“What we do in life echoes in eternity”
General Maximus Decimus Meridius[1]
For most of human history humans have sat squarely in the mid-table of the food chain.
We think of our ancestors as spear-wielding masters of the animal kingdom, but in fact we were often prey ourselves. John Valliant’s The Tiger (1997), a truly compelling read, vividly describes how a man-eating tiger in Russia’s Far East embarked upon seemingly a targeted vendetta against its would-be hunters. This true story is wrapped up in the real history of people and big cats – tigers and lions actively hunting humans with extraordinary adeptness and cunning. The fable of the lion attainting a taste for human meat and then becoming a “man-eater” is not apocryphal.
We can glimpse our forebears, crouching in terror in gloomy caves, emerging periodically to scavenge what little food they could whilst avoiding the monsters that pursued them. This is the context within which we – our brains, our entire emotional landscape – evolved.
It is no wonder that we think of ourselves as short-term thinkers. When there is something very large, furry and with sabre-teeth stalking us it pays to be focussed on the here and now. But we are increasingly learning of the super-power we have in our unique capacity for long-term thinking. Roman Krzaric has described this beautifully in The Good Ancestor (2020) – how societies throughout history have conceived of ways of planning over multiple generations, how people have started to build cathedrals they knew would not be completed in their lifetimes. There are organisations dedicated to long-term thinking: the Long Now Foundation, established in San Francisco in 1996 (or, as it puts it, the year 01996) began its work by starting construction of an immense monument-scale clock designed to tick for 10,000 years, and is a fantastic resource for ideas, talks and projects on the subject.
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In recent years long-term thinking has crystallised into a more formalised “longtermism” movement, whose premise has been articulated in What We Owe The Future. MacAskill is a leading figure within the “Effective Altruism” (EA) movement. EA seeks to optimise how people give philanthropically, by systematic screening and ranking of charitable causes in respective of the positive impact created per dollar invested. Longtermism extends our horizons beyond this by arguing that we need to factor future generations into decision making.
MacAskill argues that we vastly underestimate the moral significance of those who will come after us. He illustrates with numbers: if humans survive for as long as the average mammal species then for every person alive today a thousand will live in the future. Consequently, anything we do today which affects the existence of our descendants has extremely important implications. Longtermists may substantiate their reasoning with detailed calculations rooted in the utilitarian objective of greatest-happiness-to-the-greatest-number-of-people, deriving “expected values” of taking particular decisions.
This movement has its critics, who assert that MacAskill and his longtermist philosopher and tech bro supporters prioritise lofty and esoteric quests at the expense of important issues of today, such as overcoming poverty and social inequality.
There is indeed a problem with placing too much weight on mathematical models of the future. Taking it to an extreme, if you were to assume that there will be infinite people in the future then you should prioritise anything that affects the long-term, no matter in how small, over even the most important near-term issues facing people today.
But the main relevance of longtermism to sustainable investing is its notion that we, as a society, currently face a number of truly existential risks. Some of these risks could cause full extinction of the human race, others merely a collapse of modern industrial society, and others still the lock-in of authoritarian regimes.
Sustainable investing primarily seeks to address the existential risk of climate change and broader environmental collapse. Other existential risks to our free society include pandemics (whether naturally occurring or engineered by humans), nuclear war, the possibility of Artificial Intelligence (AI) surpassing humans as the dominant force on the planet and the replacement of democracy with autocracy which becomes entrenched into the long-term.
It is argued that too much focus is placed on climate at the expense of economic development. This first charge is flawed because it ignores the fact that integrated low carbon energy systems anchored in renewable electricity are now the cheapest, most reliant and cleanest ways to power an economy, and that this is creating tipping point and cascade effects.
A second argument is that climate change is prioritised to the detriment of focus on other potential catastrophes. This may cause some introspection for anyone in the climate community. In the coming decades these other risks present genuine threats to our world, irrespective of climate progress: a full-scale nuclear war or truly devastating pandemic would render the problem of climate change obsolete.
But climate change has certain unique characteristics. To solve it we need to fundamentally re-build our entire globally economy, over multiple decades. And it has moral dimensions – in the pressure for individuals to change their lifestyles (though in fact, overwhelmingly, individual direct actions have will have very little impact; the real need to is to fix our underlying system), or in the asymmetry between countries which have caused the problem and countries which are suffering the consequences.
Climate change is a wicked problem. Unlike other existential risks – e.g. asteroid impacts or pandemics – it cannot be addressed by a number of discreet defensive actions or sensible planning. It involves a root and branch overhaul of our modern world in the space of a generation.
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The climate community can in fact contribute uniquely to the debate over longtermism.
First, it illuminates the flaw in the argument that spending time on long-term challenges is a distraction from current problems. Climate change is a long-term and somewhat theoretical problem (at least for those not yet experiencing its full affects). Yet it is also a now problem – the actions we take this decade, this year, will have profound implications in centuries to come.
When we think about climate General Maximus,[2] who as a gladiator fought tigers as well as humans, was right: what we do now does indeed echo in eternity. This point also applies to other existential risks – the risk posed by AI of a global takeover by super robots seems abstract and consigned to the long-future, but exponential growth in computing power and learning rates means that our ability to manage it depends on action immediately.
Second, we can see from the climate struggle the price we pay for bringing our emotional or intellectual baggage to the debate. Climate change is divisive because the stance we take on it is associated with political identities. Similar to pandemics, your attitude to climate change reveals something deeper about how you see the world – if you are a climate sceptic you are likely to be a vaccine sceptic. And there are deep schisms even within environmental movement, over the role of nuclear power, or whether technology or nature are the answer.
These divisions are extremely damaging to our ability to effectively confront an existential problem, because identities and tribal loyalties cause us to prioritise winning an argument over seeing the problem in overview and seeking solutions. This is a lesson that should be applied to all existential risks.
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Overall, longtermism is overwhelmingly a practical and useful framework to help us balance our approach to investment as society. When we are evaluating large infrastructure projects, for instance, we need to be consciously reminded of why we should factor in the impact on future generations.
Longtermism can be overly theoretical. A dogmatic mathematical approach to calculating expected values could end up in perverse decision making. But it is hard to see how we are over prioritising any long-term issues at present. Moreover, longtermism shines a bright light on the single most important fact we need to recognise – that our society is vulnerable, that we face genuine existential risks to our society and our lives.
The essence of sustainable investing is the ability to conceive of a society which is capable of existing into perpetuity and, as a consequence, allocating capital to accelerate the transition towards this. And it is critical we do so – now. We live at a crossroads in history and the path we take, the choices we make, will impact what we hope will be vast numbers of people in the future. Sustainable investing should be calibrated to push us towards the right path, one of continued progress to a future that could be far, far better than many of us realise.
Longtermism is at heart profoundly optimistic. To see a potential new, and radically different, history of our species stretching out far into the future is liberating and exhilarating. And at time when our society appears at times to be hopelessly enmeshed in short-sightedness, in selfishness and the pursuit of quick fixes, the movement reminds us that we do have the ability to quietly plan with selflessness and with a multi-generation perspective.
We may be stalked by tigers in the deep recesses of our subconscious. But we can also build cathedrals in our minds, and in reality.
[1] From the film Gladiator, 2000.
[2] As in, again, from the film Gladiator.
