Tyler Cowen's Stubborn Attachments—A Review - Quillette

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Published on November 21, 2018

Tyler Cowen’s StubbornAttachments—A Reviewwritten by Coleman Hughes

A review of Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for aSociety of Free, Prosperous, and ResponsibleIndividuals by Tyler Cowen. Stripe Press (October2018), 160 pages.

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The complexity of themodern world makes itdifficult to know what’sworth caring about. Weall know that manyproblems exist, butnone of us know forcertain which problemsare over-exaggerated,which ones are under-exaggerated, which onesadmit of solutions, andwhich ones would onlybe exacerbated by our

meddling. To make matters worse, the increasingpartisanship of mainstream media along with the echochamber effects of social media throws doubt on the notionthat information reaches our minds free of slant, spin, orskew.

Onto this landscape of paralyzing uncertainty strides theeconomist Tyler Cowen with a bold solution. As he argues inhis new book Stubborn Attachments, there is one goal weshould promote above all else: maximizing the sustainablerate of economic growth. Of course, you’re free to care aboutother societal issues if it makes you happy. But from the pointof view of increasing human well-being, Cowen argues, youcan’t do better than maximizing growth; indeed you can’teven come close.

Cowen’s argument has three premises. The first is that wealthis the best thing humans have ever created. If you enjoy livingpast thirty, not starving to death, not having to wash clothesby hand, talking to loved ones on the phone, air conditioning,and having free time to read articles like this one, then youhave the existence of wealth—or rather the people,institutions, and ideas that create it—to thank.

To be sure, there’s more to human flourishing than just

wealth. We also care about things like justice, human rights,and emotional fulfillment. But even values like these, whichseem to be unrelated to wealth, still ride on its coattails. AsSteven Pinker points out in Enlightenment Now, grossdomestic product (GDP) “correlates with every indicator ofhuman flourishing” including longevity, health, nutrition,peace, freedom, human rights, tolerance, and even self-reported happiness levels.

Cowen’s second premise points to the surprising implicationsof exponential growth. Put $2 on the first square of an 8-by-8chessboard, $4 on the second square, $8 on the third square,etc., and there will be more dollar bills on the final squarethan there are blades of grass on planet earth. Now replacesquares on a chessboard with years on a timeline, and replacedollar bills with units of “wealth plus” (Cowen’s term for GDPplus immeasurable goods like leisure time and environmentalamenities), and just like dollar bills accrue with shockingspeed on a chessboard, “wealth plus” accrues with shockingspeed over time.

The exponential growth of global wealth starting around 1800.

The difference between the chessboard and global wealth isthat, unlike the predictable doubling of dollar bills on eachsquare of the chessboard, the economic growth rate changesevery year based to a large extent on policy decisions. A

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slightly higher rate of growth than we have now—say, oneextra percentage point per year—may not matter much in theshort-term, but in the long-term, exponential growth makesthat single percentage point hugely important.

Cowen gives a hypothetical example: “redo U.S. history, butassume the country’s economy had grown one percentagepoint less each year between 1870 and 1990. In that scenario,the United States of 1990 would be no richer than the Mexicoof 1990.” That would mean hundreds of millions of peopleworking longer hours and receiving a lower standard of livingin return. On the other hand, if we imagine that the growthrate were one percentage point higher during those years,Americans would be far wealthier than we currently are.“Production could be much greater than it is today,” Cowenmaintains, “and our lives could be more splendid.”

Cowen’s final premise is what he calls “Deep Concern for theDistant Future.” This means that, in a utilitarian calculus, weshould not devalue people just because they don’t exist yet.When it comes to money, we all devalue the future. Having adollar today is worth more to us than having a dollar in ayear, which is why banks can charge interest on loans. But ifwe treated morality like we treat finance—by imposing a“moral interest rate” of, say, 1.4 percent—then a single deathtoday would equal (in utilitarian terms) about one thousanddeaths in the year 2518.

Taken to the extreme, devaluing the future in this way wouldcommit us to absurd conclusions like the scenario imaginedby Cowen and the late philosopher Derek Parfit: “Imaginefinding out that you, having just reached your twenty-firstbirthday, must soon die of cancer because one eveningCleopatra wanted an extra helping of dessert.”

The idea that a future life should be worth the same as apresent life seems innocent enough. But combine it withCowen’s other premises and you reach a stunning conclusion:(1) If wealth-plus is the largest driver of human well-being;

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and (2) if small changes in the current growth rate will lead tohuge differences in the amount of global wealth-plus manyyears from now; and (3) if future people (who will vastlyoutnumber present people) are just as valuable as you andme; then the most important thing we can possibly do ismaximize the sustainable rate of growth so that the majorityof humankind—namely those yet-to-be-born—will have muchmore wealth-plus than they’ll have if we continue chuggingalong with our current, middling rate of growth.

It’s hard to find an error in Cowen’s argumentative chain.Nevertheless, for many the idea of orienting public policyprimarily towards wealth maximization will conjure upimages of a soulless, hyper-capitalistic hellscape wherehumans are treated as dispensable labor-machines. Cowen,however, anticipates this objection by placing one majorconstraint on growth-maximization: human rights. Under no(realistic) circumstances should we violate human rights tomaximize the sustainable rate of growth, he maintains; but,short of that, Cowen believes we should stop at nothing.

At 110 pages in length (minus appendices), StubbornAttachments makes a careful case without wasting thereader’s time. The discussion of human rights, however, doessuffer for its lack of detail. For a start, Cowen doesn’t definethe concept of a “right,” which presents a problem given thatit’s prone to infinite expansion. Things which didn’t even exista few decades ago—the internet, for instance—are now seen asuniversal human rights. If treading on human rights is theone thing we cannot do to increase growth then, in practice,the list of proscribed policies may grow ever longer ashumanity invents nice new things and dubs them “rights.”Vis-á-vis humanity, the conceptual expansion of rights is asign of moral and economic progress. But vis-á-vis Cowen’sargument, it’s a weakness.

Even with a well-defined human rights proviso, Cowen’sthesis might still leave the typical reader somewhat cold. Thisgut-level discomfort, however, is just an artifact of the

mismatch between our apish programming and our moderncontext. Our common sense intuitions about good and evilwere shaped in a context where the nicest thing you couldpossibly do was share a gazelle you just killed with your tribe.It’s no wonder, then, that our moral itches aren’t scratched byphenomena as recent in our evolutionary history as marketcompetition and incentive structures—even if thosephenomena are the deepest drivers of human well-being.

Others may worry that most of the gains achieved bymaximizing growth will go to the rich. Since 1980, the shareof national income going to the highest tax brackets hasskyrocketed, a trend which shows no sign of stopping. Iffurther economic gains will be hoarded by the ultra-wealthy,then the focus on growth is misplaced. Instead, we shouldfocus on fighting income inequality by redistributing whatalready exists.

Cowen rejects this argument for a few reasons. First, contraryto the idea that “trickle down” economics never works, wealthactually does “trickle down” in the long-run. If it did not, heargues, then poverty in wealthy countries would resemblepoverty in poor countries, because wealth at the top wouldnever have made its way to the bottom. But the opposite istrue. For instance, nearly all Americans below the poverty-line own a color TV, and over 80 percent have an airconditioner, a video recorder, and a cell phone. In lesswealthy countries, by comparison, the poor have few or noneof these things.

What’s more, when poverty is measured by the real-life goodsand services people purchase rather than by the figures thatappear on their paychecks, the proportion of Americans whoare poor has declined 90 percent since 1960. Even if incomehasn’t been trickling down in recent decades, better livingstandards—i.e., what income buys and what really matters—have.

Not only does wealth “trickle down” nationally, but it also

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does so globally. According to the World Bank, the globalextreme poverty rate fell from 36 percent in 1990 to 10percent in 2015, lifting over a billion people out of officially-defined destitution. This economic miracle was not caused bycharitable donation or top-down redistribution, but by theexpansion of market economies into the developing world.(That’s not to say Cowen is against charity. To the contrary,all of Cowen’s earnings from Stubborn Attachments will go toan Ethiopian man pseudonymously named “Yonas.”) Indeed,part of the reason income inequality has increased withindeveloped nations is because it has decreased betweennations, due to increased competition from the rising globalmiddle class. In short, it’s not true that the gains achievedfrom a higher growth rate would mainly line the pockets ofthe ultra-rich.

