IT SEEMS that further explanation may be required for yesterday's post about why it is so hard to tease out "true" preferences.

It is undoubtedly true that at any given time, one would prefer to be, say, thin.  That is, one would prefer being thin to having consumed loads of sweets and fried things in the past.  But it seems also to be true that at any given time, most people would prefer consuming loads of sweets and fried things to being thin in the future.  All this tells us is that people tend to highly overweight the present—and that this overweighting occurs in both directions.  It's hard to develop normative reasons that we should pay attention to peoples' tendency to discount the future, but not pay similar attention to their tendency to discount the past.

If we are not simply to rely on a bourgeois "future=good" heuristic, then developing an estimate of true preferences would require, first, finding a way to compare the relative present utilities of indulgence, and the fruits of moderation—thinness, big bank accounts, and so forth.  Then we would have to figure out whether, and how much, these things change over time, as they almost certainly do; being slender and fit is far more valuable in your twenties than in your eighties.

Needless to say, we currently have no way to do either. Of course, most people would like to reach an ideal state where they can enjoy past moderation in tandem with present indulgence:  being thin and rich while simultaneously eating, drinking and spending one's head off.  It is with just such a picture . . . dressed to the nines with champagne and beef wellington in hand . . .  that many of us rein in our more extravagent desires. 

But while it is possible to reach such a state, it is not possible (barring freaks of inheritence and metabolism) to stay there.  And excessive future orientation runs a real risk that one's life will be "jam yesterday, and jam tomorrow, but never jam today . . . "*   The man who reaches old age with no savings and emphysema is a tragedy . . . but equally so is the 31 year old who dies with an overstuffed bank account and a long history of foregone opportunities for hedonistic pleasure.

* A few years ago, I was (wrongly) diagnosed with a presumptively fatal autoimmune disease.  One of my first decisions was that if the diagnosis was confirmed, I was going to start smoking again.  This is, I am told, not uncommon.  My family and friends, however, were utterly, and with utter illogic, horrified.