Stubborn Attachments Read online

  Ideas for progress

  San Francisco, California

  press.stripe.com

  Stubborn

  Attachments

  A vision for a society of free, prosperous, and responsible individuals

  Summary

  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.

  So, how do we proceed? Tyler Cowen, in a culmination of twenty years of thinking and research, provides a roadmap for moving forward. In this new book, Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals, Cowen argues that our reason and common sense can help free us of the faulty ideas that hold us back as people and as a society. Stubborn Attachments, at its heart, makes the contemporary moral case for economic growth, and in doing so delivers a great dose of inspiration and optimism about our future possibilities.

  Acknowledgements

  The author wishes to thank Agnes Callard, Bryan Caplan, Patrick Collison, David Gordon, Robin Hanson, Daniel Jacobson, Kevin McCabe, Sarah Oh, Meg Patrick, Derek Parfit, Hollis Robbins, Tom Round, Amni Rusli, David Schmidtz, Alex Tabarrok, Larry Temkin, University of Pennsylvania seminar participants, Kevin Vallier, and numerous commentators on earlier papers related to this work for useful comments and discussions. The Mercatus Center supplied useful research assistance. Special thanks go to my agent, Teresa Hartnett, to Brianna Wolfson for her work on the publishing side, to Tyler Thompson and Kevin Wong for the design of the book, to Rebecca Hiscott for editing, and to Patrick Collison for his interest in publishing this book with Stripe.

  Biography

  Tyler Cowen is a Holbert L. Harris Professor at George Mason University and Director of the Mercatus Center. He received his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1987. His book The Great Stagnation: How America Ate the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better was a New York Times best seller. He was recently named in an Economist poll as one of the most influential economists of the last decade, and several years ago Bloomberg Businessweek dubbed him “America’s Hottest Economist.” Foreign Policy magazine named him as one of its “Top 100 Global Thinkers” of 2011. He also cowrites a blog at marginalrevolution.com, runs a podcast series called “Conversations with Tyler,” and has cofounded an online economics education project, mruniversity.com. His most recently published book was The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream.

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

  © 2018 Tyler Cowen

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published in the United States of America

  by Stripe Press / Stripe Matter Inc.

  Stripe Press

  Ideas for progress

  San Francisco, California

  press.stripe.com

  Printed by Hemlock in Canada

  ISBN: 978-1-7322651-3-4

  Ebook by Bright Wing Books (brightwing.ca)

  First Edition

  Table of Contents

  1—Introduction

  2—Wealth makes the world go round

  3—Overcoming disagreement

  4—Is time a moral illusion?

  5—What about redistribution?

  6—Must uncertainty paralyze us?

  Conclusion—where have we landed?

  Appendix A

  Appendix B

  References

  Landmarks

  Cover

  Table of Contents

  Start of Content

  Tyler Cowen

  Stubborn

  Attachments

  A vision for a society of free, prosperous, and responsible individuals

  1—Introduction

  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.

  It sounds so simple: prosperity and individual liberty. Who could be opposed to that? In the abstract, few people would speak out against those values. But in practice, we turn away from them all the time. We pursue many other ends, ones we should instead ignore or reject. 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.

  But how do we know which goods we should be pursuing, and how do we weigh one value against another? How should we make decisions when moral values clash? These rather corny questions—the stuff of freshman bull sessions, presented and chewed over around the dorm—remain of vital import.

  Before considering how to make such trade-offs, here is some background on my underlying philosophical stance and what I intend to bring to the table.

  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.

  That said, I am not going to spend time discussing what the concepts of right and wrong really mean, whether they come from God, or whether we always have compelling reasons to act in a moral way. I will not consider meta-ethics, the study of the underlying nature of ethical judgments. Instead, I will simply assume that right and wrong are concepts which make fundamental sense. Even if you don’t subscribe to this view, you may be able to slot many of my arguments into your favored alternative moral stance.

  In concrete cases, it is often very difficult to discern which particular course of action is right and which is wrong. The skeptic is underappreciated, especially in an age of polarized politics when each side is convinced it is right and the other is unacceptably wrong. Science is our main path to knowledge, and yet so often science tells us that we don’t know. That is all the more true for social science, and macroeconomics may well stand at the summit of our epistemic limitations. So, as we consider the realm of politics, we should not engage in the sport of building a coalition of like-minded individuals, defeating competing coalitions, and then implementing as law that which we already know to be best. That’s a popular approach, and it makes us feel good about ourselves and our own supposed superiority, but it is unjustified. We need to be more modest when it comes to what we can possibly know.


  Philosophers David Hume and William James both understood the smallness of the individual human mind compared to the vast expanse of nature and society, and they emphasized the irrationalities of the human mind when facing the daily problems put before us. 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.

  Yet at the same time, we need doctrines we can actually believe in and which provide a foundation for a political and social order. A fine-tuned philosophical doctrine which no one accepts or ever could accept won’t be of much use. Reconciling the need to accommodate both skepticism and belief is one of the trickiest tasks for any philosophy. If we are indeed skeptics of a sort, how can we believe in anything of real import? To frame this question another way: what should be the roles of reason and of faith as we move forward?

