TB: Stubborn Attachments (Cowen)
Core Thesis
Sustainable economic growth is a moral imperative. Because long-run growth is the primary driver of human welfare across time, we have an ethical obligation to take actions — personally and politically — that promote it. Civilizational collapse and basic rights violations are the two worst possible outcomes; everything else follows from keeping the growth engine running.
Key Takeaways
The framework: Liberty Plus Sustainable Growth
- Built on common-sense moral intuitions rather than a single ethical theory. "Libertarianism × Economics" — not pure libertarianism, which has real limits, but a framework whose primary organizing ideal is prosperity and liberty together.
- Sustainable growth is a moral imperative: we have a duty to lift people out of poverty (which saves lives) → long-run growth is the biggest factor in doing this → therefore we must pursue sustainable growth.
The long-run matters
- It is intuitively wrong to discount the future over long time frames. A dollar of welfare in 100 years is not worth less morally than a dollar today.
- This commitment to the long-run changes what policies matter: the slow, compounding, boring things (stable institutions, property rights, rule of law) outrank flashy redistribution.
Corollaries
- Civilizational collapse is one of the worst things that can happen — extra caution is warranted on anything that threatens it.
- Tragedies of the commons that threaten sustainable growth (environmental collapse, societal breakdown) must be treated as top-tier moral problems.
- Faith plays a key role in ethics and political science — the absence of religious/transcendent commitment weakens our ability to fulfill long-run moral imperatives. An unpopular but important truth.
How it cuts across politics
- Left: invest in infrastructure, education, environment (growth-compatible) — but wealth redistribution at the cost of growth is wrong under this framework.
- Right: tends to discount the far future — also wrong.
- Better politics comes from getting the future right.
Mental Models
- Compounding Returns — the entire argument rests on compounding: small consistent gains in growth rate transform lives across generations
- Second-Order Thinking — what are the second-order effects of redistribution on growth? of institutional stability? This is the central question.
- Incentives Matter — good institutions align self-interest with sustainable growth; bad ones extract from it
- Absence Blindness — we are blind to the counterfactual of what growth would have produced; political debate focuses on visible redistribution, not invisible compounding