The second reason Cowen rejects the inequality critique isthat redistributionist policies, though often sold asstraightforward solutions to poverty, often require tradeoffs—that is, they might reduce poverty for some while preventingothers from escaping it. Consider the contest betweenreducing poverty for Americans and reducing poverty formigrants: the bigger America’s welfare state becomes, themore voters will feel (rightly or wrongly) that recentimmigrants are taking more from the country than they’recontributing. Thus, they will vote to curb immigration,preventing many migrants from achieving a higher standardof living by moving to America.

Cowen also highlights the tradeoff between current povertyand future poverty. Imagine that we institute some policyintended to help the poor—say, a new entitlement programfunded by a tax increase. Imagine, moreover, that this newpolicy has the unfortunate side effect of slightly reducing theeconomic growth rate. What we will have done, in effect, isprioritize some number of today’s poor over a far greaternumber of tomorrow’s poor. This is because a slightly lowergrowth rate today means much less national and globalwealth-plus hundreds of years from now, which in turn

means billions (upon billions, upon billions…) of futurepeople who will be much poorer than they could be.

That said, Cowen doesn’t reject redistribution per se; he isstrongly in favor of redistributionist policies that increasegrowth, like ensuring that the poor are well-housed and well-fed. He only rejects forms of redistribution that reducegrowth. The unconditional desire to reduce inequality,growth-be-damned, is “the thinking man’s equivalent of thesavage’s short-run gratification,” Cowen writes. “It is ourlatest adaptive mechanism for feeling good about ourselves,at the expense of letting Rome burn.”

There is something in Stubborn Attachments for all threemajor political ideologies—and therefore something forideologues of each stripe to hate. Conservatives will loveCowen’s appreciation of order and stability (burning thesystem to the ground is bad for growth), but some will bristleat his deep concern for the implications of climate change.Libertarians will love the emphasis on markets but will hateCowen’s defense of the welfare state. And progressives willlove Cowen’s stances on climate change and human rights butwill balk at the idea that capitalism, far from being a scourgeon the poor, is in fact the best anti-poverty program everdevised.

Ultimately, absorbing the thesis of Stubborn Attachmentswould entail a radical loss of purpose for the politically-minded among us. The small, short-term policy fights thatenergize us most are precisely the ones from which, onCowen’s account, we should abstain entirely. Even thesmartest among us don’t know what net effect small policieswill have; plus very little well-being turns on such policies tobegin with. Growth maximization, on Cowen’s view, becomesa moral black hole from which no partisan skirmish, nomatter how seemingly important, can escape.

In a cultural landscape where partisan skirmishes regularlyinduce something approaching bloodlust on both sides of the

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political aisle, it’s safe to say that most Americans are roundlyrejecting Cowen’s thesis at the moment. But perhaps thatmeans the message of Stubborn Attachments is needed nowmore than ever.

Coleman Hughes is a Quillette columnist and anundergraduate philosophy major at ColumbiaUniversity. His writing has also appeared inthe Spectator, City Journal, and the HeterodoxAcademy blog. You can follow him onTwitter @coldxman

References:

Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now, (Viking: New York), 96.

Tyler Cowen, Stubborn Attachments, (Stipe: San Francisco), 40.

Ibid., 24.

Ibid., 65.

Pinker, Enlightenment Now, 116-117.

Ibid., 117.

Cowen, Stubborn Attachments, 124.

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90 Comments

Pingback: Coleman Hughes reviews *StubbornAttachments* - Marginal REVOLUTION

Another well written, concise, thoughtful article Mr Hughes, thanks.At the end, I kinda wanted you to declare your position on the mainthesis; but yeah, it’s a book review, so you’re forgiven.Keep going Coleman, all good.

Wow, what a goofy premise. Growth at all costs. So the firstthought I had was environmental. Humans are displacing everything else that needs habitat. You can’t live on a planet withnothing but pavement and Starbucks. Then I’m thinking abouttechnology. What happens when almost everything is done byintelligent robots? Why do you need growth? Just build enoughfor the need of living people. Most societies experience negativebirth rates if they have educated industrialized populations.

ChrisNovember 21, 2018

Michael JosephNovember 22, 2018

Great article, but the two parties in America are not equally agnostic onmaximizing growth. That is strictly a Republican concern at this pointin the story. Out id’s Trump ‘s entire economic plan!

Nice review. The redistribution that almost certainly does the mostharm to economic growth are moving from meritocratic to social justicecriteria for individual and group selection and advancement. Replacinga 135 IQ Asian/White with a “victim” class 105 IQ applicant to Harvardor Google hiring female programmers with Gender Studies degreesinstead of male programmers with Computer Science degrees willcertainly hurt productivity by reducing the more efficient distributionof resources, but that is exactly what is increasingly happening with thepolicy preferences of the Left. The biggest Leftist fallacy is in fact thattrickle-down doesn’t work, as if rich people bury their money in thebackyard instead of saving it in banks (which make loans to businessesand consumers to buy stuff), or investing in new business (whichcreates jobs and wealth), or buying stuff (which creates jobs for thepeople that make and sell the stuff). The desire to “get the rich” meansthere are virtually no Leftist policies that don’t kill economic growth,but unfortunately much of the public votes on the basis of what feels“fair” and/or whether they get some “free” stuff, rather than what isgood for growth.

“as if rich people bury their money in the backyard”

Or “offshore tax havens” as they’re known colloquially

Duppy – yet even the offshore tax havens don’t bury the money– they just hide it from tax authorities. Banks need to lendmoney to make money (and pay interest on deposits), so themoney they get from tax cheats is put into the local or global

greggloryNovember 21, 2018

E. OlsonNovember 21, 2018

DuppyConquerorNovember 21, 2018

E. OlsonNovember 21, 2018

economy where it hopefully generates growth and furtherwealth. The question is whether a tax haven bank allocates themoney for growth better than the government who would take itthrough taxation (likely) or banks in developed countries wherethe tax cheaters live (less likely).

Much as I respect Cowen, his approach to future value of life makes afundamental ontological error, even if you allow for his utilitarian ethic.

The “utility of future generations” is a seductive but ridiculous concept.Let us be clear: these “people” don’t exist. They may never exist. Theyhave no claim on us, the living. Insofar as “their” utility is aconsideration, it is only the utility we ourselves enjoy uponapprehending their prospective utility. That is, our own vicariousutility. We, the living, and our wants, are the only moral units ofcalculus

If those wants include the existence of future generations, and thehappiness of such, well to the good. But such “future generations” don’texist and have independent claims apart from our consciousness.

Indeed, if the objective is to maximise the utility of some hypotheticalentity set at some future state, you don’t have to go far to get toabsurdity. Should we prefer a future of great happiness for Billions, orsatisfaction for Trillions? Or should we not prefer a future whereBillions of Humans are replaced by Quadrillions of intelligent insects?Perhaps numerous future AI’s will constitute the bulk of futureexperienced utility, and hence our goal should be to immanentisethem? And why stop with future AI? Entire realms of hypotheticalentities can be arbitrarily conjured into existence andimbued with moral claims on our current behaviour. SupposeI diligently affirm that intelligent unicorns will shortly be created andconstitute the majority of future awareness. Surely we should sacrificeall our utility now to ensure lush green future pastures for our pointy-equine successors?

Cowen’s approach is flat out wrong. The future only has value in thepresent minds of the living. Reifying non-existent entities from “thefuture” and giving them moral claims on the present is a fundamentalerror. I think of it as slightly less psychotic version of Roko’s Basilisk.

AlistairNovember 21, 2018

Jack DanzeyNovember 21, 2018

Alistair,

I think I get where you are coming from, but I think thatperhaps you are not seeing the argument quite clearly. By yourlogic, it seems, there is no reason not to destroy our planetthrough pollution, deforestation, hunting/fishing to extinction,etc, so long as the effects of doing these things do not manifestuntil after you are dead. After all, the future generations have noclaim on you. They cannot demand anything from you.

