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

by Tyler Cowen

Economists sometimes argue that a construct known as Arrow’s impossibility theorem makes it impossible to resolve clashes of preference. But once we consider happiness and well-being as relevant features for comparing one choice to another, Arrow’s impossibility theorem does not hold. Arrow’s original theorem assumes, and has to assume, that “happiness talk” (e.g., cardinal, interpersonal utility information) is absent from the comparisons of social states. Think of Arrow’s theorem as looking only at the kind of information which can be reflected in observed votes or ordinal rankings.

By the way, I see only one episode in human history in which the Principle of Growth was clearly and unambiguously applied, and that is in the East Asian economic miracles, which includes Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and China (with a caveat for sustainability in the case of China). These histories are normally thought of as big economic successes, and of course they are, but there’s more to it than that: they also represent the highest manifestation of the ethical good in human history to date. Whereas Hegel saw the nineteenth-century Prussian state as a manifestation of God’s will in history, I am assigning a comparable (but secular) place of importance to the East Asian economic miracles. The word “miracle” truly does apply.

Note that the traditional notions of “positive rights” or “positive liberties”—both of which refer to people’s opportunities—do not fit into this conception of rights. The concept of positive liberties is important, but it is already covered by the imperative to maximize sustainable growth. There is no need to double-count positive liberties, and in fact doing so would be a mistake.The result is that these negative rights, restrictive though they may be, represent a stripped-down set of bare-bones constraints, a series of injunctions about the impermissibility of various forms of murder, torture, and abuse.

The actual attitudes required to induce an acceptance of such long time horizons are, in psychological terms, much closer to a kind of faith. We cannot see these very distant expected gains, but we must believe in them nonetheless, and we must hold those beliefs near and dear to our hearts. In this sense, we should strongly reject the modern secular tendency to claim that a good politics can or should be devoid of faith.

This point can be expressed as follows: we should redistribute wealth only up to the point that it maximizes the rate of sustainable economic growth. This may mean more redistribution than we currently undertake, and sometimes redistribution of a different kind, namely growth-enhancing redistribution. (By no means do all of today’s government programs actually redistribute wealth to the poor, much less boost economic growth.) It will not, however, suggest that a utilitarian or consequentialist approach obliges us to redistribute most of our nation’s income to the very poor. Nor are productive individuals morally required to spend most of their years serving the very poor.

Many advocates of greater state spending—especially non-economists—seem to like the idea of a very low discount rate. Many of these individuals would like our government to devote more resources to education, to infrastructure, and to improving the environment, all positions associated with the political left overall, at least in the United States. They see a lower discount rate as supporting all of these policies. Yet they also tend to favor redistribution, even when such policies conflict with economic growth. In this sense the political left does not have a consistent attitude toward the importance of the future. Many thinkers on the right suffer from the opposite inconsistency. They often favor market-based discount rates, which are relatively high, but when the topic is redistribution, they worry much more about the longer-term consequences.6

In many cases our obligations should be viewed at a collective level. This framework does not pin down a uniquely correct course of action for each individual, so it’s not morally clear which individual is obliged to make the sacrifice. What if there were an innocent girl drowning in a lake, and any one of us could jump in and save her? In these cases the question, “What should I do?” allows for considerable latitude, and the scope of my individual obligation, as a group member, may be indeterminate. It’s good if I risk my safety and jump in after her, but it’s also fine if someone else does it instead. Similarly, it doesn’t have to be my group that protests government injustice, because many other groups could do this as well. This becomes a problem of game theory, and as we know from game theory, the implied obligation of a single individual or group is very often indeterminate.

More practically, the additional wealth that accumulates as a result of economizing on life-saving expenditures does lead people to buy safer cars, to take less risky jobs, and so on. So it can be argued that we will save some number of other lives by investing less in direct life preservation for the elderly. We don’t know whether an increment of wealth saved will in fact rescue or preserve other human lives, but there is some chance that this might be the case. And this possibility lowers the value of spending a lot of money to extend a human life.