  Next, I hold pluralism as a core moral intuition. What’s good about an individual human life can’t be boiled down to any single value. It’s not all about beauty or all about justice or all about happiness. Pluralist theories are more plausible, postulating a variety of relevant values, including human well-being, justice, fairness, beauty, the artistic peaks of human achievement, the quality of mercy, and the many different and, indeed, sometimes contrasting kinds of happiness. Life is complicated! That means no single value is a trump card which overwhelms all other values in all instances, and thus there is a fundamental messiness to the nature of the good. A recognition of this messiness may at first seem inconsistent with an attachment to rigid ideals of prosperity and liberty; that reconciliation will be a central issue in this book.

  Sometimes my fellow economists argue that “satisfying people’s preferences” is the only value that matters, because in their view it encapsulates all other relevant values. But that approach doesn’t work. It is not sufficiently pluralistic, as it also matters whether our overall society encompasses standards of justice, beauty, and other values from the plural canon. “What we want” does not suffice to define the good. Furthermore, we must often judge people’s preferences by invoking other values external to those preferences. To give an extreme example, when we condemn a man who beats his wife, must we really calculate whether the suffering of the victim exceeds the pleasure of the hitter? I think not. Furthermore, if individuals are poorly informed, confused, or downright inconsistent—as nearly all of us are, at times—the notion of “what we want” isn’t always so clear. So while I am an economist, and I will use a lot of economic arguments, I won’t always side with the normative approach of my discipline, which puts too much emphasis on satisfying preferences at the expense of other ethical values. We need to make more room for justice and beauty.

  I sometimes call myself a “two-thirds utilitarian,” since I look first to human well-being when analyzing policy choices. If a policy harms human well-being, on net, it has a high hurdle to overcome. If “doing the right thing” does not create a better world in terms of well-being on a repeated basis, we should begin to wonder whether our conception of “the right thing” makes sense. That said, human well-being is not always an absolute priority—thus the half-in-jest reference to my two-thirds weighting for utility. We sometimes ought to do that which is truly just, even if it is painful for many people. I should not forcibly excise one of your kidneys simply because you can do without it and someone else needs one. We should not end civilization to do what is just, but justice does sometimes trump utility. And justice cannot be reduced to what makes us happy or to what satisfies our preferences.1

  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.

  With this in mind, let’s now turn to the question of choice. When it comes to choice, I see some key questions for the individual as well as the collective. Why do we prefer one choice over another? To what extent do we have good reasons for such preferences? Exactly which choices should we make?

  To make progress on these queries, I will consider six critical issues, each of which can help us resolve clashes of value:

  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.) This is a key question to consider when deciding how much we should commit to making our future world a better place.

  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. Here’s a very simple example: if your daughter wants to watch Japanese anime on television and your son wants to watch a Disney cartoon, whose desire should prevail? If John desires greater income equality and Cecilia does not, on what grounds might we elevate one preference over another?

  There are well-known responses these quandaries in economics, for instance the Arrow and Sen impossibility theorems, which suggest that aggregation problems are very difficult to solve and are perhaps altogether intractable. Some commentators read these theorems as evidence that we cannot rationally decide who should get his or her way when people disagree. Yet we must resolve issues of clashing preferences virtually every day of our lives, so we cannot in fact retreat into a kind of operative nihilism. I’ll tip my hand and say that I am optimistic that this problem can be resolved.

  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.

  Philosophers pose similar questions in a different language. They debate the doctrine of rule utilitarianism, which suggests that we should choose those rules that maximize social utility. Similarly, a broader and more pluralist approach called rule consequentialism looks for the rules that will maximize a broader definition of good consequences.2 But does the doctrine of rule utilitarianism (or rule consequentialism) collapse into act utilitarianism? That is, are we not always second-guessing our adherence to the supposed rule? Are we morally justified in breaking a rule when the individual circumstances dictate we should?

  Under one common view, rules are a mere fiction, a phony trick—albeit a useful one—that holds no independent force in our moral reckoning. Can we generate a coherent morality in which we respect rules and principles for their own sake? Can we make a fundamental choice to think in terms of rules and principles per se? Might we even obsess over rules? Or will we find ourselves caught in the trap of always worrying about the exceptions, thus ending up right back where we started, with rules as a useful fiction?

  I’m going to speak up for rules.

  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 s
ocial 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.

  I’m still bugged by some pretty common problems from science fiction and speculative fiction. Here’s an example: even our tiniest actions can theoretically set off a chain reaction with far-reaching repercussions. Imagine if Hitler’s father—or how about Caesar’s father?—had arrived one second later to the marriage bed. A different sperm and egg would have come together, and the entire course of human history might have been radically different. When I was a kid, I read a comic book story about a team of researchers who went back in time to observe the dinosaurs. By mistake, their ship crushes a single leaf, and all of human history is changed; in this alternate reality, the American Indians end up conquering Europe. If there is a future version of Hitler, my writing this book—and your reading it—may well play a role in his later conception and birth. Who knows?

  Given such long-run uncertainty, how can we possibly pretend to assess the good and bad consequences of our actions? How can we make any decision at all without succumbing to moral paralysis and total uncertainty?

  Usually, people skirt past this problem by saying we must simply do the best we can. There is much truth to that, but the question remains: how can we use our epistemic modesty to make better choices?

  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