Using a small sample of couples before and after they have children, Alex Gazmararian finds that support for climate change policy increases after people have children. People also become more future-orientated when primed to think of children.
The short time horizons of citizens is a prominent explanation for why governments fail to tackle significant long-term public policy problems. Actual evidence of the influence of time horizons is mixed, complicated by the difficulty of determining how individuals’ attitudes would differ if they were more concerned about the future. I approach this challenge by leveraging a personal experience that leads people to place more value on the future: parenthood. Using a matched difference-in-differences design with panel data, I compare new parents with otherwise similar individuals and find that parenthood increases support for addressing climate change by 4.3 percentage points. Falsification tests and two survey experiments suggest that longer time horizons explain part of this shift in support. Not only are scholars right to emphasize the role of individual time horizons, but changing valuations of the future offer a new way to understand how policy preferences evolve.
It’s a little tricky to say that the driving force is time preference per se, maybe it’s just caring about (some) future people. Suppose a white man marries an African American woman. He subsequently may become more interested in civil rights, just as having children may make people more interested in the(ir) future. Or suppose that medical technology extends life expectancy, leading people to save more. Is this due to lower time preference or increased-self love?
We do see more parenthood driving future-oriented behavior on many margins. I am reminded, for example, of More Pregnancy, Less Crime which showed huge drops in criminal activity as people learn that they will be mothers and fathers. Criminals are very present-oriented so this effect is also consistent with parenthood driving lower time preference, although other stories are also possible. It’s difficult to distinguish these explanations and as far as policy and behavior is concerned perhaps the distinction between caring about the future and caring about future people doesn’t really matter.
