Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals

by Tyler Cowen

When it comes to the future of our world, we have lost our way in a fundamental manner, and not just on a few details. We must return to principles, but we do not always have good principles to guide us. We have strayed from the ideals of a society based on prosperity and the rights and liberties of the individual, and we do not know how to return to those ideals.

The foundational problem the book proposes to address.

We need to develop a tougher, more dedicated, and indeed a more stubborn attachment to prosperity and freedom. When you see what this means in practice, you may wince at some of the implications, and you may be put off by the moral absolutism it will require. Yet these goals—strictly rather than loosely pursued—are of historic importance for our civilization, and if we adhere to them, they will bring an enormous amount of good into our world.

The warning regarding the proposals.

I treat questions of right and wrong as having correct answers, at least in principle. We should admit the existence of significant moral grey areas, but right and wrong are a kind of “natural fact,” as many philosophers would say. To put it bluntly: there exists an objective right and an objective wrong. Relativism is a nonstarter, and most people are not sincere in their relativist pronouncements anyway. At some gut level, relativists still they think they know right from wrong; if you doubt this, watch them lecture their kids or, better yet, criticize their colleagues.

Context on how the argument lays out.

If we are building principles for politics, we need approaches which are relatively fortified against human error and the rampant human tendency for self-deception, and which can transcend our own tendencies for excessive “us vs. them” thinking.

Some of my favorite portions of this book relate to the insanity of politics given how little we truly know.

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.

The highlight here removes the context that this was a numbered list in the text: 1) “Right” and “wrong” are very real concepts which should possess great force. 2) We should be skeptical about the powers of the individual human mind. 3) Human life is complex and offers many different goods, not just one value that trumps all others. From these starting points, he then says the question of choice is critical—questions for the individual as well as the collective. To understand the nuances here, he says we should consider 6 issues related to choice: 1) Time 2) Aggregation 3) Rules 4) Radical Uncertainty 5) How can we believe in rights? 6) Common sense morality. Short descriptions of each of these are laid out below in my highlights.

Time How should we weight the interests of the present against the more distant future? This relates to a more metaphysical question: do we have legitimate reasons to weight the present more heavily simply because it is the here and now? Does the economic approach to time discounting—which suggests that the future declines in moral importance as it becomes more distant in time, and in rough proportion to market interest rates—apply? (I say no.)

Aggregation Aggregation refers to how we resolve disagreements and how we decide that the wishes of one individual should take precedence over the wishes of another.

Rules The notion that rules and general principles can govern our choices and also our politics is a compelling one. But what does it mean to adhere to such rules and principles? We’d like to think that rules have independent power and intrinsic force, but that view is difficult to defend under fire. After all, virtually all rules have exceptions. Sometimes it is moral to lie in order to save innocent victims from their persecutors, to cite one classic example from moral philosophy. When we decide whether and when to break a given rule, we’re back to judging individual cases, which is what rules were supposed to get us away from in the first place.

Radical uncertainty I’m a skeptic, sure, but I’m a skeptic with a can-do temperament who realizes how paralyzing skepticism can be. It is, of course, extraordinarily difficult to predict the distant future. I’m not just talking about the difficulty of constructing good theories in the social sciences and then testing those theories against the data; we also have to contend with our broader inability to trace definitive chains of cause and effect in human affairs.

How can we believe in rights? The notion of intrinsic human rights comes up often in philosophic discussion, and it exercises considerable sway in the world more broadly, including in international law. But within philosophical circles, the foundations upon which the concept of rights rest are often viewed as shaky. Even when a notion of intrinsic rights is accepted, they are still seen as relying too much on pure intuition. I’m not going to argue my own understanding of rights from scratch, but I do believe in (nearly) absolute human rights. I will put forward a doctrine of “rights without embarrassment.” That may not be nearly as strong as absolute proof of intrinsic rights, but some key elements of ethical reasoning do support the notion of objectively valid human rights, and, indeed, of their nearly sacred character.3