Perhaps your issue is that you think that the argument is toostrong, a moral imperative rather than just good policy. Maybethis is so, but good policy it is, nonetheless.

Jack,

Close, but I fear your example may be a bit misleading.

“By your logic, it seems, there is no reason not to destroy ourplanet through pollution, deforestation, hunting/fishing toextinction, etc, so long as the effects of doing these things do notmanifest until after you are dead.”

Except insofar such a course of action would conflict with ourcurrent desire to have future generations come into existenceand be happy. As our desire for such posterity conflicts andexceeds our short-term gains from trashing the place, the planetis safe-ish, for now. But it would follow that if we wanted, aboveall things, to destroy the planet and humanity, “future unborngenerations” would not have a moral claim to prevent us.

That is, the reason we don’t do “bad” things is “because we don’twant that future”, not “because we are morally mandated toavoid that future”

It an argument to recognise that all utilitarian calculations areultimately selfish (in a formal sense – and this is exactly whatwe should expect in a utilitarian ethic!).

‘. . . would conflict with our current desire to have future

AlistairNovember 21, 2018

JohanNovember 22, 2018

generations come into existence and be happy.’

Well then.

You like Ayn Rand. “We the Living” is one of my all time favoritebooks. Should be mandatory reading. She would hate this ideaas well. But, to your argument, subjecting the present to thefuture is what creates human flourishing. It is the ultimatehuman ability to look into the future and plan for it now.

In fact, any financial expert will tell you the same thing. Save asmuch as possible as early as possible. Even though you might bedead tomorrow, odds are you won’t be – a new development inhuman history – so we should not act as though the present isall that we have.

As Jordan Peterson would say, “act in a way that affirms yourfamily, your community, and humanity generally, now and inthe future.”

I haven’t read the book. But from what this article says I agreewith its conclusion.

Unlike unicorns, children do exist, and it is inevitable that moreshall be born. The existence of these people isn’t reallyhypothetical – it is guaranteed, save some species-destroyingcataclysm. The argument presented is a natural extension of theargument we must pass on a better world for our children. Wealready aim to operate in a way that benefits them, or at leastreduces our negative impact on them. Aiming to extend ourvision past those currently alive is synonymous with planningfor the future.

Well, that’s nice, Stephanie, but until the children exist, theydon’t. And their “inevitability” doesn’t give you the right toproject your value preferences into their mouths.

Look, I agree with your values, I have kids etc. But you’re

Nick EnderNovember 21, 2018

StephanieNovember 21, 2018

AlistairNovember 22, 2018

missing the ontological point at the core of this. The point is thatthese are our values. They are NOT the values of the future(non-existent) children, unicorns or whatever. We shouldn’tdeceive ourselves into thinking we are “speaking with the voiceof the future” when we plan for it. We are speaking for ourselves,today, and our present values. When we speak of “our children’sutility” we are actually speaking of our vicarious utilityapprehending their prospective utility.

Making transcendental claims that hypothetical entities haveextant utility is tosh. Consider if everyone alive today wasinstantly replaced, Thanos-style, by deep greens determined tosuicide and remove the “cancer of humanity from the earth”.Would “unborn future generations” have any moral claimagainst their action? Or what if I gave you a choice between two100-year futures; with equal per capita wealth; one with 6Billion humans including your descendants, and 7 Billionhumans with none of your descendants? Which would youpick…? If hypothetical beings have extant utility, you mustchoose the latter, right?

Sorry. Philosophy grad. Precision in language matters, becauseit is precision in thought. People are being sloppy here.

Alistair, I don’t see what’s sloppy about taking the commonmotivation to do right by your kids and extending that togeneralised future generations. Yes, that depends on what youmean by “doing right,” but as the article describes, greaterwealth is the surest path to higher standard of living. Unlessyou’re arguing that it’s possible our descendents might enjoystarvation, I don’t see what there is to dispute in that. We canproject that value “into their mouths” as surely as we know ourown children will enjoy food. If by some horror our children failto pick up these values, they are free to choose to starve, butthere is no reasonable cause to think their values on this willdiverge from ours. It is highly unrealistic that the biological urgethat drives us to survive and thrive will disappear.

If everyone on the planet turned suicidal, that would be a greattragedy for many reasons, including the many people who wouldnot exist. From a biological perspective, continuing the speciesis our only vital task. It would be immoral to fail in thatresponsibility, as objectively immoral as you can get.

The existence of future generations and our responsibility to

StephanieNovember 22, 2018

pass on the best we can doesn’t necessitate that the future isimmutable. It’s not hypothetical people as individuals who havevalue, because they don’t exist as individuals. Instead, I’d saythat it’s generalised future generations that we have aresponsibility to.

Sorry, science grad. I don’t see the benefit of assumingunprecedented changes in animal nature for the sake of makinga semantic argument. Nor in impossible hypotheticals.

I’m wondering if this perceived concern for future generations isakin to a lateral consideration for all human beings on the planetat this time? Billions of people we will never meet or even knowof… how do our feelings in this regard differ across time oracross the seas?

As far as being careful about leaving behind the things we valuetoday to future participants, well, yes, of course. In themeantime, I want to be able to revisit a lake (e.g.) teeming withfish and surrounded by healthy forests, for myself and to sharewith others multiple times in my lifetime. That is challengeenough for those of us here now.

We should be prudent in our stewardship of resources, but intruth after the witness generations have died out, the memorywill be lost to the culture and remembered only in a fewpublications. What will be left to distant generations, who theywill be and how they will look upon it, is certainly unknowable.

Stephanie and Alistair,

You both seem to be drawing on different ideas aboutobligations to future generations. Stephanie appears to bethinking of something like Burke’s covenant between the living,the dead, and the unborn. This is a value or worldview, a way ofunderstanding one’s place in the cosmos from which obligationsfollow. I happen to sympathize with this view and, judging by hisremarks about his own children, Alistair seems to share some ofit too.

Utilitarianism, however, is a different worldview altogether. And

augustineNovember 23, 2018

X. CitoyenNovember 26, 2018

Alistair is right about the problem with the version presented inthis book. I can perhaps state the absurdity it creates even moresuccinctly: If the utility of possible future people must becounted in the hedonic calculus, then every woman alive todayhas an obligation to have as many children as she possibly can.After all, anything else she might choose to do instead mustnecessarily be of lesser value than the lives of her children andher children’s children and so on. Needless to say, this violatesthe principle that ought implies can in a dozen different ways.

Of course, this is yet another example of the absurdities andparadoxes that arise from utilitarian thinking in general.

A commentator above hits on it, but real committed feeling to thefuture mostly takes the form of wanting the best for ones children. Thistakes on a somewhat generalized sense in wanting the society theyinhabit to be one good for their welfare, but it’s still about oneschildren.

If I believe my society is working towards the welfare of a generalizedand I’ll defined future people’s who may or may not include mychildren and their welfare then I’m less committed.

If you want people to play cooperate rather then defect you need toconvince them that you are playing cooperate too. Particularly radicalviews of the future don’t fit that mold.

“If you want people to play cooperate rather then defect youneed to convince them that you are playing cooperate too.Particularly radical views of the future don’t fit that mold.”

It certainly raises the suspicion that your counter-party isclueless, vulnerable to invasive defection strategies, and likes toadvertise this.

It is extremely dangerous to live amongst a tribe of co-operativepacifists when there are predators about.

AsdfNovember 21, 2018

AlistairNovember 21, 2018

Andrew Leonard

So Capitalism is to economies what compound interest is to money

Well said..

The reviewer points it out, but what exactely are “human rights” is a bigsticking point. Also what is “good for stability” or “good for growth”.

Is an expensive education for everyone good for growth? Probably notsince it would fail an ROI for most people. Is it a human right anyway?Is it possible for people and politicians to rationally determine an ROIon emotionally charged “pro growth investments”.

