The James Hausman Tax Law & Policy Workshop Series
presents
Professor Neil Buchanan
Rutgers University School of Law
What Do We Owe Future Generations?
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
12:30 - 2:00
Flavelle Dining Room
78 Queen's Park
The aging of the large cohort of people born in the decades following World War II raises a number of well-known policy questions, most obviously whether various countries will be forced to alter their retirement systems as a relatively smaller work force faces the prospect of supporting a relatively larger population of retirees. Standard analyses of these policy questions have been couched in the language of intergenerational justice, with scholars typically expressing concern that currently-living generations are harming future generations by refusing to change policies that will ultimately require large changes in future benefits or taxes. This, it is assumed (or sometimes stated bluntly), is unfair to future generations.
In the United States, even under the most pessimistic official projections of retirement obligations, material standards of living will more than double by 2080. This raises a fundamental question that has not received sufficient attention: If future generations will almost certainly be significantly richer than current generations, why must current generations make further sacrifices to prevent any erosion in the (much higher) living standards of future generations?
The current literature on intergenerational justice is relatively well developed in the areas of philosophy and environmental policy but extremely sparse in the areas of fiscal and economic policy. Even in the most fully developed literatures, however, the discussion centers on the question of whether current generations owe anything to future generations, leaving unanswered the question of how much weight to apply to the putative desires of young or unborn people. This article discusses these questions and offers some preliminary thoughts on how current fiscal policies should be formed with the goal of balancing the interests of current and future generations.
Neil H. Buchanan is an Associate Professor at The George Washington University Law School and has also taught at the law schools of New York University and Rutgers University. Prior to attending law school at the University of Michigan, Professor Buchanan was an economics professor. He received his B.A. from Vassar College and earned his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University, specializing in macroeconomics, the history of economic thought, and economic methodology. He has held full-time faculty positions in economics at the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Barnard College, Goucher College, and Wellesley College. He also has held visiting or adjunct faculty positions in economics at Bard College, Towson University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Utah.
Professor Buchanan's current research concerns the long-term tax and spending patterns of the U.S. federal government, focusing on such issues as budget deficits, the national debt, and the long-run prospects for the Social Security system. He also is developing a long-term research project that asks how current policy choices should be shaped by concerns for the interests of future generations. Professor Buchanan has published articles in Tax Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Tax Notes, and Virginia Tax Review, as well as for refereed social science journals and for the on-line legal magazine FindLaw's Writ. He also writes regularly for the legal blog, Dorf on Law ( www.michaeldorf.org).
A light lunch will be served.
For more information about this workshop, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca
