes her concern for future well-being on Parfitian grounds is exploitable: that is, will voluntarily take a course of action that not only reduces her overall well-being but strictly reduces it at some time without increasing it at any. So Parfit’s considerations could only rationalize a form of time-preference that is in this sense inefficient; and this is at least grounds for regarding the latter as irrational.

The plan of the paper is as follows. Section 1 outlines Parfit’s position. Section 2 describes and illustrates the argument that exploitation threatens time-preference unless it takes one specific form. Section 3 argues that the Parfitian argument rationalizes a form of time-preference that does not take this form and which therefore is arguably irrational. Section 4 considers some objections.

1 Parfitian Time-Preference

Parfit writes:

My concern for my future may correspond to the degree of connectedness between me now and myself in the future. Connectedness is one of the two relations that give me reasons to be specially concerned about my own future [, the other being continuity⁵]. It can be rational to care less, when one of the grounds for caring will hold to a lesser degree. Since connectedness is nearly always weaker over longer periods, I can rationally care less about my further future.⁶

By connectedness Parfit means a relation that holds with more or less strength between myself at one time and myself at another. The degree of connectedness corresponds to the number of direct connections, of the right kind, between those mental states and events (memories, character traits, experiences, thoughts) of mine that obtain or occur at the earlier and those that obtain or occur at the later time.

For instance, if I see a red car on Tuesday morning and—via the normal mechanism—recall seeing it on Tuesday afternoon, then the causal link between my visual experience on Tuesday morning and the episode of conscious recollection on Tuesday afternoon constitutes one such connection ‘of the right kind’ between myself on Tuesday morning and myself on Tuesday afternoon.

Connection can involve identity as well as causation. If on Tuesday morning I form the belief that Jones drives a red car, and if I preserve this belief until Tuesday afternoon, again via whatever mechanism is normal for me, then the preservation of this state by itself constitutes another connection ‘of the right kind’ between myself on Tuesday morning and myself on Tuesday afternoon.⁷

I won’t—because Parfit doesn’t—attempt to give a sharp criterion for exactly which connections are ‘of the right kind’. But I will assume, because he assumes, that we have some way to count them.

Now define strong connectedness as the holding of very many such connections between a person at one time and a person at another. At one point Parfit suggests that ‘very many’ requires the holding of at least half of the number of connections that hold across any ordinary day-long period in the life of nearly every actual person.⁸ Clearly strong connectedness need not be transitive: although it holds between me on any day and me on the following day, it probably does not hold between me now and me in very many years’ time.

Finally, we can say that a person A₁ at time t₁ and person A_n at the later time t_n (written t₁ < t_n) are continuous if and only if there is a chain of persons-at-times, A₂-at-t₂, A₃-at-t₃… A_n−1-at-t_n−1, with t₁ < t₂ <⋯t_n−1 < t_n, such that each is strongly connected to the next, A₁-at-t₁ is strongly connected to A₂-at-t₂ and A_n−1-at-t_n−1 is strongly connected to A_n-at-t_n. Although strong connectedness is not transitive, continuity, which is just the transitive closure of strong connectedness, is transitive; and it holds between myself now and myself whenever I exist at all.

Connectedness and continuity are the two relations that make my future self of special concern to my present self. And although continuity does not come in degrees, connectedness plainly does. Parfit’s argument is then that it can be rational to care less about (the well-being of) myself in the distant future than about myself in the nearer future, because time diminishes the degree of connectedness. There are fewer connections between me now and my distant-future self than between me now and my near-future self. That is his normative justification of what I am calling pure time-preference.⁹

2 Rational Time-Preference is Delay-Consistent

This second section outlines a well-known constraint upon time preference that threatens to undermine Parfit’s argument. Section 3 realizes that threat: but in this section, I’ll just describe the idea and then illustrate it. I’ll do this briefly and informally, since the basic point is well-known (for details see Appendix 1).

The representative time-preferring agent (call her Alice) is willing to make trade-offs that a temporally neutral person (call him Bob) would decline. For instance, let T₁ and T₂ be real numbers such that Alice presently cares more about her well-being T₁ units of time (say, days) from now than after T₂ units of time from now. (In the cases that will matter T₁ < T₂, but we needn’t assume this here.) Then Alice currently prefers waiting T₁ days for one additional unit of well-being to waiting T₂ days for the same benefit. On a natural assumption,¹⁰ there is therefore some r < 1 such that she now prefers waiting T₁ days for r units of well-being over waiting T₂ days for 1 unit of well-being, and so would trade in the second for the first; whereas Bob—who is indifferent between early and late well-being—does not have this preference for any r < 1, and so would never trade in the second for the first.

Focus now on the delay between T₁ days in the future and T₂ days in the future, which I’ll define simply as the ordered pair (T₁, T₂), where T₂ > T₁. The length of this delay is T₂ − T₁. Its discount valueV (T₁, T₂)—relative to Alice—is the r such that Alice is indifferent between r units of well-being T₁ days from now and one unit of well-being T₂ days from now. (More-or-less equivalently, it is the smallest r such that Alice would accept the former in exchange for the latter.)

The key feature that arguably constrains rational time-preference is then:

Delay-consistency (DC): Delays of the same length have the same discount value.

