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Those who are most critical of the recent study's findings may be college students, who take them as an older generation's predictable complaints about "kids these days." It's true that such studies deal with averages distilled from very large numbers. Luckily, there are many highly empathetic young people who undertake projects like volunteering for altruistic reasons rather than for résumé-padding.

Instructors who wish to impart lessons about the nature of fairness, and its emotional and cognitive roots, must not forget that students are also taking mental notes as we, too, use or set aside our empathy muscles in our relationships with students. After all, it's hardest to empathize with those who don't reciprocate.

If empathy is truly on the decline among college students, then professors who care may be seen as both potential suckers, ripe for manipulation, or as potential sources of emotional connection—sometimes by the very same student. Students should be warned: Empathy doesn't make a person an easy target. When used with skill, empathy can guide us to balance the needs of ourselves, our students, and our larger social contexts with judicious care.

Why this might be the case and the implications for civic culture are the subject of debate among scholars.  Briefly, in my view, there are a number of likely factors contributing to the decline in interest and participation in civic affairs generally and the environment specifically. These include:

1. Time Displacement

Young people are spending more time with social media and online entertainment content which displaces time spent doing other more civically oriented activities including news reading, time spent outdoors, and time spent interacting across community settings.  

2. The Gossip Girl Factor

Youth oriented media inundates young people with narratives and messages that reinforce materialistic, consumerist, and narcissistic values. Past research has also shown that entertainment portrayals tend to reduce social trust and promote distrust of government. This last finding also likely applies to news programming such as The Daily Show and Colbert Report.

3. Political Polarization

Today's world of polarized politics and opinionated media likely reinforces disengagement among young people and moderates more generally.  In a forthcoming paper reviewing a large body of studies on forms of media use, selectivity, and their effects in the context of politics, Wolfgang Donsbach and Cornelia Mothes suggest that media enable a spiral of political polarization and mobilization among the most politically engaged.

n Zuckerberg’s New Yorker profile it is revealed that his own Facebook page lists, among his interests, Minimalism, revolutions, and “eliminating desire.”² We also learn of his affection for the culture and writings of ancient Greece. Perhaps this is the disjunct between real Zuckerberg and fake Zuckerberg: the movie places him in the Roman world of betrayal and excess, but the real Zuckerberg may belong in the Greek, perhaps with the Stoics (“eliminating desire”?). There’s a clue in the two Zuckerbergs’ relative physiognomies: real Zuckerberg (especially in profile) is Greek sculpture, noble, featureless, a little like the Doryphorus (only facially, mind—his torso is definitely not seven times his head). Fake Mark looks Roman, with all the precise facial detail filled in. Zuckerberg, with his steady relationship and his rented house and his refusal to get angry on television even when people are being very rude to him (he sweats instead), has something of the teenage Stoic about him. And of course if you’ve eliminated desire you’ve got nothing to hide, right?

It’s that kind of kid we’re dealing with, the kind who would never screw a groupie in a bar toilet—as happens in the movie—or leave his doctor girlfriend for a Victoria’s Secret model. It’s this type of kid who would think that giving people less privacy was a good idea. What’s striking about Zuckerberg’s vision of an open Internet is the very blandness it requires to function, as Facebook members discovered when the site changed their privacy settings, allowing more things to become more public, with the (unintended?) consequence that your Aunt Dora could suddenly find out you joined the group Queer Nation last Tuesday.

Is there an ethical basis for being concerned about global warming that does not depend upon the notion that quite generally we are radically negligent about future people? I think that there is, but this concern depends upon a rights-based notion of ethics rather than on utilitarianism. Most professional economists will at this point stop reading because they will think that rights are a quagmire. But here goes.

Natural assets such as biodiversity, and natural liabilities, such as carbon, are not owned by the current generation, because we did not create them. We have them because previous generations passed them on to us, and we are obliged to do the same. If we deplete natural assets, or run up natural liabilities, we have an obligation to compensate future generations in some other way.