IT SEEMS that further explanation may be required for
yesterday's post about why it is so hard to tease out "true"
preferences.  It is undoubtedly true that at any given time, one
would prefer to be, say, thin.  That is, one would prefer being
thin to having consumed loads of sweets and fried things in the
past.  But it seems also to be true that at any given time, most
people would prefer consuming loads of sweets and fried things
to being thin in the future.  All this tells us is that people
tend to highly overweight the present—and that this
overweighting occurs in both directions.  It's hard to develop
normative reasons that we should pay attention to peoples'
tendency to discount the future, but not pay similar attention
to their tendency to discount the past.  If we are not simply to
rely on a bourgeois "future=good" heuristic, then developing an
estimate of true preferences would require, first, finding a way
to compare the relative present utilities of indulgence, and the
fruits of moderation—thinness