DC constrains the value of a delay to depend only on its duration and not on its futurity. For any T₁ and T₂, V (T₁, T₂) depends only on their difference T₂ − T₁ and not in any other way on the absolute values of T₁ and T₂. If Alice conforms to DC then she must, for instance, value a week’s delay in a week’s time—that is, (7, 14)—at the same rate as a week’s delay in 3 weeks’ time, i.e. (21, 28). If Alice violates DC then I’ll say that she is delay-inconsistent.

DC places the following constraint on the trade-offs that Alice is (now) willing to make. Suppose Alice is willing to exchange 1 unit of well-being to be realized 4 weeks from now, for r units of well-being to be realized 3 weeks from now; then she is willing to exchange one unit of well-being to be realized 2 weeks from now, for r units of well-being to be realized 1 week from now. More generally, if: (a) she is willing to exchange N units of well-being to be realized after T₂ for rN units to be realized after T₁; then: (b) she is willing to exchange N units of well-being to be realized after T₂ + t for rN units to be realized after T₁ + t, for any t such that T₁ + t and T₂ + t are both positive.

Now suppose that at any time Alice takes the same attitude towards well-being at the same distance in the future: if e.g. on 1 January she is indifferent between 1 additional unit of well-being on 1 January and x additional units on 16 January, then on 12 January she is indifferent between 1 additional unit on 12 January and x additional units on 27 January. This assumption is formally reflected in the fact that the discount value function V is a function only of a temporal interval measured from the present; it is not also sensitive to which time is now present. The usual name for this is stationarity.¹¹

Stationarity (S): Alice is equally patient at all times.

It is important not to confuse stationarity with delay-consistency. DC is a synchronic constraint: it says that evaluated at any fixed time t = 0, delaying a consumption from a future time t = t₁ to the future time t₂ devalues the consumption by a factor that depends only on the length of the delay t₂ − t₁ and not also on its timing i.e. not in any further way on the absolute value of t₁. S is diachronic: it says that when evaluated at different times a delay of fixed length and fixed distance from the index of evaluation creates the same discounting of value.

The main point of this section is that if Alice violatesDC but satisfies S then she is exploitable. Given a suitable combination of offers she will voluntarily make a sequence of choices that not only reduces her aggregate well-being over time but strictly reduces it at some time without increasing it at any time.¹²

For an unrealistically dramatic illustration, suppose that Alice’s delay-inconsistency takes the following form: the discount value of a delay of length 1 day is 0.2 if the delay begins 1 day in the future, but 0.8 if the delay is 2 days in the future. Stationarity implies that she retains this pattern of preference over the next week; so for any N we have:

• (1) On Monday she is indifferent between N units (of well-being) on Thursday and 0.8N units on Wednesday.

• (2) On Tuesday she is indifferent between N units on Thursday and 0.2N units on Wednesday.

Now suppose that on Monday her well-being schedule for the future is as follows:

• (3) 60 units on Wednesday, 60 units on Thursday.

On Monday we offer her (A) the chance to give up 20 of the Wednesday units for 30 additional units on Thursday. (1) implies that she will accept; so by Monday evening she is facing the schedule:

• (4) 40 units on Wednesday, 90 units on Thursday.

On Tuesday we then offer her (B) the chance to give up 40 units on Thursday in exchange for 10 additional units on Wednesday. (2) implies that she accepts this offer too. So by the time she gets to Wednesday she is facing the following schedule:

• (5) 50 units on Wednesday, 50 units on Thursday.

Comparing (5) to (3), we see that Alice’s own preferences have led her voluntarily to accept trades that make her worse off on some days and better off on none. In this sense those preferences are inefficient. The culprit is delay-inconsistency: given S (stationarity), she is open to this form of exploitation if and only if she is delay-inconsistent. To get a feel for this, notice that Bob—whose complete temporal neutrality plainly implies delay-consistency—would accept A but reject B.¹³

Does this show that delay-inconsistency is irrational? Well, it gives a reason to call it that; and it certainly is inefficient. In any case, delay-inconsistent time-preference is in some sense self-frustrating: Alice is cheating herself out of something that matters to her, namely her own future well-being. The next step is to redirect this concern at Parfit’s argument for time-preference.

3 Parfitian Time-Preference is Delay-Inconsistent

Parfit does not go into detail on the relation between (a) the diminution of connectedness between Alice now and her future self and (b) the rate at which she discounts the latter. But there are two obvious and natural ways in which (b) might seem to depend on (a). I’ll argue that on both, Parfitian time-preference is delay-inconsistent and so arguably irrational. A third proposal does not entail delay-inconsistency; but it cannot support the form of time-preference that Parfit is seeking to justify.

Throughout this section I’ll work with a very simple model of diachronic connection. Say that a direct connection decays when the trace of Alice’s present psychology that preserves it is extinguished. For instance, if Alice sees a red car on Monday morning, then there is a direct connection, sustained by her memory of that episode, that lasts until she forgets it: the extinction of her memory-trace is the decay of that connection. Similarly, the survival of any one of Alice’s present character traits constitutes a direct connection between her present self and any future version of her that retains it; when the character trait changes, the connection decays.

The model that I’ll use treats the longevity of any particular direct connection as a random variable. Random in what way? Well, a simple-minded idea would be to treat the decay of any one connection as a kind of rare event that is as likely to occur at any one time as at any other. We can express that with the following assumption:

Uniformity (U): If a connection has survived up to t, the probability that it will decay over the next small interval of time is proportional to the length of that interval.