Redistribution that is bad for growth probably won’t take the form offlat transfers, but expensive yet useless “investments” in public goodsthat don’t pan out but are sold as “human rights”.

We need to get a grip on this whole “human rights” business as aspecies. It used to be understood that your rights end wheremine begin, generally speaking. That no longer seems the case.You could argue that the welfare state helped destroy that worldview. It’s hard to argue that your rights can’t impinge on minewhen your “right” to a certain standard of living means I mustgive up my right to the income I have earned. I think maybe thatthe responsibilities over rights conversation that is being had insome corners of the IDW is the answer. Maybe it’s the case thatinstead of demanding more rights as a people, we should bedemanding more responsibility…

@Asdf Good point. Few people will admit to advocating forrestrictions on growth, the problem is people disagree on how to

November 21, 2018

Amitkumar PalNovember 21, 2018

AsdfNovember 21, 2018

Nick EnderNovember 21, 2018

StephanieNovember 21, 2018

get growth. The left thinks tax breaks are a waste of money thatcould be spent on infrastructure projects, the right thinksredistribution and regulatory burdens hamper growth.

I nonetheless appreciate that someone is making the argumentthat wealth generation is itself a virtue.

Imagine a simplified society in which there are 5 rich people and 50poor people. Suppose that in the growth-maximizing scenario, eachrich person has $100 and each poor person has $5, resulting in totalwealth of $750. To address inequality, policy makers enact variousmeasures that make public investments and redistribute wealth,resulting in a new society in which the 5 rich people each have $85 andthe 50 poor people each have $6. As a result of deadweight loss,reduced growth, etc., the wealth of the new society now measures $725.Couldn’t it be the case that the incremental dollar to the 50 poor peopleis worth more (in terms of well-being) than the cumulative loss of therich people? Don’t wealth and income have diminishing marginalutility (food > golf club membership)? I’m sympathetic to the notionthat capitalism is the best anti-poverty program ever devised, but I’mnot sure that simply maximizing economic growth guarantees the mostdesirable outcome, no matter what currency you care about. JohnRawls certainly had a lot to say about this sort of thinking, I’m sure he’dhave a thoughtful rebuttal if he were still with us.

I was waiting for someone to point this little problem out.

Wealth-maximising is not guaranteed to be utility maximising.In fact, I’d hazard that the utility maxima almost certainly isn’tthe wealth maxima. You don’t need Rawls to see that.

It’s no use Cowen protesting positive correlation betweenwelfare measures and GDP, because so long as the responsesurface was smooth and monodirectional, that’s what we wouldsee from any function that was actually welfare-maximisinginstead.

TimNovember 21, 2018

AlistairNovember 21, 2018

E. OlsonNovember 21, 2018

Tim – you make the mistake of assuming that wealth earned hasdiminishing returns, which suggests the wealthy eventually gettired and bored as they buy their 75th Rolls Royce, and 59thmansion, the 4th private jet, etc., but such extravagantconsumption is typically among their less importantexpenditures. Rather the bulk of their wealth is typically used toprovide capital for the next Google, or Amazon, or McDonalds,or buy bonds that underpin government spending, or given tocharities the help the poor, support artists, cure diseases, or paidout in taxes, and all but the taxes and government bonds rarelysuffer from diminishing returns to the wealth holder or societyat large. Thus instead of giving each poor person the extra dollarfor merely breathing, growth oriented investments provide jobsso that the poor person can earn 2 or 5 or 15 dollars more fromwork that also provides personal benefits (sense ofsatisfaction/achievement, social involvement, etc.) and societalbenefits (less crime, less welfare dependency, and increased taxrevenues).

Totally acknowledge that my example was an oversimplificationand I agree with much of what you said. That said, I still thinkit’s reasonable to conceive of a society that has higher costs ofcapital (to your point on the savings of the wealthy), lower totaloutput, etc. but has higher utility than the output-maximizingsociety. Perhaps this hypothetical society is one in which therising tide doesn’t lift the right boats to maximize utility?Perhaps some boats are anchored to the sea floor? Or maybe thetide doesn’t sufficiently rise because wealthyconsumption/investment leaves the local economy? Also, asAlistair indicated, I think it’s a very open question as to whetheror not maximizing wealth maximizes utility. Nothing wrong withassuming it does for the sake of bounding our conversation, butit remains the elephant in the room.

It is an interesting issue, because the “poor” in Westerncountries are not poor by any historical standard. Thus giving anobese, closet full of clothes, large-screen TV owning “poor”person in today’s America more money for breathing (akawelfare) does not necessarily provide higher marginal utility tothe individual than letting the rich people keep their money

TimNovember 21, 2018

E. OlsonNovember 21, 2018

through lower taxes, because the poor person is more likely to“waste” the money (i.e. buy lottery tickets, designer sneakers,abuse drugs, smoke) than the rich person since their basic needsare already taken care of. The case for marginal utility would bestronger if the poor were going from starvation to satiation(which would provide health and productivity benefits), orshoeless and wearing rags to having a decent wardrobe (whichwould provide health and social benefits), or could be trusted toinvest the money in education (productivity benefits) orproperty or retirement savings (financial security), but thatdoesn’t describe the vast majority of today’s “poor”. The bestevidence indicates that the poor are poor because they makemore bad decisions than the middle and upper classes, andgiving them more money with “no-strings-attached” is not goingto fix the problem, or provide higher growth to the economy.

Concern for wealth utility is a canard. If the wealthy place theirmoney in country clubs and Lamborghinis, then there becomesmore country club and Lamborghini manufacturing jobs. If thewealthy place their money in savings, banks become more ableto write loans for new upstarts. Banks that have a 20% loan todeposit ratio fail as they are paying out more in deposit interestthan they are taking in from loan interest. Money that ends upoff shore accounts benefit the banks and residents of thecountries in which that money resides. If there is an unfulfilleddemand, rest assured that an up start business will fill thatdemand an become wealthy. The idea of wealth utility is thesupport mechanism for luxury taxes. However it has beenconsistently demonstrated that luxury taxes harm the luxuryproviders and workers, not the wealthy. The best way to harman economies is to remove capital from them. Over taxationtakes money from the economy and places into a bureaucracy.The more layers of bureaucracy the more money is lost before itsultimate return to the economy. Anyone concerned with utilityof money should be more concerned with tax rates thaninvestment vehicles of the rich.

If that was a possibility, it would be a real problem. Luckily incapitalist (AKA free market) system, 5 “rich” people can only beas rich as 50 “poor” people are willing to consume products andservices 5 “rich” people are offering, which in turn makes 50people richer too!

FarrisNovember 21, 2018

simon...November 22, 2018

Even if we focus on the future only as far as our children and theirchildren (who will live during our lifetimes) Cowen’s prescription stillmakes a lot of sense. I will not give two hoots right now for people of22nd century, but what I do and the growth policies I support willaffect them – to Cowen’s point.

As far as defining human rights that is a real problem in that it’s anunknown future variable, and basic common sense is not guaranteed toprevail. If something like UBI becomes a ‘right’ it will affect economicgrowth.

I can get on board with the growth thesis, but I’d prefer the dubiousglobal warming bent be modified to good stewardship of theplanet/environment. The kind of money and resources they proposechasing climate change down the rabbit hole will definitely affecteconomic growth – where anti-pollution measures and conservationare likely to be benign if not helpful.

This doesn’t seem to address the biggest hole in this kind of thinking.What’s growth for? Its not an end itself. Economic growth doesn’tincrease happiness levels once GDP per head passes $25k, for instance.

Totally Empirically False.

Wolfesen, et al.

Your solid citations duly noted…….. :-0

If that were true, why don’t most people donate all money

Craig WillmsNovember 21, 2018

c youngNovember 21, 2018

AlistairNovember 21, 2018

Hubert Leigh SmithNovember 21, 2018

david of KirklandNovember 21, 2018

earned over $25k? Because it’s not true?Growth means a person tomorrow has more options and choicesthan a person today, which few would think a bad idea.But we do need to figure out how to balance economic growthwithout humanity being a cancer upon the Earth.

