March 7, 2024

Do you think the concept of democratic voting could be the answer to handing on a sustainable future?

How can we maintain resources for future generations?

Economists have studied how people cooperate in groups, but they haven’t looked specifically at whether individuals are happy to cooperate with future generations who cannot reciprocate.

A team led by Martin Nowak of Harvard University wanted to test whether groups of people could sustain a resource over several ‘generations’ of players.

See what happened in this handy, candy-filled Nature Video.

The game in the video is called an “Intergenerational Game” that explores the mechanisms of cooperation and investigates a question that is at the heart of all sustainable development, yet remains widely elusive because it entails a moral component that cannot easily be assessed: are humans able to cooperate with future generations? In other words, what planet are we willing to leave behind for the people who come after us?

“Given that future generations are unable to respond to the current generation, it seems that conventional mechanisms for cooperation cannot be utilized to solve this critical problem,” says Martin Nowak, professor of mathematics and of biology at Harvard University. “But we have evidence that a large majority of people would vote for cooperating with the future if the vote was global and binding.”

Here is the scientific paper that shows the research from the video: Cooperating with the future supplement to nature video.pdf Download Cooperating with the future supplement to nature video.pdf

JUST READ THE ABSTRACT and FIRST TWO PARGRAPHS (if you want to read it all- go for it- it is interesting!)