ABSTRACT
Assuming the same relative position within society, people often are curious about whether they would prefer to go back in time, go forward in time, or stay in the time in which they find themselves. In this chapter we raise a large number of philosophical questions, many of which are, at a quite fundamental level, “unanswerable.” We start with some fairly standard questions: Are we better off now than we were in the past? If that is the case, will it be the case that we will continue to become better and better off? Is income (which is the same as output) a good measure of whether we are “better off” or is it a bad measure? Will imposing environmental standards create incentives to move technological advances in directions that enhance the goals that underlie that imposition? Will we run out of resources? Is population growth an insurmountable problem? Is sustainability a better goal than “optimization?” Is it irrational to let some portion of one’s portfolio of assets, particularly environmental assets, become smaller over time? These are the sorts of wide-ranging questions that this closing chapter hopes to entertain.