Happiness is mostly a signal that things are moving in the rightdirection.You could have been the happiest person in the world1000 years ago with just 100m² house and a few dozenpossessions. There is nothing magical about $25k – it’s just thatit’s what you expect.

Growth lets us feel like we are making things better because wecan do things we couldn’t before, like explore the galaxy. It’s arather objective measure that can’t be faked.

The notion that wealth generally increases happiness, clearly lacks anunderstanding of the human animal.

What to make of the affluent Trump supporters, who brim with rageand fear? Or affluent westernized young men who join ISIS?Why the complaints about the Kelo decision, where the governmentseized land and gave it to a more productive entity?

Status and dominance are every bit as critical to the human person ashousing and food. What Cowen is trying to do is argue that humansshould stop being they way they are.

Most prefer that their babies don’t die, that the mothers don’tdie, that children don’t die, that we’re not starving, not fightingdisease, not fighting each other…

AuxNovember 22, 2018

ChipNovember 21, 2018

david of KirklandNovember 21, 2018

Peter from OzNovember 21, 2018

WHat to make of affluent lefties who want to whine abouteverything all the time in fear and anger that is completelyabsent on the right.That’s the difference between the right and the left. The leftwhines and fears everything. The right faces up to challengesand overcomes them with ingenuity and skill.

I think perhaps you mean the centre. Mrs Hanson is as much afear and anger creature as Mr Di Natale.

A utilitarian moral argument based on the projected well being offuture generations combined with a projection of exponential growthinto the deep future is absurd on many levels.

Making moral decisions on the potential benefit to massive numbers offuture people allow the justification of almost any action based on asupposed future benefit. As an example I could argue that If weeliminated all people who were not a a single ethnic group we wouldhave eliminated racial conflict in the future with massive benefitoutweighing the short term cost of billions of lives with thousands ofbillions of lives saved and enhanced in the future. A less extremeversion of this would be a eugenic argument to sterilise all those withany genetic disease.

Any forecast deep into the future is inherently suspect because wesimply can’t forsee the future. Moral decisions based on a projectedfuture lack any foundation because we know the assumptions behindthe decision are almost certainly wrong without knowing in what waythey are wrong.

Assumptions of indefinite exponential growth must be suspect. It maybe a long way off but there must be some limit to the benefits of humaningenuity and resources of any physical sort are finite.

Ah, but that is where the non specific vague reference toundefined “human rights” comes in. Not to mention a vague

wonderingscotNovember 23, 2018

AJNovember 21, 2018

AsdfNovember 21, 2018

notion of “stability”. What are human rights? What will bringabout stability? If we can’t get specific, what does this really tellus that we don’t already know? I already wanted to vaguelyincrease growth provided it doesn’t conflict with other things Ifind important…like everyone else.

I think these things remain vague so that people can read inwhatever definitions they want, this appealing to the widestaudience even as the assumptions of that audience may beirreconcilable.

” he is strongly in favor of redistributionist policies that increasegrowth, like ensuring that the poor are well-housed and well-fed”

How do we determine if housing and feeding the poor increasesgrowth?

” gross domestic product (GDP) “correlates with every indicator ofhuman flourishing”

Correlation does not equal causation. As such, this is an excellent placeto begin some research…what is creating this correlation, and is therean element of causation?

True, but growing GDP suggests people are creating morethings/services that other people want/need. Imagine trying tocare for 7.5 billion people today without non-muscle energy…we’d all be farming and foraging…

@ R Henry, while correlation is not the same as causation,correlation with a likely causal mechanism implies causation.The causal mechanism in this case is obvious. More money

R HenryNovember 21, 2018

R HenryNovember 21, 2018

david of KirklandNovember 21, 2018

StephanieNovember 22, 2018

means people live better.

This is a very interesting discussion. Well-informed, well-supportedarguments from a variety of perspectives. It’s a pleasure when theinternet actually works like this.

Except that infinite growth is impossible on a finite planet. Also, thereis no such thing as trickle-down anything. The workers of the worldproduce a certain amount of goods and services. Those G&S are thenconsumed. The more that is consumed by anyone the less is consumedby anyone else. Labor can go into making Patek Philippe watches forthe 0.01%, or the same labor could go into making perhaps 50 decenthouses for the working class. It really is more of one and less of theother or more of the other and less of the one. I’m told that the amountof money rich Americans spend on their pets would be enough to feedall the world’s poor quite adequately.

So the fact that capitalism and free markets have caused morepeople to rise out of poverty than any government or charitableprograms means that trickle down doesn’t work?

@Peter from Oz

Your logic has never failed before this Peter, I’m quite surprised.You straw man me and flavor it with a false dichotomy. I’m a bigfan of capitalism and free markets but they are only related totrickle down as a slight of hand. In fact trickle down is a fraudand not really capitalism at all. It is a smokescreen, a lie and apretend excuse for too much unearned wealth being basicallystolen by a class of people who are not capitalists but moneyists.Andrew Carnegie would piss on them. He made steel, they makenothing. Or few of them do, anyway. Musk is a capitalist.

cacamboNovember 21, 2018

Ray AndrewsNovember 21, 2018

Peter from OzNovember 21, 2018

Ray AndrewsNovember 22, 2018

Goldman are a den of thieves.

Well said Ray, and I agree with the Musk example.

@Irrational Actor

Thanks. Capitalism is the world’s most successful method ofgenerating wealth and creating innovation, but it is also a maddog. It is dangerous, utterly irresponsible, ignores externalities,tends to gross concentration of wealth (beyond any notion ofwhat has been ‘earned’) and is generally to be kept IMHO undervery close surveillance — which makes me a conservativeconservative perhaps. Liking capitalism and trusting Goldman,and/or people like Trump, are not the same thing.

This planet’s resources are in principle finite in absolute termsbut there is no limit on how those resources can be configured,with or without humans on board. The question is how do wemanage those resources to our liking to appreciate the marvelsof nature, meet energy needs, etc. The end of lush rainforests orlemurs argument doesn’t seem to have fazed many people thusfar, globally speaking. I recall a figure for pangolin scale importsto China that was measured in tons.

“[capitalism] is dangerous, utterly irresponsible, ignoresexternalities, tends to gross concentration of wealth…”

I think you mean some of the people in the process exhibit thesetendencies. In a gun crime we usually ask “Who is the shooter?”and not “Is the gun maker a leader in the industry?”

@augustine

No, I mean exactly what I said. I suppose one might attempt the

Irrational ActorNovember 22, 2018

Ray AndrewsNovember 22, 2018

augustineNovember 23, 2018

Ray AndrewsNovember 23, 2018

correction that you make, but it seems pedantic to me. Weascribe moral characteristics to social systems and movementsall the time. For example, few would protest if I said that Nazismis a racist ideology, whereas only individual people can actuallybe racist. I might have said that capitalism tends to encouragethose tendencies, but it seems to me that the way I put it is quiteclear.

Moral characteristics can be ascribed that way, yes, but notactions. A belief system or ideology is acted out through theagency of human beings. It cannot not act directly. Capitalism isnot irresponsible or dangerous, and any danger posed byparticular capitalists is mainly dependent on their individualcharacteristics and circumstances.

People often direct their objections toward an abstraction ofgroup membership rather than the people involved. The indirectmeaning may be clear enough but it clouds the distinctionbetween man and his ideas.

“Workers of the world” is a bold stroke! But your argument is abit simplistic. You might be happy with a watchmaker buildingyour house, but I probably wouldn’t. They are not “the samelabor”.And the more that is consumed by, say, me, the more money isearned by the producers of what I consume, and the more theyconsume from other producers, and so ad infinitum. Theworkers being, of course, consumers too.

I grew up in the UK in the fifties and sixties. Everybodyconsumed less then. Everybody consumes more now. And in themeantime, both the proportion and absolute number of theworld’s population living in desperate poverty has decreaseddramatically, despite the huge increase in absolute number ofpeople.

The money rich Americans spend on their pets prevents the petfood producers’ numbering among the world’s poor. Likewisethe money spent on books, music, art, carbon-fibre bicycles,television sets, food processors, or any of the other myriadthings we use beyond the strictly necessary. The amount ofmoney spent on almost any of them would be enough to feed the

augustineNovember 24, 2018

wonderingscotNovember 23, 2018

world’s poor – but where would the money come from?

