Does helping people struggling to survive today make any difference for future generations? New research from the University of Utah has documented evidence that it does. Rather than viewing present-day poverty and long-term risks as competing priorities, the research team led by psychologist Kyle Fiore Law sees them as interconnected.
"In debates about the future, there's often an assumed trade-off where money spent on people who are alive today is not money spent on protecting future generations," said Law, an assistant professor of psychology. Through a series of three studies, his team tested that assumption and found the opposite might be the actual case.
"There is often an assumption that investments in education and the sciences aren't going to lead to profits or that investing in climate change solutions is going to mean cost for businesses," Law continued. "These things might be linked together. The more capacity people have in the present to meet their basic daily needs, the more they can start looking at higher-order, loftier goals about safeguarding the future, and they'll actually have the capacity to make a difference."
Three studies, same story
Law and his collaborators do not argue that people experiencing poverty are responsible for protecting the future. Instead, they argue that poverty and inequality themselves can be viewed as intergenerational problems. Reducing economic hardship can not only improve people's lives in the present, but also foster conditions in which future-oriented thinking and generosity are more likely to flourish.
The results appear in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
The researchers examined the relationship between economic hardship and concern for future generations in three studies. The first two relied on existing survey datasets, while the third entailed an economic decision-making experiment conducted by the researchers.
- Study 1 compared 144 countries to test whether countries with higher poverty and inequality show less concern for the long-term future. It examined poverty levels through the Multidimensional Poverty Index, inequality through the Gini coefficient, and development through the Human Development Index. The team found poorer and more unequal nations scored lower on long-term orientation and intergenerational solidarity.
- Study 2 looked at more than 123,000 people in 34 European countries. People who perceived themselves as having higher socioeconomic status were more likely to say they had an obligation to make sacrifices for future generations, according to Law. This relationship was particularly strong in countries with lower inequality.
- Study 3 analyzed responses by 1,264 Americans in a preregistered experiment. People with higher real-world socioeconomic status tended to give more to a charity benefiting future generations. Simply giving participants more resources in the experiment, however, did not produce the same effect.
People care when they can afford to
"It's more of a systems-level finding that countries that have lower levels of poverty and inequality are investing in the future," said Law, who directs the Morality, Altruism & Prosociality Lab, or MAPLab. "That's likely because they can afford to. People in those countries express a greater capacity and interest in longer-term goals that could benefit the societal future. Again, they have the resources to think beyond their basic needs."
These findings suggest alleviating poverty and inequality today may also support humanity's long-term future.
"If people have what they need to survive and possibly in excess of that, they feel that they have a greater duty to steward a better future for society," Law said. But he cautioned that the evidence does not establish causal relationships.
"Everything is correlational," he said. "The best part about the data though is that they are based on really large samples and they're consistent across these large samples and it seems to be consistent across countries."
The trouble with "longtermerism"
The study is among the first to examine deeply our concern for people who live after we're gone, according to Law.
"Nobody had in the published literature asked a question about the relationship between present-day poverty and inequality and concern for future generations. In psychology in general, people haven't focused too much on concern for the future, especially the far future, until very recently," he said. "There's a lot of work coming out now related to this because I think as society becomes more uncertain, there are concerns about where the future's heading."
Finally, the findings undermine the case for extreme "longtermism." Some versions of longtermism prioritize protecting the far future even when that means reallocating resources that could help people today. Law's team argues that such zero-sum framing may be counterproductive because improving present circumstances could itself increase society's capacity to make investments that benefit future generations.
This research was published Aug. 29 in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin under the title, "Why Poverty in the Present Matters for Intergenerational Concern and the Future of Humanity." Law's coauthors include co-lead Stylianos Syropoulos and Christina Jinhee Capozzoli of Arizona State University; Amanda Signorini and Liane Young of Boston College; and Brendan Bo O'Connor of University at Albany, State University of New York. Funding came from the John Templeton Foundation.
Banner image: Stock photo via Adobe Stock.