Common sense morality Common sense morality holds that we should work hard, take care of our families, and live virtuous but self-centered lives, while giving to charity as we are able and helping out others on a periodic basis. Utilitarian philosophy, on the other hand, appears to suggest an extreme degree of self-sacrifice. Why should a mother tend to her baby when she could sell it and use the profits to save a greater number of babies in Haiti? Shouldn’t anyone with medical training be obliged to move to sub-Saharan Africa to save the maximum number of lives? What percentage of your income do you give to charity? Given the existence of extreme poverty, shouldn’t it be at least fifty percent? Is eating that ice cream cone really so important? Common sense morality implies it’s OK to enjoy that chocolate, but utilitarianism says otherwise.

It is the work of capital, labor, and natural resources, driven by the creative individual mind, which undergird the achievements of our civilization. Whether or not you agree with all of Rand’s political views, she is correct in her stance that we must not take the existence of wealth for granted.

End of chapter 1.

In economics, there is at least one (hypothetical) example of a free lunch. Economist Frank Knight wrote of the Crusonia plant, a mythical, automatically growing crop which generates more output each period. If you lay the seeds, the plant just grows; you don’t have to water it or tend to it. Imagine, for example, an apple tree that yields several apples each year. The tree also produces apple seeds. The apple seeds germinate, resulting in a steady and indeed growing supply of new apples and also of new apple trees, albeit based on some measure of sun and rain. A Crusonia plant, measured in terms of its ability to produce apples, might grow five percent each year on net. At the same time, it looks like a modest apple tree and does not appear to resolve any key ethical or political questions.

The Crusonia plant is used as an example liberally throught this book.

I see the Crusonia plant as an entry point for resolving aggregation problems. A Crusonia plant would be more desirable than a plant that dies after a month and leaves no successors, even if this short-lived plant were quite lovely or brilliant. We could compare the two plants in terms of various qualities, such as their color or their scent, but after a while the unceasing free yield of the Crusonia plant has to prove the better choice. At some point the sheer accretion of value from the ongoing growth of the Crusonia plant dominates the comparison. We thus have a principle of both ethics and prudence: when in doubt, choose the Crusonia plant.

So, in a social setting, what might count as analogous to a Crusonia plant? Look for social processes which are ongoing, self-sustaining, and which create rising value over time. The natural candidate for such a process is economic growth, or some modified version of that concept.

Wealth Plus: The total amount of value produced over a certain time period. This includes the traditional measures of economic value found in GDP statistics, but also includes measures of leisure time, household production, and environmental amenities, as summed up in a relevant measure of wealth.

More broadly, the principle of Wealth Plus holds that we should maintain higher growth over time, and not just for a single year or for some other, shorter period of time. Maximizing the sustainable rate of economic growth does not mean pursuing immediate growth at the expense of all other values. Policies that prioritize growth at breakneck speed are frequently unstable, both economically and politically.

We can already see that three key questions should be elevated in their political and philosophical importance, namely: What can we do to boost the rate of economic growth? What can we do to make our civilization more stable? How should we deal with environmental problems? The first of these is commonly considered a right-wing or libertarian concern, the second a conservative preoccupation, and the third, especially in the United States, is most commonly associated with left-wing perspectives.

e/o intro to chap 2

We often forget how overwhelmingly positive the effects of economic growth have been. Economist Russ Roberts reports that he frequently polls journalists about how much economic growth there has been since the year 1900. According to Russ, the typical response is that the standard of living has gone up by around fifty percent. In reality, the U.S. standard of living has increased by a factor of five to seven, estimated conservatively, and possibly much more, depending on how we measure prices and the values of outputs over time, a highly inexact science.

The economic growth of the wealthier countries benefits the very poor as well, though sometimes with considerable lags. The distribution of wealth changes over time, and not all growth trickles down, but as an overall historical average, the bottom quintile of an economy shares in growth.10 You can see this by comparing the bottom quintile in, say, the United States to the bottom quintile in India or Mexico.

