Both conflicts are being shaped by new economic realities, principally a largely sluggish world economy that is, particularly in Western democracies, further hamstrung by a growing push for “Net Zero”. The adoption of green “de-growth” philosophy impacts both on the youth of the West, who face a consciously scaled-down quality of life, as well as a new generation in developing countries desperate for growth.

In high-income countries, the youngest generations already face fewer opportunities than their parents and grandparents. Slow growth and lack of opportunity mean they can look forward to a future characterised by a greater economic insecurity, poorer living conditions, less chance of owning a home or car, or even eating well. Such attitudes are exacerbated by the relentless hysteria poured out by the green movement and its media minions. Indeed, according to one recent survey, a majority of young people around the world see the planet as essentially doomed by climate change.

Perhaps as a result, when it comes to politics, many new voters seem comfortable rallying around polarising and extreme figures. In the 2016 primaries, Bernie Sanders amassed more votes from people under 30 than Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton combined. In France, meanwhile, Le Monde described this “political de-socialisation” as having fuelled support for the likes of both the Trotskyite Jean-Luc Mélenchon and far-Rightist Marine Le Pen.

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But alienation, rather than radicalisation, is a more fitting description of the emerging Western generation. The biggest problem lies not in lack of jobs or even skills, but a population that is increasingly “unengaged”.

Nor is this merely confined to the West. Evidence of a “great resignation” is also emerging in East Asia. In Japan, young adults, according to David Pilling, are “pioneering a new sort of high-quality, low-energy, low-growth existence”. In China, meanwhile, the children of largely upwardly mobile parents face an increasingly fraught economic future. Xi Jinping may hope for a generation that will follow the path of devoted Stalinist Stakhonovites or Maoist Red Guards, but confronts a generation more concerned with 20% unemployment and limited options than ideological fervour. As in Japan and the West, China now sees a generation — including an increasingly underemployed surplus of educated people — who eschew their parents’ work ethic, embracing instead a desire to “lay flat” as they essentially avoid the congestion and stresses of urban life. 

Combined with rapid demographic decline in East Asia, Europe and the United States, the mass disengagement of the young will make building a stronger world economy an even greater challenge. The remarkable economic boom of the past century sparked a population explosion — 75% of the world’s population growth was born in the last century. Yet, birth rates are now dropping, especially in more developed nations. Globally, last year’s population growth was the smallest in a half-century, and by 2050, some 61 countries are expected to see declines.

And as workforces shrink, growth will suffer, as has been the case throughout modern history. In the United States, workforce growth has slowed to around a third of the level in 1970, and seems destined to fall even more. Nearly 70% of US counties have seen declines in their under-25 populations, a trend particularly marked in big coastal metropolitan regions.

China faces a similar dilemma, with its senior population expected to have more than tripled by 2050, one of the most rapid demographic shifts in history. The transition will be made particularly tough by a welfare state that is underdeveloped, and whose ranks of retirees are soaring: the Chinese retirement age is 60 for men, and just 50 for women.

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All this sets up what may be the biggest generational conflict of all — between the still-youthful developing world and the ageing high-income countries. Demographic decline and slow growth in high-income economies threaten to undermine the future of developing countries, notably in Africa. By 2050, UN projections suggest that nearly 55% of world population growth will occur in sub-Saharan Africa, where fertility rates remain relatively high. However, during the following 50 years, that share is projected to account for all growth as populations plummet elsewhere. With workforces shrinking in China, East Asia, Europe, Australia and the United States, the population of sub-Saharan Africa is expected to increase by upwards of 700 million. And with this “youth bulge” across the developing world not expected to peak until later this decade, Africa could well be, as the Brookings Institution suggests, “our last hope” in the West to forestall demographic and economic decline.

Essentially, high-income countries face a choice. They will feel enormous pressure to restrain imports from places such as sub-Saharan Africa to keep their own economies running and the pension system solvent. In the US, more than 40% of boomers have no significant retirement savings and the successor generations appear even more bereft. Without an East Asia-style boom, the only option for the developing world’s youth will be more migration to the West, both legal and illegal, which is expected to average 2.2 million annually through 2050.

This would represent such a surge that Europe, in particular, would be ill-equipped to prevent, let alone assimilate. Indeed, often despite promises to the contrary, immigration, legal and illegal, is at record levels in Britain and Germany, and remains at historically high levels in France. In response, despite crushing labour shortages, many countries — including the Netherlands, France, Denmark, Norway, and Germany itself — have tightened their immigration controls. The resulting migrant populations of unemployed and underemployed people have created social unrest in Europe’s cities, much as we have seen in America.