Slightly more formally, this means that each direct connection decays in the next $\Delta T$ units of time with probability $r\Delta T$ for some constant r, called the intensity of its decay-process. It follows that the longevity of that connection follows an exponential distribution: if it exists now, then the probability that it will exist—i.e. will not have decayed—after a lapse of T units of time is $e^{{ - rT}}$. Similar assumptions are often used to model temporal intervals between randomly occurring events like births or deaths in a population, arrivals at a queue or calls coming into a telephone exchange.¹⁴

It is important to bear in mind that U is not saying that different connections have the same probability of decay over any given time-period. The intensity associated with a memory connection might, for instance, be higher than that associated with a character trait. U implies only that the survival of each connection is a process with some fixed intensity.

It will matter to the argument that different connections do decay at different rates. Whether this is true of any actual individual is an empirical matter that I can’t settle here. But it is plausible enough: nobody would find it strange that vivid memories or strong hopes and fears last longer than, or that certain character traits or intellectual capacities change less frequently than, memories of everyday perceptual experiences. Setting aside the empirical plausibility of U, it would in any case be a serious qualification of Parfit’s argument that it only supports efficient time-preference for beings whose psychological connections all decay at one identical rate.

With U in hand I turn to the argument that Parfitian time-preference violates DC; as advertised I derive it from two natural proposals about the relation between the diminution of connectedness and that of future-directed self-concern.

3.1 Connectedness Without Continuity

The simplest proposal is what Parfit’s wording most strongly suggests. Let Conn (T) be the proportion of Alice’s present states that are directly connected to herself T days in the future. Then her present discount value for the delay (T₁, T₂) is simply:

• (6) $V\left( {T_{1} ,T_{2} } \right) = \frac{{Conn\,(T_{2} )}}{{Conn\,(T_{1} )}}$

I’ll say that in this case Alice simply discounts her future well-being.

For instance, suppose that on some appropriate measure, 50% of Alice’s current mental states are directly connected with herself after a year (T₁), but only 10% of her current mental states are directly connected with herself after 5 years (T₂).¹⁵ If Alice discounts simply, her present value for the delay (T₁, T₂) is 0.1/0.5 = 0.2. She now considers one unit of well-being in 5 years’ time to be worth 0.2 units of well-being in 1 year, and so would trade anything less than the former for anything more than the latter.

Does simple discounting give rise to delay-inconsistency? The following analogy sets out the intuition behind my argument that it does.

Let S be a composite material body consisting initially of N atoms of polonium-212, which decays very quickly, and N atoms of uranium-235, which decays very slowly. At the outset, the decay of polonium atoms makes a big difference to the proportion of original atoms of S that remain. But as time goes on the slow-decaying uranium atoms will dominate: their decay will make an increasing contribution to the rate at which the survival-rate of the original atoms declines. And since uranium decays slowly, the proportion of original atoms that remains falls more slowly as time goes on. So this proportion will fall by more over any 1-day stretch in the near future than over any 1-day stretch in the distant future. The decline in the proportion of original atoms over a delay of fixed length is not itself constant but depends on how far in the future the delay is supposed to be.¹⁶

Back now to Parfit. The decay of a single atom of S corresponds to the breaking at some time t of one direct connection between Alice’s current mental state and her mental state at (or after) t. For instance, her losing a memory tomorrow constitutes the breaking of a direct connection between herself now and herself tomorrow (and thereafter). Now suppose that over some stretch of time direct connections with her original state break at random in accordance with U. But there are two types of connection: those that break frequently, and those that break infrequently. The foregoing argument shows that the proportion of direct connections that she maintains with her current state falls at a declining rate as time passes. So if the discount value she attaches to a delay (T₁, T₂) is the ratio of the weight of her present direct connections with Alice-after-T₁ to the weight of her present direct connections to Alice-after-T₂, this value will not remain fixed for delays of fixed length but will increase as the futurity of the delay increases. Alice is therefore delay-inconsistent.

Here is a simple if unrealistically stark illustration. Suppose that Alice’s current mental ‘bundle’ consists of two types of state: memories and character traits, with weights W₁ and W₂ respectively. The preservation of a single character trait or of a single memory between now and some future time t constitutes the existence of a single direct connection between herself now and herself at t; the loss of such an item between now and then constitutes the breaking of one such item. Now suppose that both types of connection decay at random, but memories quickly and character traits slowly. For instance, suppose that over an average 1-day period 50% of memory connections and 20% of character traits are lost.¹⁷

What the foregoing argument shows is that if she is a simple discounter then Alice’s current discount value for a delay of 1 day will depend on when that delay occurs: it increases with the increasing futurity of the delay. That is, Alice is at any time more impatient about delays that occur in the near future than she is about delays that occur in the relatively distant future. Formally, her discount value for a delay (T₁, T₂)—that is, the units of well-being at T₁ that she would exchange for an extra unit at T₂—is given by the following formula:

• (7) $V\left( {T_{1} ,~T_{2} } \right) = \frac{{W_{1} \,0.5^{{T_{2} }} + W_{2} \,0.8^{{T_{2} }} }}{{W_{1} \,0.5^{{T_{1} }} + W_{2} \,0.8^{{T_{1} }} }}$

So if e.g. W₁ = W₂ = 0.5 then the discount value of a delay of 1 day is V (1, 2) = 0.68 if that delay occurs 1 day in the future; but if the delay occurs 2 days in the future then it is V (2, 3) = 0.72.¹⁸ So simple discounting makes Alice delay-inconsistent: and if she simply discounts at the same rate today and tomorrow then she is liable to exploitation.¹⁹

3.2 Continuity as an Additive Constraint

The target passage from Parfit mentions two relations with one’s future self that might matter to one’s present self: psychological connectedness and psychological continuity. The last section assumed that degree of connectedness is the only determinant of the rate of self-interested future discounting. But what if continuity also matters?