I’ve always thought that “trickle down”was one of the moreunfortunate expressions in economic argument. It speaks of alack of agency at any point in the process. What in fact improvesthe lot of the poor is their engagement in production andconsumption, work and trade. The capital generated by myriadeconomic activities is an essential enabling factor. It makespossible, for example the programs of small loans in places likeBengal that allow peasant farmers – and their wives – to stepinto the larger economic flow by funding their tiny businesses. Itmakes possible programs to eliminate debilitating diseases, todevelop more resilient staple crops, to provide energy, healthcare, communications and transport.

So no, none of that happens through the “trickling down” ofcash. Business, government, law and civil society all have activeroles to play in promoting growth, managing its downsides, andextending support and protection and incentive to those at riskof being left out. And for all its flaws, and the long way still to go,the economic order of the postwar years has beenextraordinarily successful at doing so across most of the world.

Proven time and time and time and time again: there is noknown limit to produced resources. Whether food, machinery,or services; if there is enough demand it will always be provided.If there is a run on your watches (say 1000 of them) it provideswages equal to 50,000 houses to all involved in making them;from the sales force to the craftsmen, from the janitors to themetal miners, the food vendors and gas station clerks, etcetera.

The point being that the “more that is consumed by anyone”simply makes the supply increase.

A prime example is provided in your last sentence about petfood. In the last century teams centered around NormanBorlaug’s Green Revolution improved crop yields to relievehunger. Now there is grain grown every year (your quote)“enough to feed all the world’s poor quite adequately” twiceover! There is no more world hunger in that sense. There is stillstarvation and malnutrition; a result of policy, war, and crimethat sending dog food money will have no effect on.

hooodathunkitDecember 2, 2018

Although you are right to praise Borlaug, we don’t reallyproduce twice the amount of grain needed to feed the world.Why would we? Nobody gets paid for producing grain that isn’tused, and it spoils pretty quickly.

“But from the point of view of increasing human well-being, Cowenargues, you can’t do better than maximizing growth; indeed you can’teven come close.”

Almost all human beings realize how false this statement is. Billionairescommit suicide from time to time. Kids in Haiti play joyfully much ofthe day.

Economic growth and material well-being are good things to be sure,however the sort of extremely impoverished intellect that believes thisis the most important thing for human beings is truly worthy of pity.

nit: it’s vis-à-is not vis-á-vis. (You have the wrong accent on the ‘a’)

Always enjoy Mr. Hughes’ contributions to Quillette.

I’m assuming the book fleshes this out, but Hughes’ statement that,“We also care about things like justice, human rights, and emotionalfulfillment. But even values like these, which seem to be unrelated towealth, still ride on its coattails,” jolted me.

Is Cowen suggesting that wealth is a self-starting, a priori, commonalityamong mankind? This struck me as a horse and cart problem. Wealthseems to only germinate and grow within a petri dish containing acertain type of values, and it will quickly die when those values areremoved. This is why some cultures seem to be perpetuallyimpoverished. And, mind you, you can pump as much money as youwant into these cultures, but until new values are imported, the wealthwill never perpetuate. It will wither and die, every time.

Larry SiegelDecember 3, 2018

SteveNovember 21, 2018

gNovember 21, 2018

Nate D.November 21, 2018

This struck me as a glaring error. So obvious that I wondered if I wasmissing something. Am I missing something?

NateI don’t think you are missing anything. But this is a bit of achicken and egg argument. Did we become civil because ofmarkets or did our pre-existing civility cause markets to grow?Maybe it’s a bit of both. We were civil enough to start on theroad to capitalism, and once we got onto that road we becamemore civil.

It is a sine qua non. Without wealth, you don’t get any of thatother stuff. You just wind up struggling to find enough food forthe next day.

It is as if “man” or “person” were a box of interchangeable parts, thatwe could send a group of Swedes by teleport to the Australian Bush orwe could take a group of aborignals and teleport them to Moscow and itdidn’t make a difference.

Most peoples have a sense of right and wrong, good and evil, andanyone who has ever traveled will discover that those notions changewhen you cross the river. How one tribe who believes up is good anddown is evil can coexist with another tribe who believes up is bad anddown is good, and further make collective political decisions on thecommonwealth is beyond me.

I suppose a good old fashioned fascist dictatorship with a council ofscientific experts could rule this international order, but when you putit like that–an International Fascist world state–it doesn’t sound soappealing. But it would be wealthy, the trains would run on time, andthe factories wouldn’t pollute.

Peter from OzNovember 21, 2018

Larry SiegelDecember 3, 2018

KDNovember 21, 2018

dmalcolmcarson

“[I]t’s safe to say that most Americans are roundly rejecting Cowen’sthesis at the moment.” Really? To my mind, the party that producesbetter economic growth, all other things being equal, is typicallyrewarded politically, and vice-versa. You didn’t go into the details of theextent to which imagined reductions in future economic growth due toprojected climate change figure into that calculus, but so far, eventhough “climate change is already here”, there’s no evidence that it’shad any appreciable effect on economic growth.

@dmalcolmcarson

That comment was spot on. Many Americans, although I don’tthink “most” most, believe in politics on a level thatapproximates religious faith. That seems to be particularly truewithin academia and amongst intellectuals.

I believe that will change over time. Politics will fail to deliverbeneficial ends to society as it normally does. And people willwalk away from it. Aided I hope by people such as myself whowill point out the failings of politics as frequently as possible.

You want growth, wealth maximisation and human rights?Henry George’s Single Tax gives you all three … for the price of abureaucratic tweak.

Pingback: Coleman Hughes reviews *StubbornAttachments* | AlltopCash.com

Trickle-down economics is unfortunately an abused misnomer. A betterterm should be something like “ever-cheapening technology,” whichleads to economic empowerment at various scales. Color TVs werementioned in the essay, but more banal things like a cheap box of nailsalso contribute our accelerating standard of living.

November 21, 2018

Circuses and Bread (Solutions, not politics )

November 22, 2018

D BruceNovember 21, 2018

LazyNovember 21, 2018

It’s difficult to understand the various time scales which can spandecades or generations to produce an ever-cheapening contribution.The problem is that authoritarians typically want to short-circuit theevolutionary process in favor of results that they can controlimmediately (redistribution of wealth, planned economy, strongregulations).

Thank you for a lucid and insightful review. I found this paragraph ofyours to be the most illuminating:

“Ultimately, absorbing the thesis of Stubborn Attachments would entaila radical loss of purpose for the politically-minded among us. Thesmall, short-term policy fights that energize us most are precisely theones from which, on Cowen’s account, we should abstain entirely. Eventhe smartest among us don’t know what net effect small policies willhave; plus very little well-being turns on such policies to begin with.Growth maximization, on Cowen’s view, becomes a moral black holefrom which no partisan skirmish, no matter how seemingly important,can escape.”

Can human beings be “rational” enough to let go of their small scalemoral battles that give them a reason to wake up every day?

Interestingly enough, Cowen’s argument (as presented by Mr. Hughes)is not essentially different from Locke in the Second Treatise. Thepurpose of government is to preserve life and property. We have a dutyto acquire as much as we can because it will raise the common stock ofmankind. Income inequality will inevitably occur, but, as Locke puts it,a day laborer in England, is better clothed, fed, and has more comfortthan Native Americans across the pond (in the 1600’s). Thus, we haveto accept income inequality because even the poorest are much betteroff than they would be had no income inequality ever come to pass.Locke makes acquisition a moral imperative.

One last thought: was Socrates, who claimed to live in ten-thousand-fold poverty, less happy than we are? We are infinitely morecomfortable, entertained, and live longer lives than ever before, butwealth is still only a means, not an end. Self reported happiness indexesby social scientists tend to able only to measure what is measurable(duh): material things. There are articles on Quillette every week thatindicate that, in addition to the great gains in material prosperity, thereis a lot of anger, loneliness, and disconnectedness that many people intechnologically advanced countries are experiencing.