Some, such as Fred Pearce, author of The Coming Population Crash and Our Planet’s Surprising Future, consider such demographic shifts to be “no bad thing”: “We need a breather. A stable, sagacious society that has lost its adolescent restlessness and settled into middle age sounds appealing.” Yet this view ignores the ramifications of a generational conflict that seems certain to intensify as both young people in high-income countries as well as those in the developing world face a potentially frustrating future. Like the generational conflicts both within societies and between them, the global demographic crisis is just beginning. And in the meantime, the West’s adolescent restlessness can’t simply be wished away.

Crushing certain plants could add up infinitesimally. A little error here would multiply in 60 million years, all out of proportion… A dead mouse here makes an insect imbalance there, a population disproportion later, a bad harvest further on, a depression, mass starvation, and finally, a change in social temperament in far-­flung countries. Something much more subtle, like that. Perhaps only a soft breath, a whisper, a hair, pollen on the air, such a slight, slight change that unless you looked close you wouldn’t see it. Who knows?

Eckels accidentally crushes a butterfly.

Returning to the now there are signs of a devastating ripple effect. The company logo now reads: “SEFARIS TU ANY YEER EN THE PAST. YU NAIM THE ANIMALL. WEE TAEK YU THAIR. YU SHOOT ITT.” A despotic strongman has just been elected President. And something else has happened, too — something much worse. The story ends: “There was a sound of thunder.”

We all stand to the distant future as Jurassic Eckels stood to now. Anything you do might have momentous consequences in 500 years. Not stopping at a traffic light might mean not hitting a fly; that fly has several million descendants; one of these is mutated, bringing a pandemic to Europe… If you look at it from far enough, everything you do is fraught with the gravest consequence. But what they will be — well, who can say? And from that perspective, our attitude to the distant future can look deeply selfish. The truth is that most people don’t care much about it. Shouldn’t we?

That we should care, much more than we actually do, is the main message of long-termism. According to long-termism, “positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time”. Probably the most popular and influential long-termist is Will MacAskill. MacAskill is Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University and director of the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research.

MacAskill is best known for his work on effective altruism. This movement, which until recently has been increasingly popular among the most influential tech entrepreneurs, is based on the idea that there are more and less effective ways to “do good”; so if you are going to do good then you should do it as effectively as possible.

“Until recently”: as most readers will know, things have taken something of a turn in recent days. The cryptocurrency exchange FTX, valued earlier this year at about $30 billion, has suddenly collapsed. Its founder and CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, is something of an avatar of the movement. In 2012, when Bankman-Fried was still a student at MIT, MacAskill persuaded him that the thing to do, if he really wanted to do good, was to get rich first himself, and then improve the world. Bankman-Fried certainly got rich, for a while. Whether he improved the world, or anything much, is another question.

I have no intention of rushing into judgment on these events, about which I know very little. I do believe that there are sound philosophical objections to long-termism. and indeed to any form of Effective Altruism that entails it. I spell out some of these here. One such objection may be that Effective Altruism, or the ideas behind it, threaten common-sense moral values like integrity and honesty. But it is too soon to say — certainly too soon for me to say — whether it is that particular tension that is now being played out.

In any case, effective altruism plainly did, at least for a while, persuade a lot of important or at least wealthy people. Of course, that doesn’t settle whether it is true. Whether it is true depends on what you mean by “effective”.

MacAskill et al. interpret it broadly in line with utilitarianism, which prescribes “the greatest good for the greatest number”. This in turn can also mean quite a lot of things; depending on what it means, effective altruism might turn out to be demanding in surprising ways. For instance, it may enjoin you to spend your next charitable dollar on malaria charities rather than cancer charities. The best cancer interventions prevent a death caused by cancer for each $19,000 spent, whereas the best malaria interventions prevent a death caused by malaria for each $3,000 spent.

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And it may also enjoin you to spend much more attention and also money on the distant future. After all, barring catastrophe the distant future probably contains many more people than the present or near future. So “the greatest good for the greatest number” means prioritising the future, possibly the very distant future, doesn’t it?

Indeed it does, according to long-termism. And MacAskill’s recent book, What We Owe the Future, is an extended defence and application of long-termism. The earlier chapters of the book emphasise just how big the future is, and just how much influence we can have over it, and why all this matters. In later chapters, MacAskill applies long-termism to the analysis of specific threats. These include social collapse and “value lock-in”: the idea that we might adopt, irrevocably, a set of moral values that lead humanity into deep and eternal darkness. (A crucial defence against that, in my view, is unbreakable protection for free speech.) They also include a Terminator-style takeover of humanity by Artificial Intelligence. (A colleague calls it “Attack of the Killer Toasters”.)

