Time Time Time

Abstract

If you were a neoclassical economist, the most dominant strategy to maximize your life would be to know or control you point of death and spend your last penny the minute before exodus, according to the standard neoclassical rules. However, if you are human and heterodox economist, you realize, the world does not function this way. If it were efficient to know your point of death, evolution would have found a biological way to program a conscientious knowledge of the point of death in human. It is the miracle of life that our last day remains unknown and this unknown point of cessation creates opportunity to care beyond one’s own life span. Life is not a zero-sum game discounted from your point of death, but also the length of time having lived, so the past, shapes our discounting. The following paper argues that general discounting theory is always forward looking but never considers how your past experiences, call it learning, as well as the length of your life passed, may stretch the focus of discounting. Adopting a theory that explains discounting beyond one’s prospective time of death and integrating the notion of past time of being stretching the focus of social care may help explaining why young people, who have a rather narrow past time horizon, are more prone to engage in myopic behavior (e.g., take drugs, save less), whereas older people whose discounting may draw on a long history of past experiences, tend to engage in discounting beyond their prospective natural existence and embrace long-term social care (e.g., for climate stability, charity for future generations). Overall, finding the miracle of life in an unknown point of death is a novel heterodox strategy to explain discounting behavior in a real-world relevant way. Pointing at the necessity to include one’s own history and experience into standard neoclassical economic discounting theory, spearheads heterodox economics by opening a detected black box of forward-looking discounting behavioral economics’ decision making fallibility predicaments. Shedding light on the importance of integrating backward looking aspects in discounting and the temporal locus determining a diversified range of experiences setting the stage for future social care beyond one’s own existence will grant opportunities to imbue intergenerational equity in mankind.