Using a small sample of couples before and after having children, Alex Gazmararian notice that Support for climate change policy increases after children are bornPeople also become more future-oriented when they are prepared to think about children.
Citizens’ short time horizons are a major reason why governments fail to address important long-term public policy problems. The real-world evidence on the influence of time horizons is mixed, and it is difficult to determine how individuals’ attitudes would differ if they were more concerned about the future. I approach this challenge by drawing on a personal experience that leads people to value the future more: parenthood. Using a matched difference-in-differences model with panel data, I compare new parents to otherwise similar individuals and find that parenthood increases support for addressing climate change by 4.3 percentage points. Falsifiability tests and two survey experiments suggest that longer time horizons partly explain this shift in support. Not only are the researchers right to emphasize the role of individual time horizons, but changing assessments of the future offer a new way to understand how policy preferences evolve.
It’s a bit hard to say that the driving force is time preference per se; perhaps it’s just caring about (some) future people. Suppose a white man marries an African-American woman. He might subsequently become more interested in civil rights, just as having children can make people more interested in their future. Or suppose medical technology increases life expectancy, leading people to save more. Is this due to lower time preference or increased self-esteem?
We see that parenting fosters future-oriented behavior in many areas. I remember, for example, More pregnancies, less crime which showed a significant decline in criminal activity as people learned they would be mothers and fathers. Criminals are highly present-oriented, so this effect is also consistent with parenthood leading to a lower time preference, although other stories are also possible. It is difficult to disentangle these explanations with respect to policy and behavior Perhaps the distinction between caring about the future and caring about people in the future doesn’t really matter..