Finally, MacAskill tells the reader “what to do”; and here he recapitulates the basic ideas of effective altruism. It turns out that the effective altruist has more career options than you’d expect. The most good that you can do means the most good that you can do; and as Aristotle more or less says, this means matching the needs of the world with the talents and values of the individual. MacAskill’s utopia, or at least the path to it, has a place for software engineers and tennis stars as well as charity workers.

Before returning to long-termism, I should disclose that I taught MacAskill myself, back when he was an undergraduate and I was a junior lecturer. This was many years ago. And I didn’t teach him anything glamorous, like the ethics of the future. For us it was nerd central: philosophical logic, which covers the semantics of conditionals, the nature of reference, and related thrills and spills. But even from that crabby perspective he was clearly brilliant. His tremendous success in the following years didn’t surprise me, though it did give me great pleasure. I did think some of his ideas wrong or questionable. But my attitude to MacAskill was (I imagine) more like Aristotle’s feelings about his star pupil than Obi-Wan Kenobi’s feelings about his.

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Anyway, this is what MacAskill says:

“The idea that future people count is common sense. Future people, after all, are people. They will exist. They will have hopes and joys and pains and regrets, just like the rest of us… Should I care whether it’s a week, or a decade or a century from now? No. Harm is harm, whenever it occurs.”

It is worth thinking more about the underlying philosophical attitude. Most of us care more about people who are alive now, and perhaps also their children, than about their descendants four millennia from now. We don’t care about them at all. If MacAskill is right, then that’s a serious mistake. Is it, though? It is a vexed question. Philosophers and economists writing on climate change have discussed it extensively. I was surprised to see relatively little discussion of that literature in What We Owe the Future. Here, though, it’s worth emphasising two points.

The first concerns what is realistic. Throughout history people have, on the whole, cared more about those closer in space and time — their family, their neighbours, their generation. Imagine replacing these natural human concerns with a neutral, abstract care for “humanity in general”. In that world, we would care as much about the unseen, unknown children of the 25th millennium as about our own. That may be admirable to some people — at any rate some philosophers. But it is hardly realistic.

“She was a… diminutive, plump woman, of from forty to fifty, with handsome eyes, though they had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if…they could see nothing nearer than Africa!” Mrs Jellyby — that eminent Victorian philanthropist who left her own home and family in squalor — was always meant, and has always been taken, as a figure of fun. The same goes for the modern equivalent of Dickensian space-Jellybism. I mean time-Jellybism, which reckons the distant future as important as the present. I don’t expect that to change soon.

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None of this is surprising. There is no proof, no argument, that can prove anyone wrong to care about one thing more than another. High-minded philosophers from Plato to Kant have imagined, and blood-soaked tyrants from Robespierre to Pol Pot have enforced, a scientific ethics. But ethics is not a science, although MacAskill’s approach can make it look like one. MacAskill “calculates” value using the “SPC framework”, which assigns numerical values to the significance, persistence and contingency of an event — say, an asteroid impact or a nuclear war — and then plugs these into a formula. The formula tells you how much we should now care about — in practice, how many present dollars we should be spending on — that future contingency.

But really neither maths, nor logic, nor empirical evidence, nor all these things put together, can ever tell you how much to care about anything. There is, as Hume said, a gap between “is” and “ought”. Science, reason, logic, observation, maths — all these tell us how things are; but never how they ought to be. Instead our moral judgments arise, as Hume also said, largely from our sympathetic feelings towards others. Putting it crudely: the root of moral evaluation that seeing a fellow human in pain causes pain to you, and the more vividly you observe it, the stronger the feeling. Joe Gargery is a finer moralist than Mrs Jellyby could ever be.

And is it any wonder that our strongest feelings — and so our deepest moral concerns — are for those that we see most often; those most like us; those who inhabit our time, and not the unknown future victims of unknown future catastrophes? And does anyone seriously expect this to change? As Swift said, you could never reason a man out of something he was never reasoned into. As for the time-Jellybys, who would sacrifice God knows how many people to material poverty today for a 1% shot at an interplanetary, interstellar, intergalactic future in 25000AD — though MacAskill is usually more careful — well, if all they ever get is mockery, they will have got off lightly.