Even if you don’t regard material wealth as central to human well-being, economic growth brings many other values, including, for instance, much greater access to the arts and education. Economic growth also gives individuals greater autonomy and minimizes the chance that their destiny will be determined by the time and place in which they were born. It remains true that many individuals are born poor or are born into families that do not much respect formal education or are born far away from cities. Still, ask yourself a simple question: has there ever been a time in human history when so many individuals had such a good chance of becoming world-class scientists? Individuals today are more able to shape their futures, choose their friends, communicate with the outside world, and weave together diverse cultural strands when building out their personal narratives. Benjamin M. Friedman, in his brilliant The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, shows just how many of the virtues of the modern world depend on higher and indeed growing levels of wealth.17 The bottom line is this: the more rapidly growing economy will, at some point, bring about much higher levels of human well-being—and other plural values—on a consistent basis. If some set of choices or policies gives us a higher rate of economic growth, those same choices or policies are akin to a Crusonia plant.

e/o good is growth anyways?

even if we accept the “flatline” empirical result on happiness and wealth, these self-reported happiness questionnaires are given to individuals in normal life circumstances. The answers will not pick up the ability of wealthier economies to postpone or mitigate extreme tragedies. For instance, happiness measures cannot pick up the benefits of greater life expectancy. The dead and incapacitated cannot complain about their situation from the grave, at least not on questionnaires. Life expectancy rises with wealth, but self-reports of happiness miss this benefit because researchers do not poll the dead. If an immigrant, or a child of immigrants, fills out a happiness questionnaire, no comparison is made between their current and pre-immigration state of affairs, either as it was or as it might have been. By design, happiness research draws upon a fixed pool of people living under relatively normal circumstances. This will limit its ability to measure some of the largest benefits brought about by economic growth. If we want to be around to even have the option of answering happiness questionnaires, wealth is extremely important.

e/o growth makes us happier

The main point is simply that if the gains to the future are significant and ongoing, those gains should eventually outweigh one-time costs by a significant degree, and they will likely carry along other plural values as well.

As argued above, a sustainable increase in economic growth, properly understood, will boost many plural values in the medium and long runs. To be sure, some people will be worse off, and some values, in the short to medium run, will not be favored. In these respects, aggregation problems do not disappear. Nonetheless, the competing options do not generally offer a deadlock of roughly equivalent values and interests on each side of the scale, with one side looking better by some moderate amount. South Korea is much better off than, say, the Democratic Republic of Congo by a considerable margin. The higher growth alternative will eventually offer a clear and ongoing preponderance of plural values in its favor, whether it be living standards, women’s rights, freedom of choice, the fight against poverty, or other important values. So why not choose that option and recognize that we have rational grounds for preferring it?2 This approach to the aggregation problem coincides with common sense morality. Not everyone can be happy about everything all of the time, but we should nonetheless choose the option that makes a strong preponderance of people much better off. Most important plural values will come along for the ride.

Why pro-growth policies are fundamental.

The Principle of Growth: We should maximize the rate of sustainable economic growth, defined in terms of a concept such as Wealth Plus.

I call the second principle the Principle of Growth Plus Rights: The Principle of Growth Plus Rights: Inviolable human rights, where applicable, should constrain the quest for higher economic growth.

Expressed differently, when it comes to non-tradable and storable assets, markets do not reflect the preferences of currently unborn individuals. The branch of economics known as welfare economics holds up perfect markets as a normative ideal, yet future generations cannot contract in today’s markets. If we were to imagine future generations engaging in such contracting, current decisions might run more in their favor. Circa 2018, the future people of 2068 can’t express their preferences across a lot of the choices we are making today, such as how rapidly to boost future wealth or how much to mitigate the risk of serious catastrophes.