As Bret Stephens put it in the NY Times today:

Leo StraussNovember 22, 2018

“Part of the reason is that we tend to forget that technology is only asgood as the people who use it. We want it to elevate us; we tend todegrade it. In a better world, Twitter might have been a digitalbillboard of ideas and conversation ennobling the public square. We’veturned it into the open cesspool of the American mind. Facebook wassupposed to serve as a platform for enhanced human interaction, notatool for the lonely to burrow more deeply into their own isolation.”

and: “Tweeting and trolling are easy. Mastering the arts of conversationand measured debate is hard. Texting is easy. Writing a proper letter ishard. Looking stuff up on Google is easy. Knowing what to search for inthe first place is hard. Having a thousand friends on Facebook is easy.Maintaining six or seven close adult friendships over the space of manyyears is hard. Swiping right on Tinder is easy. Finding love — andstaying in it — is hard.”

In any event, thanks again for the thoughtful article. This was MUCHbetter than the article on “deepities.”

@Leo Strauss

I agree, that was the best paragraph in the review. While I claimzero influence on Mr. Hughes viewpoint, it is greatly rewardingto see folks start poking around the idea that maybe, just maybepolitics isn’t all that it’s chalked up to be.

In answer to your question, I don’t think the point that wasbeing made is that people should give up their small scale moralbattles. Why shouldn’t people want to order their world on amore moral basis? Is that all that much in conflict with the ideaof growth maximization? I don’t think so. The point seemed tobe more focused on political behavior.

@Circuses and Bread

In response to your first paragraph, would you be willing to saymore about why it is that politics is not all that it is chalked up tobe? Aristotle, for instance, insists at different points that we arepolitical animals–i.e., we will find our highest fulfillment in

Circuses and Bread (Solutions, not politics )

November 22, 2018

Leo StraussNovember 22, 2018

(smaller) political communities in which we rule and are ruledin turn, and in which we have reasoned discussions about thegood and bad, and hence, just and unjust. That is the height ofpolitical life, but, a height, that Aristotle thinks most politicalcommunities will fail to reach, though, they ought to strive for it.Modern liberal theorists (Hobbes, Locke, etc) tend to focus onus as individuals, insisting less on our political or social natures,and more on our rights as individuals and what we are allowedto demand from our political communities. So, then, why ispolitical life bad? Or what is it lacking? Or if it is deficient, whatdo you propose as an alternative?

To your second paragraph, what you do make of Mr. Hughes’final paragraph, which follows the one that we both foundinteresting: “In a cultural landscape where partisan skirmishesregularly induce something approaching bloodlust on both sidesof the political aisle, it’s safe to say that most Americans areroundly rejecting Cowen’s thesis at the moment. But perhapsthat means the message of Stubborn Attachments is needed nowmore than ever.”

Am I wrong in taking Mr. Hughes to be saying that our smallpartisan battles are precisely what present us from taking part inCowen’s wisdom? I would be genuinely interested to know if Iam not catching the thrust of the argument at the end of thearticle.

@Leo Strauss

Thanks for the reply.

I guess where I should start is by giving a definition of politicsthat I like and use: those actions taken to gain, hold, or influencepower in a government. I realize that others want to definepolitics more widely, but I don’t. My position is prettystraightforward: I’m anti politics. In my view politics is not areasonable way to achieve beneficial ends in society. Politicsfails any reasonable return on investment analysis. I’ll go furtherand say that pretty much any moral endeavors outside of politicswill have a far better end result than what could be achievedwith comparable resources and effort within politics. So for folkswho are looking for a better solution than politics, my answerwould be try anything else, confident in the knowledge that youreally have to work hard to do a worse job than politics. And I do

Circuses and Bread (Solutions, not politics )

November 23, 2018

think people should put in serious efforts to develop a bettersociety, I don’t advocate a sort of limousine libertarianism wherewe tut-tut other folks efforts without offering to pitch in with ourown hard work.

As for whether people are political animals, I don’t see anythingthat indicates that they are inherently political, and indeed ifyou take voting as the litmus test of political activism, either aplurality or majority of those eligible to vote don’t bother. I dobelieve however that people are social animals, and tribal ones.Hence, we will likely be stuck with the various political factions,or as I refer to them, political cults, until such time as there aresome viable alternative “tribes” for folks to attach themselves to.

I believe that Mr. Hughes is correct in noting other alternativestrategies will have a hard time reaching prominence in the USso long as the politics virus is running rampant like a bad fever.But I do think it will run its course eventually. There is already abulwark of abstention, people who refuse to be involved inpolitics. I’m also heartened by a recent note of skepticism I’mseeing here and elsewhere amongst academics where they’retrying to be a little more objective in their treatment of politics.There is a little less of the “we gotta believe” and more healthyskepticism. I find it refreshing. If I were to come up to anacademic and say that my magic potion cures cancer, they wouldrightfully demand evidence, studies that could be duplicated,and would approach my claims with a air of professionalskepticism. So why should politics be any different? So you saypolitics achieves beneficial ends in society? Fine. Where is theevidence? Where are the duplicable studies? Where is the air ofprofessional skepticism? Advocating faith in politics as asolution doesn’t make you an academic, it makes you a shaman.

Thanks again for the very interesting reply.

I really liked this article. No surprise there, huh?

The author of the book offers a solution, unlike politics which offers uslittle but misery, evil, and despair. The solution is not what I think isthe absolute best, but it’s good enough. That’s the beauty of offeringsolutions; it’s not hard at all to come up with a better plan than whatpolitics has to offer us. Pick one. It’ll be hard to do any worse.

Circuses and Bread (Solutions, not politics )November 22, 2018

I disagree that maximizing the sustainable rate of economic growth isthe goal we can all agree on, or even should agree on. Why? Because itfavors maximum saving and investment over consumption, whichamounts to sacrificing the present for the sake of the future. Indeed, iffavors maximum income inequality because the wealthy can afford tosave a bigger percentage of their income without hardship.

A better goal, it seems to me, would be maximizing the general welfareof this and future generations, not valuing the welfare of one over theother. For any hard corp econ buffs out there, here is one element of apolicy aimed at achieving that goal, at least in theory:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WIdVnQEWdYgYYly9iKkesWCVhfINvbtwuVq2GMOxMbw/edit?usp=sharing

Growth like we have now can’t continue forever. The per capita energyusage is about 6 MWh / year and our population has been doublingevery 53 years. Assuming that continues, in 10000 years we’ll be using4e69 Wh / year.

If we figure out 100% conversion of mass to energy, that’s 1e56 kg offuel, which is a lot more than all the matter in the visible universe.

@Aux

Yet the infinite growth people continue to peddle their wares. Achild can see that this is folly yet many of our leaders cannot seeit.

“It’s hard to find an error in Cowen’s argumentative chain.” Really?Both Cowen and Hughes appear to live on a world that is flat andextends infinitely in all directions. Only in such a world could thedelusion of continuous economic growth be real. Unfortunately, it ispretty well certain that the planet is a sphere with a finite surface area

Luke LeaNovember 22, 2018

AuxNovember 22, 2018

Ray AndrewsNovember 22, 2018

Michael LardelliNovember 22, 2018

to grow food on, finite atmosphere to dump CO2 into, and finite energyand mineral resources to dig up. Also, if you look at the current trendsin fossil fuel extraction and atmospheric CO2 increases, it looks likelythat energy production is peaking and so we are highly likely past thepeak of net energy. Get ready for decades of “negative economicgrowth”. That’s the only “sustainable” economic growth you’ll beseeing.

Wealth and value, come to a workable parallel. Then build a globalinference engine that is capable of steering our actions to the path ofour intent. And,some encarnation of these ideas may be a part of of its governingphilosophy.

maximizing the sustainable rate of economic growth.

I have not read the book so I’m uncertain of sustainable in this context.I will assume its common meaning that whatever resource being usedthere is a sufficient quantity left for the foreseeable future gatheredusing the established technology of the day that allows the economy tochug along.

