A vision for a society of free, prosperous, and responsible invidviduals
By Tyler Cowen
Opening of the book:
“Growth is good. Through history, economic growth in particular has alleviated human misery, improved human happiness and opportunity, and lengthened human lives. Wealthier societies are more stable, offer better living standards, produce better medicines and ensure greater autonomy, greater fulfillment, and more sources of fun. If we want to sustain our trends of growth, and the overwhelmingly positive outcomes for societies that come with it, every individual must become more concerned with the welfare of those around us.”
Closing of the book:
“I end this book be reiterating some core claims. Our civilization carries many wonderful plural values. Preserving and extending those values through time should be our priority. Sustainable economic growth elevates living standards and human welfare, and delivers other plural values. The case for a good society, appropriately specified, is sound, and it does not fall prey to the usual problems of utilitarianism or consequentialism. It is permissible to believe in absolute or near-absolute human rights. We can be, and must be, partially utopian in our personal and political commitments. We should not be afraid to think in terms of the big picture, rather than evaluating everything on a case-by-case basis. We should be deeply skeptical of particular instrumental views of what is likely to promote the good.
We still do not have the Best Ethical Theory. But we should live our lives to the fullest, knowing that common sense morality has a deep connection to what is truly right.
I believe this was the second read and this time it was the beautiful Strip Press edition. Some thoughts:
- because Tyler’s an economist, a lot of his thinking throughout the book seems like optimizations for highest expected outcomes
- so, high value on the future because that is a forcing function for good choices in the present and near-future. i.e., we’ll make more good-for-all decisions if we care about future human civilization. has a bit of James Carse’s Infinite Games to it.
- some conceptual foundations of the book
- Wealth Plus: “the total amount of value produced over a certain time period”. so basically, GDP is one measure but Wealth Plus takes the actual human experience and adds them in to give a fuller presentation of value: “leisure time, household production, environmental amenities”
- Discount rates
- low discount rates place a very high value on the future and high discount rates value the present more highly. this is an important lens through which we organize ourselves politically, culturally, and spiritually.
- The Butterfly Effect
- consequentialists and hyper pessimists are wrong that not knowing the future consequences of your actions means you shouldn’t be too much concerned on how you choose to act
- Tyler agrees that you can’t know – does driving through a Yellow light slow down the motorist waiting to proceed and change their life drastically? – so you should have a very low discount rate on the future in that case in order to believe that your actions now do very much effect the future and therefore you should proceed with the well-being of the future in mind. in other words, what you do matters, so make the choices that you think have the lowest downside risk to the future well-being of yourself, your kids and grandkids, and humans hundreds of years into the future.
- Redistribution
- the problem of fair wealth distribution is very real. instead of big swing redistributions from the wealthy to the poor, we should instead seek out better ways to compound economic growth. he references trickle down economics and its mockery, but in effect it is what happens since not everyone will be a great wealth generator themselves and since economic growth leads to better outcomes for everyone (medicines, food, technology, etc.) we shouldn’t want less wealth generators just because the wealth is unevenly distributed (“eat the rich” “there should be no billionaires”), we should instead get good at building our society around more economic growth more evenly distributed.
- The Epistemic Critique
- we should be humble that we can’t know exactly what’s going to happen in the future.
- we should lean heavily on the systems and methods that, having looked back, have gotten us to where we are today: rule of law, institutions, markets, and scientific inquiry
- Near-absolute human rights
- human rights should be valued highly, alongside economic growth. so you wouldn’t do whatever it takes to grow GDP from 4% per year to 15% year because the effects of that could mean something like destroying the entire country of Venezuela to get the oil and that devalues human rights to a degree we don’t accept. or, you’d wipe out civilization altogether. think paperclip maximizer problem.
- so, human rights are near-absolute and should be held in mind while optimizing for economic growth.
- The main disagreement I had is how determinist I understand Tyler to be in this section on near-absolute human rights
- he gives this example about a scenario where you learn that an alien civilization is visiting planet earth. they tell you that if you don’t kill a baby, the entire planet is destroyed.
- I understand why this is a moral problem and philosophical exercise: not doing so would mean that all other babies die, and all other humans die, and the earth is destroyed so no babies in the future get to enjoy life and the abundance of living. so, you have a therefore have a very high discount rate on the futre.
- but I just distrust that the exercise – do this and X happens, don’t do this and Y happens – is how this would actually happen in real life.
- E.g., what’s to say that upon being told this by the aliens you’re given one hour to decide. 12 minutes into that hour, a specific kind of EMP we’d developed is detonated by the government and it just so happens to destroy all the aliens? or, maybe more likely, what if 17 minutes after being told this a bolt of lightning strikes the alien ship carrying all of the aliens that threaten civilization and destroys them. problem solved, no?
- obviously, this is a very low chance of happened. but pre-determined logic for this problem felt a bit too “high discount rate on random and chaotic events that could save civilization” to me. or, I though, this takes away like all human agency.
- maybe you could call this the “gun jamming” problem: i.e., right when you needed it to, the gun jammed and the robber trying to shoot you is foiled and arrested.
I really enjoyed the book. Tyler’s one of my favorite writers and thinkers and I just think believe in what he’s laying out here, namely that individual liberty, coordination through understanding the aggregation/redistribution problems, and compounding economic growth make for a better future.