Continuity as defined in Sect. 1 is, unlike connectedness, an all-or-nothing relation: any future person is fully continuous with Alice now or not at all continuous with Alice now. So continuity (or its absence) should make the same contribution to Alice’s evaluation of future well-being regardless of when in the future that well-being is supposed to be realized.

There are two very simple and obvious ways to incorporate continuity into the discount function. We might treat it either (i) as making a weighted contribution to Alice’s present value for future well-being, over and above that of connectedness, or (ii) as a necessary condition on Alice’s presently attaching any value at all to future well-being. I’ll discuss (i) in this section, and I discuss (ii) briefly at n. 22. (I am not claiming that (i) and (ii) are exhaustive; but they do exhaust the obvious and natural possibilities. If they don’t help then the Parfitian must find something that does.)

We can formalize (i) as follows. Let the variable C* be sensitive to whether the person who benefits from some episode of well-being at T is psychologically continuous with Alice now. If so then C* (T) = 1. If not then C* (T) = 0. For continuity to make a fixed additive contribution to her evaluation of a delay in the realization of well-being is for there to exist some constant λ, 0 ≤ λ ≤ 1, satisfying:

• (8) $V\left( {T_{1} ,T_{2} } \right) = \frac{{\left( {1 - \lambda } \right)\,Conn\,\left( {T_{2} } \right)\,+\,\lambda C^{*} \left( {T_{2} } \right)}}{{\left( {1 - \lambda } \right)\,Conn\,\left( {T_{1} } \right)\,+\,\lambda C^{*} \left( {T_{1} } \right)}}$

In something closer to English: Alice’s present value for a unit of future well-being at a future time is a weighted average of two things: first, the degree to which she is psychologically connected with the recipient of that well-being; second, whether the recipient of that well-being is continuous with her. The discount value of a future delay in the realization of well-being is again the ratio of the value of this weighted sum for the later time to its value for the earlier time. I’ll call this λ-discounting.

What motivates λ-discounting is the philosophical intuition that the degree of connectedness with one’s present self cannot be the only factor of future self-interest. There might well be future persons who are to some degree psychologically connected with Alice but not psychologically continuous with her; on the Parfitian view, these are different persons.²⁰ But it might matter to her whether she gets the well-being. That is, if well-being is distributed amongst a range of future people who are all equally strongly connected to her now, she ought to attach additional value to the well-being of the one that is identical to her. λ measures that premium. Note that I am not endorsing this line of thought but only making room for it: what makes the room is that λ in (8) may be strictly positive, rather than zero as in simple discounting. (And λ = 1 represents the other extreme of temporal neutrality, at least as regards Alice’s descendants-by-continuity.)

In any case it is easy to see that λ-discounting creates delay-inconsistency for the same reasons as—and in wider circumstances than—simple discounting. The mathematical case is straightforward and set out in Appendix 2. Here I’ll briefly state the intuition: what established the declining rate of decay of the polonium-uranium composite described at Sect. 3.1 also establishes the declining rate of decay of a composite of uranium and polonium with some third, radioactively inert substance.

More explicitly: the preferences of any λ-discounter over schedules of well-being enjoyed by her future self are indistinguishable from those of a simple discounter who gives weight λ to cross-temporal connections that never decay.²¹ The argument that simple discounting is delay-inconsistent therefore applies here too. As Alice looks further into the future, she sees the decay of more connections. So her concern for her more distantly future self rests more on its continuity, and less on its degree of connectedness, with her present self. But since continuity with her present self perishes more slowly than these other connections (for as long as she lives), the decline of her future self-concern must decelerate. So λ-discounting is delay-inconsistent. Specifically we should expect the λ-discounter to care less about a delay of fixed length, the further in the future that delay is. Again, this leads to exploitability.²²

3.3 Expectation of Continuity

A third proposal deserves brief comment. This is the idea that Alice presently weights well-being T days from now by her present degree of confidence that her present self is continuous with the person who gets the well-being T days from now. Let Cr be the probability function representing Alice’s credence or confidence over a suitable algebra of propositions. Then on this proposal, her discount value for a delay is

• (9) $V~\left( {T_{1} ,~T_{2} } \right) = \frac{{Cr\,\left[ {C^{*} \left( {T_{2} } \right)\,=\,1} \right]}}{{Cr\,\left[ {C^{*} \left( {T_{1} } \right)\,=\,1} \right]}}$

This function plausibly satisfies DC. To see why, note first that if T₁ < T₂ (and setting aside exotic cases), Alice-now is continuous with Alice-at-T₂ if and only if Alice-now is continuous with Alice-at-T₁ and Alice-at-T₁ is continuous with Alice-at-T₂. It therefore follows from (9) and the definition of conditional probability that:

• (10) $V\left( {T_{1} ,~T_{2} } \right) = ~Cr\,\left[ {C^{*} \left( {T_{2} } \right) = 1|C^{*} (T_{1} = 1)} \right]$

And the latter is equivalent to Alice’s present confidence that continuity holds between T₂and T₁. This quantity plausibly is a function of T₂ − T₁, or at any rate it is if we assume that (a) when a direct connection decays, it is replaced by another with the same likelihood of decay. In that case (10) is simply the complement of the probability that enough direct connections will be broken over a short enough subinterval of (T₁, T₂) as to violate continuity within that period. If the proportion of direct connections that decay at any given rate is constant, which it is if (a) holds, then this probability depends only on the duration of the interval (T₁, T₂) i.e. only on T₂ − T₁, and not on its futurity. So (10) represents an attitude towards the future that is delay-consistent.

The trouble with (10) is that continuity considerations alone cannot justify the form of time-preference that had been our target all along, namely positive time-preference under certainty. The aim was to justify Alice’s present discounting of future goods relative to present goods when she knows that the former will be as valuable to her when she gets them as are the latter when she gets them (i.e., now).²³ On the Parfitian equation of personal identity with continuity, this means that we are supposed to be justifying the discounting of goods received by a future Alice with which she knows that her present self is continuous.²⁴ So from that perspective, the target is to justify positive time-preference even in the situation where Cr (C*(T) = 1) = 1, for all relevant T. That form of time-preference is plainly inconsistent with (10); so, it cannot be justified by considerations that justify time-preference only for stretches of the future over which continuity with the present has a positive chance of being broken.²⁵

3.4 Comments

That concludes my main argument. Simply put, it is this. Delay-inconsistency is plausibly irrational. Parfit’s rationalization of temporal discounting implies delay-inconsistency. Therefore, Parfit’s rationalization of delay-discounting fails. The next section examines some objections to it; but first two comments on its scope.

First: the argument raises a problem for Parfit’s rationalization on the basis that it makes the rate of future discounting an aggregate of psychological variables that diminish at different rates: some fast, some slow. But nothing in the argument crucially depends on the fact that these variables characterize the objects rather than the subject of future-directed concern.

We get an argument with that second effect if we suppose that human decision-making aggregates the output of two separate decision-making modules, one (‘System 1’) being impatient and the other (‘System 2’) patient. This idea, nowadays called the two-systems hypothesis, has roots in Plato²⁶ and probably further back, and it currently enjoys some empirical support.²⁷ According to it, we can model a decision maker’s valuation of delays (i.e. the overall output) as reflecting a weighted average of two attitudes, namely the ‘impatient’ and ‘patient’ discounting functions associated with System 1 and System 2 respectively. If each individual system conforms to delay-consistency, the aggregate output—the decision maker herself—will by the foregoing argument be delay-inconsistent.

The two-systems hypothesis therefore renders the decision-maker susceptible to exploitation by means of the procedure described in Sect. 2: when faced with an appropriate schedule the decision-maker will make choices that render her worse off by her own lights at all periods than she might have been had she chosen otherwise. (And—if it means anything to say this—both of her sub-personal systems will also be ‘worse off by their own lights’ than each might have been had she chosen otherwise.) None of this means that aggregative models should be discarded as descriptive accounts—on the contrary, they enjoy some empirical support and may indeed explain our actual future-directed attitudes, which as is well-known do display delay-inconsistency.²⁸ I mention it merely to illustrate that as well as its present normative application the main argument also has descriptive application.

Second: the argument did not rely on the fact that in Parfit’s view the relevant cross-temporal connections are between mental bundles. They might connect any aggregates some of whose elements decay or are replaced at different rates from others. So again, the argument would apply against anyone—if there is anyone—who tried to justify future discounting in terms of the diminution of some other aggregate of cross-temporal connections. (For instance: if some genetic lines have a greater chance of extinction than others, one could not justify an efficient social discount function on the basis that the value to present society of future welfare is the proportion of presently-living people who get, or whose descendants get, to enjoy it.²⁹)

4 Objections

The following diagram represents the structure of my argument up to this point. In it, an AND gate represents the conjunction of the claims pointing into it; a claim in a box is entailed by whatever points directly into it (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

Logical relations between key claims

As the diagram shows there are two premises that a defender of Parfit might reject. I’ll consider these in turn.

4.1 Rejecting S

Stationarity is crucial to the argument because a non-stationary discount function might be delay-inconsistent yet unexploitable.³⁰ Such a discount function would therefore be immune to criticism from the standpoint of Sect. 3.

