Treuhänder künftiger Generationen

The modern democratic state’s Achilles tendon is the elected politician thinking and acting in the short run. A common assumption of economic theory is the politician maximizing the probability of his own reelection. Towering public debt in many Western democracies seem to provide an empirical validation for this assumed short-terminism. How can legitimate claims be accounted for, especially those of future generations whose members to not have their say at the next election? How can a possible institutional arrangement look like that does not dislodge parliament as the political master in a democracy?
A possible answer, defended in this book, is the sharing of power between politicians – to their own benefit – and independent institutions, similar to the theoretically well-founded and reality-tested monetary policy approach.