The overtaking criterion implies the following: given the long-run comovement of sustainable growth and human well-being, if one growth path is consistently higher than the other over time, we should prefer that higher growth path. At some point in the future, the higher growth rate will make people much, much better off, and that path is worth choosing even if it involves some cost in terms of foregone consumption today.

a well-constructed welfare state can distribute education and nutrition more widely. The individuals supported by this state are not only better off, but they are more likely to be productive and pay taxes, and they are less likely to overturn public order. Other benefits of redistribution stem from political improvements. Social welfare programs can buy the loyalties of special interest groups and decrease feelings of desperation, both of which can help cement social order. Furthermore, social welfare programs make many citizens feel better about their state, again boosting public order as well as political consensus and stability.1 These factors rationalize some investments in a welfare state—and yes, we should describe them as investments—and thus support some wealth redistribution. Furthermore, they suggest an appropriate nature and scope for such redistribution, namely that we try to enhance sustainable economic growth. Past some margin, an overly generous level of wealth transfer harms economic growth. Many people end up working less, or working less hard, and the associated higher tax rates discourage entrepreneurship and can lead to economic stasis. Furthermore, if it is standard procedure to approach government for a handout, that will induce too much rent-seeking, dependency, corruption, and eventually fiscal imbalances and perhaps even insolvency or a financial crisis. Alternatively, excess or poorly conceived welfare expenditures may create urban cultures of de...

Martin Luther King Jr. brought much good to the world with respect to both justice and long-term economic growth. It would be fair to say that King did the right thing in choosing to pursue higher ideals rather than playing golf all day, even though he lost his life in doing so. The same can be said of Gandhi. Nonetheless, such obligations to sacrifice cannot be universal or near-universal. If we all went around sacrificing our own individualistic pursuits to an extreme degree, there would be no civilization left to advance. As we saw earlier, it is more sensible to reject collective sacrificial recommendations that will lower the rate of sustainable economic growth.

For instance, let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the wealthy earn eight percent on their holdings, annually and on average, while the poor earn one percent. If one-fifth of the gains to the wealthy trickle down to the poor over time, then the poor are better off if the wealthy command more resources. They will receive one-fifth of the eight percent, or 1.6 percent, rather than the one percent they would earn on their own. Usually this trickle won’t reach them right away, but over time the rich will build more factories, buy more products, hire more domestic workers, fund more research and development, push for more immigration, and so on. Sooner or later, many among the poor will benefit. If we have a deep concern for the distant future, it matters less if most of these benefits come later.

The argument for trickle down approaches.

The most prominent economic approach to growth, the Solow model, is named after MIT economist and Nobel Laureate Robert Solow, who laid out the basics of the model in the 1950s. The Solow model postulates a stripped-down economy-wide production function based on constant returns to scale. National output is the result of capital inputs, labor inputs, and technological progress, which renders both capital and labor more effective.10 In this model, the primary way to increase ongoing growth is to induce a higher rate of technological innovation. Indeed, much empirical research has shown embodied technological progress to be a major factor behind U.S. economic growth. The Solow model helps us to understand the phenomenon of catch-up growth, which has been so significant in East Asia. In the model, the rate of return on capital diminishes as the capital stock increases. So when there is not much capital, the returns on investment and thus the incentives to invest are high, at least provided that the labor force is of good quality and institutions will protect the property rights of investors. Poorer countries should therefore be expected to catch up to richer countries as they borrow new technologies and increase their capital stocks to implement new and lucrative opportunities. The economic growth in China that began in the 1980s had this catch-up flavor. The Solow model also implies that economies should recover quickly from one-time negative shocks such as earthquakes or de...

The Solow model.

In contrast to the Solow model, the increasing returns model suggests that growth begets more growth. In this view, larger economies should grow more rapidly than smaller economies, and growth rates should continue to increase over time. Improvements beget further improvements and negative events are likewise cumulative, thus the moniker “increasing returns.” Ideas, and their non-rival nature, are often cited as the fundamental source of increasing returns. Once an idea has been generated, it can be used many times by many different people at very low marginal cost. The first idea spreads, begets subsequent ideas, and so growth increases. Or there’s another way to look at increasing returns. Larger markets generate stronger incentives for idea production because innovators can sell their product to a larger market (e.g., it would not be worth inventing the iPhone for customers in New Zealand alone). That means large economies can grow more rapidly than small economies. The more the economy grows, the greater the incentive for subsequent new ideas, which in turn reinforces the incentive for growth. New ideas will lead to more growth, which encourages more new ideas, and so on. The increasing returns model is most commonly associated with the economist Paul Romer, but it can be traced back to Adam Smith and the very beginning of economics as a systematic object of study. In Smith’s implicit model, a larger market size supports a greater division of labor, which in turn makes...

increasing returns model.

