Using a small sample of couples before and after having children, Alex Gazmararian finds that support for climate change policy increases after people have children. People are also more future-oriented when they think about children.
The short-term nature of citizens is a prominent explanation for why governments fail to address important long-term public policy issues. The actual evidence for the influence of time horizons is mixed, compounded by the difficulty of determining how people’s attitudes might differ if they were more concerned about the future. I approach this challenge by using a personal experience that leads people to place more importance on the future: parenthood. Using a matched-differences design with panel data, I compare new parents with other similar populations and find that parenthood increases support for addressing climate change by 4.3 percentage points. A falsification test and two survey tests suggest that longer time horizons explain part of this change in support. Not only are scholars right to emphasize the role of each period, but changing future estimates provide a new way to understand how policy preferences evolve.
It’s a little trickier to say that the driving force behind the popular time per se, is probably to care about (other) people in the future. Suppose a white man marries an African American woman. After that he may be more interested in civil rights, just as having children may make people more interested in the future. Or suppose medical technology extends life expectancy, leading people to save more. Is this due to small time preferences or extended love?
We’re seeing more and more parenting driving future-oriented behavior in many corners. I am reminded, for example, of More Pregnancies, Less Crime which showed a significant decrease in criminal activity as people learned that they were going to be mothers and fathers. Criminals are very focused on that so this result is also consistent with the fact that the parent drives the least amount of time, although other issues are possible. It is difficult to separate these meanings and in terms of policy and behavior maybe the difference between caring about the future and caring about the people of tomorrow doesn’t really matter.
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