Generally, if Alice’s time-preference is positive then it suffices to avoid exploitation that the following holds: at any times t, t + Δ (Δ > 0), and for any delay (T₁, T₂) such that T₁, T₂ ≥ Δ, her valuations at t and t + Δ, namely V_t and V_t+Δ, satisfy:

• (11) $V_{t} \left( {T_{1} ,T_{2} } \right) = V_{{t + \Delta }} \left( {T_{1} - \Delta ,~T_{2} - \Delta } \right)$

And although stationary discounting, if it satisfies (11), is delay-consistent and so non-Parfitian for the reasons stated at Sect. 3, Alice could still avoid exploitation if she were non-stationary. If she gets increasingly patient, she may not make the choices amongst future allocations of well-being that caused the trouble in Sect. 3. For instance, suppose that Alice’s attitude towards the future evolves as follows:

• (12) $V_{t} \left( {T_{1},\,T_{2} } \right) = \frac{{1\,+\,t\,+\,T_{1} }}{{1\,+\,t\,+\,T_{2} }}$

V_t is delay-inconsistent: it implies that at any time t, the cost of deferring the enjoyment of a future good by a fixed delay $T_{2} - T_{1}$ is a declining function of the futurity of that delay. For instance, at t = 0, the cost of delaying the enjoyment of a future good from tomorrow to the day after is 33% of the present value of having it tomorrow. But at the same time, the cost of delaying a future good from 8 to 9 days in the future is only 10% of the present value of having it in 8 days.

But ${V_t}$ is also unexploitable, since it satisfies (11). Informally, this is because ${V_t}$ implies a secular increase in the agent’s patience that exactly balances the change in value of future goods as they become less and less future. In consequence, the relative values of a smaller-sooner and a larger-later reward remains constant as the time for the realization of those rewards gets closer: hence the passage of time cannot by itself induce any reversal of preference. The step from delay-inconsistency to exploitability therefore fails in this case.

But non-stationarity is normatively unsatisfactory for reasons that do not apply to Parfit’s original idea. For it makes Alice’s present evaluation of a future delay depend not only on the futurity and length of that delay but also on what date it is now. More specifically, her rate of time-preference at any time is a function of the date t—typically a declining function, so that the longer she lives the more patient she gets. But why should her past longevity have normative bearing on her present concern for her future self? Why should it be a demand of rationality that (for instance) Alice on 1 January 2016 cares less about her consumption on 10 January than Alice on 1 June 2017 cares about her consumption on 10 June 2017?

Besides, if we are in the business of rationalizing non-stationarity, we must give up on Parfit’s original claim that the only things that are prudentially relevant to present discounting are the continuity and the degree of connectedness between herself now and herself at later times. These quantities do not even appear in (12). It may be that both are the same as assessed at 1 January 2017 with respect to 10 January 2017 and at 1 June 2017 with respect to 10 June 2017.³¹ Yet non-stationarity demands a more patient attitude at the later date.

So whilst dropping S stops the argument in Sect. 3 from going through, it is doubtful that doing so is either (a) a requirement of rationality or (b) consistent with Parfit’s approach.

4.2 Rejecting U

The second assumption was that Alice treats degree of connectedness as the outcome of an aggregate of decay-processes of known intensity, so that the expected number of direct connections that survive between herself now and herself after T is some weighted average of ${e^{ - {r_1}T}},~{e^{ - {r_2}T}}, \ldots {e^{ - {r_n}T}}$, where r₁,…r_n are the known rates at which different kinds of connections decay. This assumption was crucial, for instance, in the illustrative derivation of the delay-inconsistent value function (7) from the assumption (6) that Alice simply discounts the future; more generally it is crucial for deriving the general result in Appendix 2.

Alternative assumptions about the decay of direct connections do not have this effect. The simplest and most plausible alternative is that Alice is—like most people—completely in the dark as to the rates of decay of different kinds of connections, but she estimates that overall, the total number of connections, between her present self and herself after a lapse of T days, declines at an exponential rate i.e. ${{Conn\,({T_2})} \mathord{\left/ {\vphantom {{Conn\,({T_2})} {Conn\,({T_1})}}} \right. \kern-0pt} {Conn\,({T_1})}}=f({T_2} - {T_1})$ for some exponential function f. If the subject thinks about herself in this way, simple discounting seems to imply delay-consistency, contrary to the inference defended at Sect. 3.1. Moreover, it looks more plausible that subjects do think of themselves in this way. In real life nobody even considers, let alone knows, the probability that any given direct connection, or type of direct connection—say, an autobiographical memory—will survive for a day, or a year. In short, the argument at Sect. 3.1—according to this objection—involves an absurd over-intellectualization of what goes on when a real person thinks about his or her future; and when we try to be even slightly more realistic, the whole argument collapses.

There are two replies. The first turns on the distinction—which admittedly I am taking for granted—between the descriptive and the normative. Of course nobody really thinks about these things in the course of actual decision-making. But Parfit’s account was supposed to be normative—it was saying, not that considerations about direct connections do in fact enter into the future-directed and self-interested deliberations of actual people, but that they ought to. But if the latter is true then it should hold not only for people who are ignorant of differentials in rates of psychological decay, but also for people who are not. If (a) Parfit’s normative standard bears on you and me then (b) it would also bear on people who differed from us only in respect of knowing the different average rates at which different types of psychological states decay. The objection does nothing to mitigate the doubt that my argument casts on (b); that doubt therefore transfers to (a).³²

Second, it is not necessary for my argument that Alice’s knowledge of her cross-temporal psychological connections be as detailed as the objection envisages. If she knows simply that some cross-temporal direct connections—e.g. character traits—decay on average more slowly than others—e.g. quotidian autobiographical memories—then the argument already applies. She can see that the degree of connectedness between herself after T days and her present self will decline more slowly as T increases, because as T increases the more stable types of connection tend to make a dominant contribution to the similarity between herself at T and herself now. That by itself is enough to make the Parfitian valuation of future well-being delay-inconsistent as argued at Sect. 3; given the further argument at Sect. 2 it follows in turn that such a valuation is exploitable and so plausibly irrational.

