Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals
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In short, my philosophical starting points are: “Right” and “wrong” are very real concepts which should possess great force. We should be skeptical about the powers of the individual human mind. Human life is complex and offers many different goods, not just one value that trumps all others.
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First, I do not take the productive powers of economies for granted. Production could be much greater than it is today, and our lives could be more splendid. Or, if we make some big mistakes, production could be much lower, and we could all be much poorer. This simple observation allows us to put the idea of production at the center of our moral theory, because without production, value is problematic.
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When it comes to making tough decisions, we should try to identify which elements in the choice set resemble a Crusonia plant.
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Thus even a constant level of reported happiness implies growth in real happiness over time, because the word “happy” takes on ever more ambitious meanings as society accumulates more wealth and richer experiences. Life improvements do generally make us happier, while both our expectations for happiness and our reporting standards for “being happy”—our use of language—adjust upwards.
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To put it another way: it is better to envy your neighbor’s Mercedes than to
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envy his horse and buggy. Envying his supersonic transport would be better still.
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Let’s now consider some basic choices about how to value the distant future. Again, think of a decision-maker weighing present and future interests, in this case human lives. The way discounting works, if we discount the future by five percent, a person’s death today is worth about thirty-nine billion deaths five hundred years from now. Alternatively, at that same discount rate, one death two hundred years from now is equal in value to 131.5 deaths three hundred years from now. Upon reflection, few people, putting aside their selfish interest in the current time period, would share these ...more
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Therefore we should incorporate the logic of the increasing returns model into how we evaluate social changes, even if the increasing returns model is not our single best current theory of economic growth.
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A preoccupation with pursuing growth—or some modified version of the growth ideal—therefore means a preoccupation with ideas, a preoccupation with cultivating human reason, and a preoccupation with the notion that man should realize, perfect, and extend his nature as a generator of powerful ideas that can change the world.