Do people care for a sustainable future? Evidence from happiness data

While the various streams of environmentalism agree in claiming that the current patterns of economic activity are unsustainable for natural resources, they disagree in answering the following question: who is the responsible? Two different answers have been provided: the people or the socio-economic system. The first answer claims that people are inter-temporally greedy. Unsustainable economic patterns simply reflect the little importance that current generations attribute to the living standard of future generations. According to the second answer instead, people would prefer a more sustainable path of the economy but some failure of the socio-economic system prevent this outcome. We provide a test of the basic hypothesis on which these two views diverge: the degree of people’s concern for the conditions of life of future generations. We derive this information by estimating the relationship between people’s current subjective well-being and their expectations about the living standard of future generations, i.e. a future far enough to concern only future generations. According to the first view, people’s expectations about the future should have weak or null influence on people’s current well-being. On the contrary, the second view implies that such influence should be positive and remarkable. We use various international and national survey data to estimate a standard happiness regression augmented with people’s expectation about the future. Results suggest that current well-being is sharply and negatively associated to a negative expectation of the future. Where possible, we use 2SLS to account for possible endogeneity between the expectations about the future and current well-being. We find that expecting the worst (the best) for future generations has a very large negative (positive) impact on subjective well-being. This conclusion supports the view that current problems of sustainability are due to some failure of the socio-economic organization and not to the inter-temporal greed of human beings.