5 Conclusion

For any time t in the next 50 years (say), Alice like many other people now has a special concern for just one of the persons who will exist at that future time. It is correct to say that Alice is identical to the object of her special concern at t. But leaving it at that gives us no idea why she should, as most of us do, care more about the well-being of that special object’s near future than about its more distant future. After all, identity does not come in degrees: she is no more identical to herself tomorrow than to herself in 10 years.

The ingenuity of Parfit’s idea was that it identifies a relation—degree of connectedness—that comes in degrees, and seems to do so in just the right way to justify caring more about the near than about the distant future. Unfortunately this promising idea cannot rationalize positive time preference: if the measure of connectedness aggregates connections that decay at different rates, then the Parfitian argument supports forms of time-preference that are plausibly irrational because exploitable by means of familiar devices.

Appendices

Appendix 1: Delay-Inconsistency and Exploitability

I claimed at Sect. 2 that any delay-inconsistent $V$ is exploitable. To see why, suppose that Alice is delay-inconsistent i.e. for some $\Delta$, $a>0$, $V$ satisfies:

• (13) $V\left( {{T_1},{T_2}} \right)=aV\left( {{T_1}+{\Delta},{T_2}+{\Delta}} \right),~\,{\Delta}>0,~\quad a \ne 1$

This means that she is just willing to exchange one unit of well-being in T₂ days’ time for V (T₁, T₂) units in T₁ days’ time; and she is just willing to exchange one unit of well-being in T₂ + Δ days’ time for (1/a)V (T₁, T₂) units in T₁ + Δ days’ time. Let the date t₁ + Δ be (now) T₁ + Δ days in the future, and let the date t₂ + Δ be T₂ + Δ days in the future. And suppose that she is now looking forward to the following schedule of future well-being:

• (14) 1 unit at t₁ + Δ, 1 unit at t₂ + Δ

Now suppose first a < 1. Then we offer to exchange the unit of well-being at t₁ + Δ for an additional ${a \mathord{\left/ {\vphantom {a {V\left( {{T_1},{T_2}} \right)}}} \right. \kern-0pt} {V\left( {{T_1},{T_2}} \right)}}$units at t₂ + Δ. Her schedule now looks like this:

• (15) 0 units at t₁ + Δ, 1 + ${a \mathord{\left/ {\vphantom {a {V\left( {{T_1},{T_2}} \right)}}} \right. \kern-0pt} {V\left( {{T_1},{T_2}} \right)}}$ units at t₂ + Δ

We now wait for Δ days i.e. until the remaining delay before the date t₁ + Δ is T₁ days. At that point she is (by S) willing to take V (T₁, T₂) units at t₁ + Δ for each unit at t₂ + Δ. So we choose $\varepsilon ,~\varepsilon ^{\prime},~\varepsilon ^{\prime\prime}>0~{\text{s}}.{\text{t}}.\,a +\varepsilon ~+\varepsilon ^{\prime}=1~$ and $\varepsilon ^{\prime\prime}~=~{\varepsilon \mathord{\left/ {\vphantom {\varepsilon {V\left( {{T_1},{T_2}} \right)}}} \right. \kern-0pt} {V\left( {{T_1},{T_2}} \right)}}$ (these are guaranteed to exist since a < 1) and offer her $a+\varepsilon$ units at t₁ + Δ in exchange for ${{a+\varepsilon } \mathord{\left/ {\vphantom {{a+\varepsilon } {V\left( {{T_1},{T_2}} \right)}}} \right. \kern-0pt} {V\left( {{T_1},{T_2}} \right)}}$ units at t₂ + Δ. She will accept this deal too, for a final schedule that looks like this

• (16) $1 - \varepsilon ^{\prime}$ units at t₁ + Δ, $1 - \varepsilon ^{\prime\prime}$ units at t₂ + Δ

Comparing (16) with (14) we see that Alice has signed up to a sequence of deals that makes her strictly worse off at both t₁ + Δ and t₂ + Δ and no better off at any other time by her own lights at any time. That is, at any time she strictly prefers (14) to (16) and yet she voluntarily moves from the former to the latter.

If a > 1 we can run a similar procedure in reverse: starting with (14), we offer to exchange the unit at t₂ + Δ for an additional ${{V\left( {{T_1},{T_2}} \right)} \mathord{\left/ {\vphantom {{V\left( {{T_1},{T_2}} \right)} a}} \right. \kern-0pt} a}$ units at t₁ + Δ. Then after waiting until Δ days have elapsed, we pick $\varepsilon ,\varepsilon ^{\prime},\varepsilon ^{\prime\prime}> 0{\text{ s.t.}}~{\text{ }}{1 \mathord{\left/ {\vphantom {1 a}} \right. \kern-\nulldelimiterspace} a} + \varepsilon + \varepsilon ^{\prime} = 1{\text{ }}~{\text{and}}~{\text{ }}\varepsilon ^{\prime\prime} = \varepsilon V\left( {T_{1} ,T_{2} } \right)$ (these are guaranteed to exist since a > 1) and offer $\frac{1}{a}+\varepsilon$ units at t₂ + Δ in exchange for $\left( {1/a + \varepsilon } \right)\,V\left( {T_{1} ,\,T_{2} } \right)$ units at t₁ + Δ. Again, Alice will accept both offers for a final schedule:

• (17) $1 - \varepsilon ^{\prime\prime}$ units at t₁ + Δ, $1 - \varepsilon ^{\prime}$ units at t₂ + Δ

This again represents an uncompensated loss that is unavertable even if foreseen.

