Long-term decisions in historical perspective: seeds, stone arches, trees, wealth and hot waste
7 Apr 2026
12:30 -14:00
Times are shown in local time
Open to: All
Room W2.01 (Cambridge Judge Business School)
Trumpington St
Cambridge
CB2 1AG
United Kingdom
Join our Strategy and International Business seminar
Speaker: Bruce G Carruthers, Professor, Northwestern University and Sandra Dawson Visiting Professor, Cambridge Judge Business School
About the seminar topic
Public policy in relation to climate change requires people to consider future costs and benefits, and weigh these in the present. But as JM Keynes once pointed out, in the long run we are all dead, so why worry about the distant future? Most public policy now incorporates future costs and benefits into decision-making using a discount rate to weigh the future, and a net present value formula borrowed from private sector capital budgeting. A high rate means that the future is unimportant; a low rate means that the future matters a lot. Thus, policy debate centres narrowly around the appropriate discount rate, and how to measure costs and benefits.
I develop an institutional perspective that augments net present valuation approaches by documenting social arrangements where decision-makers successfully included the interests of future generations and have, in effect, ignored Keynes. I focus on several case studies, including both successes and failures, to discern their common elements, motivating justifications, underlying patterns, and the role played by fiduciaries. These examples include early modern forestry management, construction of gothic cathedrals, nuclear waste depositories, family trusts and estates for wealth preservation, seed banks, and conservation easements.
Speaker bio
Bruce Carruthers is the John D MacArthur Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University. Carruthers is involved in the graduate Comparative Historical Social Science (CHSS) programme and the Kellogg-Sociology Joint-PhD programme.
His current research projects include a comparative study of the institutional foundations of long-term decision-making, the adoption of for-profit features by US museums, the relationship between corporate taxation and corporate social responsibility, and how big data affects credit markets. He has had visiting fellowships at the Russell Sage Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Library of Congress, and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, and received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Currently, he is a non-resident long-term fellow at the Swedish Collegium and the Sandra Dawson Visiting Professor at Cambridge Judge Business School. He is methodologically agnostic, and does not believe that the qualitative/quantitative distinction is worth fighting over. Northwestern is Carruthers’ first teaching position.
Carruthers has authored or co-authored 6 books, City of Capital: Politics and Markets in the English Financial Revolution (Princeton, 1996), Rescuing Business: The Making of Corporate Bankruptcy Law in England and the United States (Oxford, 1998), Economy/Society: Markets, Meanings and Social Structure (Pine Forge Press, 2000), Bankrupt: Global Lawmaking and Systemic Financial Crisis (Stanford, 2009), Money and Credit: A Sociological Approach (Polity Press, 2010), and The Economy of Promises: Trust, Power, and Credit in America (Princeton, 2022).
Register
No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Luke Slater.