The second point is that it’s hardly obvious, even from a long-term perspective, that we should care more about our descendants in 25000AD — not at the expense of our contemporaries. To see this, we can apply a thought-experiment owed to the Australian philosopher Frank Jackson. Suppose you are a senior policeman controlling a large demonstration. You have a hundred officers. You want to distribute them through the crowd to maximise your chances of spotting and extinguishing trouble. There are two ways to do it — you might call them the “Scatter” plan and the “Sector” plan. The Scatter plan is as follows: each officer keeps an eye on the whole crowd. If he spots a disturbance, he runs off to that part of the crowd to deal with it.

The Sector plan is as follows: each officer surveys and controls one sector of the crowd. If she spots a disturbance in her sector, she deals with it. But she only focuses on her own sector. She doesn’t look for trouble in any other sector. And she won’t deal with trouble outside her sector if it arises. What works better? I have described it so abstractly that you couldn’t say. It depends on the details. But the sector plan might work better. If each policeman is short-sighted and slow, each additional unit of attention might be better focused on problems that she can effectively address (those in her sector) rather than the ones that she can’t.

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The analogy is obvious. It might be better for everyone in the crowd if each policeman were to concentrate on what was near in space. And it may be better, for everyone in each future generation, if each generation were to concentrate on what is near to it in time. This means you, your community, your children and grandchildren. Each generation would then enjoy the focused attention and concern of its own and the two preceding generations. On the other scheme, the long-termist one, each one gets marginal attention from all preceding generations. And each of those must also think about thousands of other generations. And most of them are inevitably ignorant about the problems facing this one.

Do we, today, think we would be much better off if the monks and barons of 1215 had spent serious time addressing problems they then expected us to face in 2022? — say, how to control serfs on the Moon, or how bodily resurrection could be possible for a cannibal? (Thomas Aquinas gave serious thought to that one.) No: none of that would have done any good. The people of that time were like the short-sighted policemen — and all the better for it. Magna Carta was signed in 1215, and it remains a beacon to the world. But it came about not through the Barons’ high-minded concern for the future, but through their ruthless focus on the present. About one third of the way through What We Owe the Future, there is a passage that clearly illustrates its utopianism. MacAskill writes about the long reflection: “a stable state of the world in which we are safe from calamity and we can reflect on and debate the nature of the good life, working out what the most flourishing society would be”.

He continues:

“It’s worth spending five minutes to decide where to spend two hours at dinner; it’s worth spending months to choose a profession for the rest of one’s life. But civilization might last millions, billions, or even trillions of years. It would therefore be worth spending many centuries to ensure that we’ve really figured things out before we take irreversible actions like locking in values or spreading across the stars.”

If a 400-year ethics seminar appeals to anyone, then I suppose it would be people like me, who make a living out of that kind of thing. But barring pandemic catatonia, even six or seven decades earnestly discussing Mill, Parfit and Sidgwick will leave most of us pining for anything that could raise the temperature or lower the tone — another Nero, say, or the Chuckle Brothers.

More seriously, there may be nothing to “figure out”. Liberty, justice, equality, social cohesion, material well-being – we all care about these things, but we all weight them differently. There is no right answer — there is nothing to “figure out” — about how best to weight them. As if the upshot of all this discussion would be a final, ideal system, which the statesmen-philosophers of tomorrow could impose on their unwilling subjects with a clear conscience. Not that we shouldn’t discuss these things. On the contrary; but let us not pretend that any ethics — even the “mathematical” ethics of Derek Parfit or Will MacAskill — could ever justify much coercion of anyone, ever.

Cultured, middle-class parents increasingly see their offspring as projects that require vast amounts of time, attention and money. These parents, led by the “child-centred approach”, have little or no time for anything that benefits wider society; instead, their own family unit becomes their universe. And despite there being, in my opinion, no unselfish reason for having children, those of us who choose to remain child-free are routinely called selfish.

In Crouch End, I experience more stigma for being child-free by choice than I do for being a lesbian. It didn’t used to be like this.

Throughout the Eighties, I knew several lesbians who lost custody of their children from previous heterosexual relationships due to the prejudice of Family Court Judges. It was deemed “unnatural” for lesbians to raise children. It is very rare, among the liberal chattering classes, to hear this nonsense today. I rarely sense any uncomfortable vibes from middle-class heterosexuals when they realise I am a lesbian. In fact, for this demographic, I am quite useful at a dinner party: I improve their equality and diversity index. But the conversation always turns to children. Having established that I am in a long-term, happy relationship, the next question is inevitably: “Do you have children?”

I used to say “no” and brace myself for the sympathetic nod, but a few years ago, I started to give an expansive explanation, whether they wanted it or not. And trust me, they really didn’t!