Whatever your exact view of the Solow and increasing returns models, the logic of the increasing returns model will likely carry significant weight in our final evaluation. In many cases our best answer, given current knowledge, is that a given cost brings some probability of an ongoing growth effect (as in the increasing returns model) and some probability of a once-and-for-all adjustment cost, followed by catch-up (as in the Solow model). In our expected value calculations, this will operate as an expected impact on the long-term rate of economic growth. 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. In expected value terms, most of our social choices have an impact upon future rates of economic growth. Crusonia plants are everywhere, in expected value terms. We are making decisions about Crusonia plants all the time. Finally, both the Solow and the increasing returns models emphasize ideas as the wellspring of economic growth. New ideas are the product of human reason; it was Aristotle who defined man as the rational animal. 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 id...

The key point is this: even if you’re not convinced that Napoleon really mattered, you don’t and indeed can’t really know this. There is a real chance that Napoleon being born, rather than a different child from a different act of conception, fundamentally changed world history. So in terms of expected value, it remains the case that small acts can have a big impact on the future, even if they do not always do so. It only has to be the case that some small acts steer the future along a very different path. Following the philosophers, I refer to this as the epistemic problem.1 The epistemic problem isn’t really about time travel at all, even though science fiction constructs allow us to visualize the problem in an especially vivid manner. The real issue is that we don’t know whether our actions today will in fact give rise to a better future, even when it appears that they will. If you ponder these time travel conundrums enough, you’ll realize that the effects of our current actions are very hard to predict, and that has nothing to do with whether or not time travel ever becomes possible.

The epistemic problem.

James Lenman, a philosopher and a commentator in this literature, doubts the importance of consequences as a measure of right and wrong. Lenman’s arguments are interesting, but I think that, properly understood, they strengthen the case for rules-based, big-picture thinking about consequences. Let’s first go through Lenman’s arguments, and then we’ll return to what the whole mess might mean.3 Lenman presents a D-Day example in which we must choose which French beach to invade to defeat the Nazis. This is, of course, an important decision, with significant consequences for the outcome of the war. In the example, we must choose between two candidate beaches for the invasion, yet there is no strong military reason to favor one beach over the other. One of the two choices is likely to end up being the superior decision; we just don’t know which. There is, however, a complicating factor: if we land at the northern beach, a dog will break one of its legs and suffer some pain, possibly as a result of the military action. (How about a slight sprain for the poor dog instead?) If we land at the southern beach, no canine injury occurs.

The Principle of Roughness: Outcomes can differ in complex ways. We might make a reasoned judgment that they are roughly equal in value and we should be roughly indifferent to them. After making a small improvement to one of these outcomes, we still might not be sure which is better.

The Principle of Roughness, when it applies, implies that we should not discriminate on the basis of relatively small benefits and losses. The future changes at stake—the rest of human history being up for grabs—seem so large that relatively small changes in upfront benefits and costs, such as the dog’s broken leg, do not move the initial comparison out of the category of the unclear and the blurry.

We should be skeptical of ideologues who claim to know all of the relevant paths to making ours a better world. How can we be sure that a favored ideology will in fact bring about good consequences? Given the radical uncertainty of the more distant future, we can’t know how to achieve preferred goals with any kind of certainty over longer time horizons. Our attachment to particular means should therefore be highly tentative, highly uncertain, and radically contingent.

