Time value of lives

In economics, a fundamental realization came from the realization that future money is worth less than money today. This is due to the fact that money today has more opportunity eg. it could grow due to interest so a dollar today is "worth" more than a dollar in twenty years.

In philosophy, many philosophies such as effective altruism emphasize long term thinking to include future lives in your calculations of outcome. Given this assumption and given that there are likely to be more people in the future (https://ourworldindata.org/population-growth) it makes sense to prioritize these future people very highly.

This view I dispute for a few main reasons.

It is obvious that future events are less certain than present ones. In specific cases we can make short-term predictions such as raising interest rates to control inflation (https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/12/inflation-interest-rate-relationship.asp).

However indirect consequences are extremely difficult to predict due to the sheer number of factors and data involved. This aligns with the observation that economic policies are almost always in dispute.

For example, the so-called "Green revolution" which aimed to help the world's production of food in order to suppress hunger once and for all failed in nations such as Punjab and resulted in damage to the local ecosystem.

This makes sense successful long-term predictions require an absurd amount of data and calculations which are impossible with our current technology. Moreover this data would have to be collected at a boggling amount of accuracy to make any real predictions since human societies can behave chaotically. Even a small inaccuracy in data collection could have a so-called butterfly effect resulting in unexpected outcomes and incorrect predictions.

This isn't to say that we can't make any predictions at all. The weather is a very complex system and we can still make predictions about local rainfall. But once again these predictions are in a very short term and of a general nature --- research indicates that after ten-days the accuracy of any predictions drops off incredibly (https://climatecosmos.com/climate-science/meteorologists-debate-the-reliability-of-long-term-forecasts-yzj6t-2/).

Since we cannot make any reliable long-term predictions, we should not base our decision making on future lives especially when good-intentioned policies can have negative impacts on future individuals. The short-term should be the primary focus of moral decision making and future lives discounted.