Seeing friends raise children over the years has taught me about the massive curtailment of freedom that comes with it, not just to socialise, but to work, do political activism and sleep. Having children costs a fortune: money that I think can be better spent supporting women (and their kids) to leave violent men. I would far rather my time and disposable income went towards helping children living in poverty than having my own.

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But when I say all this to North London liberals, the disapproval is palpable. It is as if I am saying I hate children — including, more to the point, their children. Obviously, that is not true. I am told I don’t know what I am missing, which is also untrue: I know exactly what I’m missing and I want none of it.

The first time I publicly questioned the sanctity and sanity of having children, it was obvious I had broken the golden rule: never question what one friend called “the sunshine miracle of motherhood”. The emails started arriving — dripping in vitriol — including one from an infertile woman who likened me to Hitler for “wanting to phase out the human race”.

Having children, though many parents seem to forget it, is a choice. But women who choose to not have children are often warned that they will regret their decision later in life, yet we rarely talk about the possibility that the opposite might also be true — that women who have children might wish they had not.

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Take the experience of Anna (whose name I’ve changed), a woman in her thirties who contacted me on social media. She had seen the massive pile-on I experienced when I challenged a group of women who were pontificating about how selfish child-free women were. One had said to me: “Leave us to do the hard work of raising the next generation, why don’t you?” Anna told me she had regretted becoming a mother but felt that she was unable to speak about it to anyone.

“I told my doctor I regretted having children and that I was deeply depressed,” wrote Anna. “She sent me to a psychiatrist. I told her that I had felt totally railroaded into having babies, not by an abusive partner or religious parents but by society that values me primarily as a breeder.”

As a campaigner against male violence, and as someone who grew up in a working-class community, I am well aware that many women do not actively choose to have children. For many mothers, particularly middle-class ones, it is a lifestyle choice; for women in violent or controlling relationships, it is often imposed upon them. The same goes for those raised in conservative religious communities in which women have a duty to produce children; anyone who does not is seen as having failed and can be punished and ostracised.

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Still, anyone who admits to regretting motherhood is seen as a sociopathic monster — even though it’s not that rare to regret having children. Last year, a YouGov poll found that 1 in 12 parents did. Society can be unkind to those women who choose not to reproduce, but it can also be unkind to those that do. Working class mothers, in particular those raising children alone, often find that affordable childcare is non-existent; women who can’t afford to not work, as well as those that actively wish to, find that their lives are made near-impossible after they have children. Witnessing how these difficulties affect mothers certainly helped me decide that motherhood was not for me.

Liberal feminism seems reluctant to address the fact that women like me are frowned upon. There is a common assumption that those of us who actively choose not to reproduce are selfish, rootless and have no concern for future generations. It is not just conservatives who suggest this, but also liberals and Leftists. They feign concern about “falling birth rates” being a “threat to the future of humanity”. The hypocrisy is staggering. Nobody, surely, decides to have children in order to produce a future workforce; no one actually breeds because they are worried about who will care for elderly people in the future.

Still, according to some, I should not only face stigma and disapproval for being child-free, but also be financially penalised. Demographer Paul Morland argued in The Times last week that, in order to address the “problem” of the falling birth rate, those without offspring should pay additional tax. “This may seem unfair on those who can’t or won’t have children,” he wrote, “but it recognises that we all rely on there being a next generation and that everyone should contribute to the cost of creating that generation. Use the funds to fix the UK’s broken, expensive early-years care system.”

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To accuse child-free people of having less stake in the future is absurd. I am a feminist and what is feminism if not an attempt to change the world for future generations? As a campaigner against all forms of violence against women and girls, my work affects more children than you can cram into a four-bedroom Georgian terrace. When asked what will happen when I die, with no kids to carry on the family name, I always say that I am proud that my legacy will be making the world a slightly better place. Meanwhile, I have witnessed friends give up on trying to change the world in favour of having children, their focus shifting onto their own, ever-shrinking world.

When I came out in the Seventies, lesbians fought back against stigma. I was informed on many an occasion by certain ignorant heterosexuals that it was a shame “you can’t have kids”. I would respond by informing them that lesbians did, in fact, have wombs. Over the years, we campaigned to change the laws that prevented lesbians from adopting and fostering, and challenged the family courts when children were removed from lesbian mothers at the behest of embittered ex-husbands. Today, it is commonplace for lesbian couples to have and raise children together, and I am delighted that they have legal protection as parents. But it’s time, now, to fight back against the stigma directed at those women who choose not to procreate. After all, the expectation that “having a family” is something we all want to do is rooted in sexism. For the record, I do have a family, it just happens not to have any kids in it.