Imagine that your chance of being right is three percent, and your corresponding chance of being wrong is ninety-seven percent. Each opposing view, however, has only a two percent chance of being right, which of course is a bit less than your own chance of being right. Yet there are many such opposing views, so even if yours is the best, you’re probably still wrong. Now imagine that your wrongness will lead to a slower rate of economic growth, a poorer future, and perhaps even the premature end of civilization (not enough science to fend off that asteroid!). That means your political views, though they are the best ones out there, will have grave negative consequences with probability .98 (one minus two percent, the latter being the chance that you are right on the details of the means-end relationships). In this setting, how confident should you really be about the details of your political beliefs? How firm should your dogmatism be about means-ends relationships? Probably not very; better to adopt a tolerant demeanor and really mean it.

As a general rule, we should not pat ourselves on the back and feel that we are on the correct side of an issue. We should choose the course that is most likely to be correct, keeping in mind that at the end of the day we are still more likely to be wrong than right. Our particular views, in politics and elsewhere, should be no more certain than our assessments of which team will win the World Series. With this attitude political posturing loses much of its fun, and indeed it ought to be viewed as disreputable or perhaps even as a sign of our own overconfident and delusional nature.

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Rather than letting it paralyze us, we can think of radical uncertainty as giving us the freedom to act morally, without the fear that we are engaging in consequentialist destruction.

We can also see this radical uncertainty as supporting a new enchantment with human life and choice; we can accept that most or all of our actions will have consequences we cannot possibly predict. On average these consequences will be positive, just as average economic growth is positive, but we will always wonder about the future consequences we have set in motion. We will wonder about our strange and almost magical powers in this regard.

If our values are to rise in importance above the froth of long-run uncertainty about the effects of our actions, we must look to relatively large and important values.

First, believing in the overriding importance of sustained economic growth is more than philosophically tenable. Indeed, it may be philosophically imperative. We should pursue large rather than small benefits, and we should have a deep concern for the more distant future rather than discounting it exponentially. Our working standard for evaluating choices should be to increase sustainable economic growth, because those choices overcome aggregation problems and are decisively good. That provides us with a broad quantitative proxy for the long-run development of human civilization, and it constitutes one means of finding and promoting comoving plural values.

Second, there is plenty of room for our morality, including our political morality, to be strict and based in the notion of rules and rights. We should subject ourselves to the constraint of respecting human rights, noting that only semi-absolute human rights will be strong enough to place any constraint on pursuing the benefits of a higher rate of sustainable economic growth.

Third, we should be very cautious in our attitudes about specific policies. Even if we succeed in taking true aim at what we think are the best courses of action, the chance that we are right on the specifics—even if the chance is as high as possible—is still not very high. It’s like trying to guess at the origin of the universe. The best you can do is to pick what you think is right at 1.05 percent certainty, rather than siding with what you think is right at 1.03 percent. Most likely you’re wrong, even if others are likely to be even more wrong than you are, and thus your attitude should be correspondingly modest in the epistemic sense.

For some more concrete recommendations, I’ll suggest the following: Policy should be more forward-looking and more concerned about the more distant future. Governments should place a much higher priority on investment than is currently the case, in both the private sector and the public sector. Relative to what we should be doing, we are currently living in an investment drought. Policy should be more concerned with economic growth, properly specified, and policy discussion should pay less heed to other values. And yes, that means your favorite value gets downgraded too. No exceptions, except of course for the semi-absolute human rights. We should be more concerned with the fragility of our civilization. The possibility of historical pessimism stands as a challenge to this entire approach, because in that view the future is dim no matter what, and there may not be a more distant future we can look toward in order to resolve the aggregation dilemmas involved in making decisions that affect so many human beings. We should be more charitable on the whole, but we are not obliged to give away all of our wealth. We do have an obligation to work hard, save, invest, and fulfill our human potential, and we should take these obligations very seriously. We can embrace much of common sense morality with the knowledge that it is not inconsistent with a deeper ethical theory. Common sense morality can also be reconciled with many of the normative recommendations which emerge from a more...