Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect Journal of Economic Theory 176 (2018) 444–478 www.elsevier.com/locate/jet Planning for the long run: Programming with patient, Pareto responsive preferences ✩ Urmee Khan a,∗ , Maxwell B. Stinchcombe b a Department of Economics, U. C. Riverside, United States b Department of Economics, U. T. Austin, United States Received 21 April 2017; final version received 30 November 2017; accepted 1 April 2018 Available online 5 April 2018 Abstract Respect for first order distributional overtaking guarantees that social welfare functions for intergenera- tional problems treat present and future people equally and respect the Pareto criterion, modulo null sets. For weakly ergodic optimization problems, this class of social welfare functions yields solutions that respect welfare concerns, sharply contrasting with extant patient criteria. For problems in which the evolution of future paths hinges on early events and decisions, the curvature of our social welfare functions determines the risks that society is willing to undertake and leads to a variant of the precautionary principle.  2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. JEL classification: C6; D6; D8 Keywords: Intergenerational equity; Pareto responsiveness; Long-run optimality in stochastic dynamic problems ✩ Many thanks to: Aloisio Araujo for showing us the connections between this work and general equilibrium theory; to Svetlana Boyarchenko for many discussions about irreversible decisions; to Hector Chade, Amanda Friedenberg and Alejandro Manelli for ganging up and forcing one of the authors to abandon a silly insistence on radical pragmatism; to Paolo Piacquadio, Marcus Pivato, Federico Echenique, Chris Chambers and Matthew Jackson for early encouragement and illuminating conversations; to V. Bhaskar for asking just the right question; to seminar audiences at USC, ASU, UT Austin, Carlos III, Iowa, Kansas State, Bielefeld, Bonn and UC Irvine, and to participants at SSCW 2014, ERG Winter Workshop 2015, SAET 2016, Stony Brook Conference 2016, ASU Theory Conference 2016 and LA Theory Workshop 2017 for many helpful questions and discussions. Special thanks to Adam Jonsson for pointing out infelicities in our naming of various overtaking criteria. An anonymous referee provided highly detailed and insightful comments that have improved the paper. * Corresponding author. E-mail address: urmeek@ucr.edu (U. Khan). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jet.2018.04.001 0022-0531/ 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.