Now, I’ll argue it’s our unsustainable demand that unlocks our amazingpotential and demonstrated talents. It’s because we behave in ways thatin hindsight appear to be, or are proved to be, recklessly unsustainablethat drives our creative genius and innovation. Thank the heavens wedance on the precipice.

I’m sure many know that whale oil was once a very important resource.It made our spermaceti candles, so bright they were it created the newmeasure of the total quantity of visible light from a source called thelumen. It lit our lamps and also lubricated our early machines. We hadlittle to no knowledge of how many whales swam the oceans, and it wasmainly due to whalers having to sail further and further from home,often at sea for years at a time, that caused some the realise theresource was rapidly decreasing. Burning a single spermaceti candle forfive hours a night all year when George Washington was living cost wellover $1,000 in today’s money. Whale oil went from thirty cents ($8.78today) a half gallon in 1831 to $1.92 ($57.80 today) a half gallon in1854. Note the prices. Our energy needs today are met far more safelyat a much lower cost.

Kenneth HuntNovember 22, 2018

ga gambaNovember 23, 2018

It should be apparent to you that not many people could afford theequivalent of either $8.78 or $57.80 per half gallon of lighting oilthen… or now for that matter. But those who demanded well lit but notsmokey rooms were prepared to pay, even $1000 per annum for a solecandle. Poor Martha, sitting in the dark. I hope George had another$1000 for her candle.

Meanwhile, petroleum, then called rock oil, was being used for folkremedies. I reckon some of them were “sacred” too. Quacks also passedit off as a cure for numerous ailments such as tuberculosis. Alternativesto expensive whale oil were sought, but many proved to be moreexpensive or inferior alternatives. The West’s first energy crisis loomedas linseed oil, lard, coal oil, turpentine, camphor, and others weregreasy or dirty, smokey or smelly. How many of you have heard ofcamphine?

With the invention of petroleum-based kerosene a viable andeconomical alternative was found. The industry’s ability to quicklycommoditise and refine the production process resulted in the price ofpetroleum to drop from thirty cents ($4.66) per half gallon in 1865 toan astonishingly low 3.5 cents ($1.05) per half gallon in 1895. Abyproduct was gasoline, which later was used to fuel the combustionengine. Petroleum-based products from plastics to fertiliser wereinvented and entered the market. You know the rest of the story.

The term “Peak Oil” was born in January 2001 when geologist ColinCampbell formed the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas.Throughout the noughties peak oil was used thousands of times a dayby journalists, politicians, industry leaders, economists, scientists, andcountless others around the globe. The experts. Their conventionalwisdom had everyone convinced it was game over. Lights out,developed and developing world.

In 2016 a Google search for the term “too much oil” outranked searchesfor “peak oil,” marking a notable reverse in trends when searches for“peak oil” outnumbered “too much oil” by nearly 100 to 1 in 2005–2006. Peak oil passed.

I’m of the opinion that there’s a correlation between the bigging up ofpeak oil and the Great Recession. Oil at $100 per barrel disrupted theeconomy by adding to inflationary pressures, so the Fed kept pushingrates higher that increased the cost of borrowing by both businessesand home buyers. Increasing unemployment (or the fear of it) led to acrash of consumer and business confidence. Potential home buyersexited the market and those who had taken out subprime loans withvariable interest rates to buy their homes were up the creek without apaddle. By mid-2008 oil was at $140 per barrel.

Economist James Hamilton, of the University of California, San Diego,has identified numerous periods since the late 19th century in Americawhen an abrupt rise in the price of oil or petrol coincided withrecession. Many of these were caused not by an interrupted supply, butby demand growth colliding with unresponsive supply. Often theunresponsive supply was caused by previous meddling by humans hellbent on keeping Mother Earth… virginal. The leave no footprintfetishisers not only want to stop all future energy development, even ofclean and green hydroelectric dams, they want to tear down the onesalready built and ably reducing our carbon emissions.

Human ingenuity figured out innovative ways to extract previouslyunextractable oil. New fields were discovered. Agriculture wasimproved in numerous ways. Even a resource that’s much far morefinite such as gold has been overcome. A tangible gold substitute wasn’tinvented; fiat currency was created.

By 2012 the experts were singing a different song. EnvironmentalistGeorge Monbiot of the Guardian: “The facts have changed, now wemust change too. For the past 10 years an unlikely coalition ofgeologists, oil drillers, bankers, military strategists andenvironmentalists has been warning that peak oil – the decline ofglobal supplies – is just around the corner. . . . Governments,businesses and voters who seemed impervious to the moral case forcutting the use of fossil fuels might, we hoped, respond to the economiccase. . . . Peak oil hasn’t happened, and it’s unlikely to happen for a verylong time.”

How convenient for them that their “facts” are malleable whilst those oftheir opponents are only lies. Still, it needs to be asked: Since the fact ofpeak oil was wrong, what else do they get wrong?

Again and again and again we find doomsdayers’ assertions don’t panout. Two hundred years ago it was Malthus forecasting not enough foodfor the then world population of less than one billion. Mass starvation,everybody. Nope. The Luddites claimed machines were going to destroyhumanity. Smash the looms! That failed. That one’s so popular it’scurrently being reprised by the neo-Luddites demanding free money inthe form of a universal basic income. When California was a state of 15million people it built its water projects, ones that allowed SiliconValley, Hollywood, Stanford, Cal Tech, and the agricultural CentralValley to not merely survive but to thrive. A contemporary California of40 million paradoxically swears it will build no more dams to fulfill itspromise to save the Earth.

As the world scrambles to replace fossil fuels with clean energy, theenvironmental impact of finding all the lithium required for thosebatteries is becoming a major issue in its own right. It takesapproximately 500,000 gallons of water per tonne of lithium extracted

at arid salt flats. Golly! And that’s not the least of it: look up cobalt.BTW, how’s lithium recycling handled?

Make no mistake, I’m not opposed to solar energy and electric vehicles.But as we shift from carbon-based energy to one deemed moreenvironmentally beneficial it’s going to reveal many consequences thatspur accusations over the lack of sustainability. Many of these issueswill be overcome, but not without incurring a lot pain for some andperhaps a few catastrophes along the way. The worst thing we can do isto stymie innovation by regulatory gridlock or social bullying. Theappeal of over emotive environmentalism and the celebration of themyth of man as Earth’s custodian is a fool’s errand. The flat earthersare those who refuse to see its man’s ceaseless tinkering to reachbeyond the declared limits that is his excellence.

The term “peak oil” was first used, AFAIK, by M. King Hubbertin a 1956 paper on nuclear power. He forecast that peak U.S. oilproduction would occur around 1970 and peak global oilproduction around 2000. The term may have been used evenearlier. Colin Campbell used it too, but not until the forecast waslooking like it was way off.

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All I’ll say is that I’d rather live in Costa Rica (GDP per capita $17,044)than in Saudi Arabia ($53,845). Especially if I had no assurance that Iwould be among the male Saudi elite before making the choice.

There’s so much wrong here… GDP ignores non-market production(esp. ecosystem services and household work), correlates poorly withhuman happiness once basic subsistence needs are met, and it’s athroughput measure rather than a balance sheet measure – which iswhy GDP typically goes up after natural disasters. Economic activityincreases, driving up GDP, without taking into account the destructionof wealth that occurred when the disaster hits.

The limitations of GDP are all very well hashed out, and indeed werewell known and acknowledged by the inventors of the measure, whowould be horrified to find it is used today as a proxy for national

Larry SiegelDecember 3, 2018

Charles BergerNovember 24, 2018

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progress.

So would anybody in their right mind, although I’d chooseMexico ($20,000) over Costa Rica because Mexico is a largerand more diverse country with a richer culture. Cowen said thatgrowth should be subjected to a constraint of not violatinghuman rights. Saudis have no rights, making their average$53,845 income worthless unless you are “among the maleSaudi elite,” and even then it doesn’t sound like much fun,women being under those veils and all.

This can’t be as simplistic as it sounds. Growth as the focus ofeverything—isn’t that just Republicanism at its most basic level?

Larry SiegelDecember 3, 2018

BuzzNovember 25, 2018

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