Policy discounting across and beyond the lifespan

Abstract Legislators face a challenge when implementing long-termist policies that prioritise sustainability and the well-being of future generations: citizens prefer policies that pay off sooner rather than later. In this research note, I assess the hypothesis that the lifespan structures this temporal discounting effect. Do people show a particular preference for policies that pay off within, rather than beyond, their own lifetime? In a pre-registered conjoint analysis with age-group blocking ( N = 2405), I find little evidence in support of this explanation. Although they significantly prefer nearer-term policy benefits, citizens show no sign of especially preferring policies whose benefits will materialise within their own lifetimes. This pattern holds across a range of personal, political and philosophical differences. The temporal discounting effect is also substantially smaller than other policy features, such as how large the payoff of that policy is expected to be. Additionally, people are clearly willing in principle to trade off the timing of benefits for the scale of benefits, preferring larger later payoffs to sooner smaller ones. Across and beyond the lifespan, the sooner a policy pays off, the better. But, whenever they materialise, the bigger the societal benefits of that policy, the better. These findings strongly suggest that temporal policy discounting is not driven by selfish concerns, while also reinforcing that any such effect does not overwhelm citizens’ evaluations of policy proposals in principle.