You buy a refrigerator and oblige its producer to collect electrical waste so that the environment stays clean for future generations. You earn a salary, but its third is transferred to current pensioners, while you are given a promise in return that future employees will pay a pension for you. Such prohibitions or obligations are fixed via government regulations that share one common feature – their costs and the expected benefit are incurred by different generations. Such rules that regulate relations among generations are so great in number that a natural question is whether peace and voluntary co-operation wouldn’t evolve if such regulations were removed altogether. I present to you our new study on intergenerational regulations where we analyse how and why the state regulates relations among society members. The authors of these regulations make an assumption that other people’s future can be effectively foreseen and planned. But we say that people are incapable to foresee their own answers to future happenings, so how are they to foresee future answers to future events? More than that, we do not know the interests and the needs of future generations, that’s why it is impossible to know whether the things that the current generation is trying to save for them via intergenerational regulations will be important and actual for people who will live in the future.
Also in July we presented the results of our latest survey of the Lithuanian Economy which has been conducted for 14 years now. The participants of the 28th survey confirm that the Lithuanian economy is really recovering and gaining speed. However, high unemployment, the record high shadow economy and the worsened business conditions hold back the economy’s running at full gallop.
LFMI’s news July – August 2011 (download a PDF file here)
