Against the Future: Why the future became an alibi and who pays now

I have run that trick on myself. On one of my own ventures I approved a quotation I could not really afford and told myself next year would absorb the cost. The purchase order is still on file. Next year arrived several times and absorbed nothing. The present had paid, and the future I borrowed against never showed up to settle. I was not lied to. I did the lying, in the respectable grammar of planning ahead.

This book argues that the future has become an alibi, a place to dump today's cost and bank today's promise without ever redeeming it. Keynes described the type in 1930, the "purposive man" who loves not his cat but his cat's kittens, and not the kittens but the kittens' kittens, deferring every pleasure forward until it is never had. The same move hides inside serious method. The 2006 Stern Review discounted future welfare at a pure time preference of 0.1 percent, while William Nordhaus answered with a rate near 3 percent on the ground that our grandchildren will be richer, and that single number decides whether we sacrifice now or later. The actual bill lands somewhere real. One 2024 estimate put unfunded American state pension liabilities near 8.28 trillion dollars, shifted onto taxpayers who never voted for it.

So the book makes an unfashionable defense of the present, where costs are actually paid and people actually live. A real obligation to the future can be audited, with someone named, a cost dated, a redemption scheduled. The alibi is the opposite: an abstract beneficiary, a cost that lands now, a payoff deferred forever.

This is a short book about jam tomorrow and the future used as an alibi, the social discount rate and the pure rate of time preference, the Stern and Nordhaus debate, intergenerational justice and Parfit's non-identity problem, Whig history, and the case for defending the present it never agreed to sell.

This book is written from an Indonesian operator's context, but the borrowed-tomorrow move works the same in other emerging-market and small-business settings.