Appendix 2: Weighted λ-Discounting and Delay-Inconsistency

At Sects. 3.1 and 3.2 I claimed but did not prove that delay-inconsistency attends λ-discounting regardless of how one assigns (non-zero) weights to continuity or to types of psychological connections that decay at different rates, if each connection satisfies U.

Here is the proof. Formally, the statement to be proved is:

• (18) Suppose that λ₁,…λ_n are all non-zero and that $\sum\nolimits_{{i=1}}^{n} {{\lambda _i}} =1.$ Let $V\left( {{T_1},{T_2}} \right)={{\sum\nolimits_{{i=1}}^{n} {{\lambda _i}{e^{ - {r_i}{T_2}}}} } \mathord{\left/ {\vphantom {{\sum\nolimits_{{i=1}}^{n} {{\lambda _i}{e^{ - {r_i}{T_2}}}} } {\sum\nolimits_{{i=1}}^{n} {{\lambda _i}{e^{ - {r_i}{T_1}}}} }}} \right. \kern-0pt} {\sum\nolimits_{{i=1}}^{n} {{\lambda _i}{e^{ - {r_i}{T_1}}}} }}$ where r_i ≥ 0 for all i, j and r_i ≠ r_j for some i, j. Then V is delay-inconsistent.

The case that r_i > 0 for all i corresponds to weighted simple discounting. The case that r_i = 0 for some i corresponds to the requirement that the agent gives some weight to continuity independently of connectedness.³³ (18) covers both cases.

The proof is as follows. Write $f\left( x \right) = \sum\nolimits_{{i = 1}}^{n} {\lambda _{i} } ~e^{{ - r_{i} x}}$ so that for any $x,~d>0,~V\left( {x,\,x+d} \right)={{f\left( {x+d} \right)} \mathord{\left/ {\vphantom {{f\left( {x+d} \right)} {f\left( x \right)}}} \right. \kern-0pt} {f\left( x \right)}}$. Then

• (19) $\frac{\partial }{{\partial x}}V\left( {x,~x + d} \right) = \frac{{f\left( x \right)\,f^{\prime}\left( {x + d} \right)\, - \,f^{\prime}\left( x \right)\,f\left( {x + d} \right)}}{{f\left( x \right)^{2} }}$

Expanding the numerator of (19) gives:

• (20) $\mathop \sum \limits_{{i=1}}^{n} {\lambda _i}{r_i}{e^{ - {r_i}x}}\mathop \sum \limits_{{i=1}}^{n} {\lambda _i}{e^{ - {r_i}\left( {x+d} \right)}} - \mathop \sum \limits_{{i=1}}^{n} {\lambda _i}{e^{ - {r_i}x}}\mathop \sum \limits_{{i=1}}^{n} {\lambda _i}{r_i}{e^{ - {r_i}\left( {x+d} \right)}}$

And with a little manipulation we can see that (20) is identical to:

• (21) $\mathop \sum \limits_{{i \ne j}} {\lambda _i}{\lambda _j}{e^{ - {r_i}x - {r_j}x}}\left( {{r_i}{e^{ - {r_j}d}} - {r_j}{e^{ - {r_j}d}}} \right)$

This is easily seen to be the same as (22), which is in turn identical to (23) and hence also (24):

• (22) $\frac{1}{2}\mathop \sum \limits_{{i \ne j}} {\lambda _i}{\lambda _j}{e^{ - {r_i}x - {r_j}x}}\left( {{r_i}{e^{ - {r_j}d}}+{r_j}{e^{ - {r_i}d}} - {r_i}{e^{ - {r_i}d}} - {r_j}{e^{ - {r_j}d}}} \right)$

• (23) $\frac{1}{2}\mathop \sum \limits_{{i \ne j}} {\lambda _i}{\lambda _j}{e^{ - {r_i}x - {r_j}x}}\left( {{r_i} - {r_j}} \right)\left( {{e^{ - {r_j}d}} - {e^{ - {r_i}d}}} \right)$

But $\left( {{r_i} - {r_j}} \right)\left( {{e^{ - {r_j}d}} - {e^{ - {r_i}d}}} \right)$ is always non-negative; it is positive if r_i ≠ r_j. It follows that every summand in (23) is non-negative and that (23) itself is positive if any two connections decay at different rates. (20) Is therefore also positive in these circumstances; so too, then, is ${\partial \mathord{\left/ {\vphantom {\partial {\partial x}}} \right. \kern-0pt} {\partial x}}\,V\left( {x,~x+d} \right)$ (since the denominator on the right of (19) is certainly positive). So if Alice is a λ-discounter of any type then she attaches greater discount value to a delay of fixed length the further it is in the future. So she is delay inconsistent on any weighting of the connections whose preservation contributes towards her present concern for her future self.³⁴