ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to critically analyse and explore intergenerational accounting and, importantly, the ideas about justice that underpin it. It suggests that taking account of the young people of today is as important as taking account of those not yet born. The chapter also suggests there are good reasons for questioning the credibility of intergenerational accounting, particularly because it misrepresents and misunderstands the nature of public debt. The key problem is that the argument made for imposing cuts on contemporary social expenditures, ostensibly to prevent a future of mountainous public-sector debt, is reliant on economic projections. The problem with Rawls' approach to justice is that while it works as a philosophical exercise in reasoning it has no capacity to work as a policy framework or heuristic. Rawls' work inspired the development of the principle of intergenerational neutrality. Justice-as-freedom approach to wellbeing seems compatible with a concern about intergenerational justice both now and in the future.
