May 22, 2023
Author: Tyler Cowen
Completed Read: May 20-21st, 2023
These is pretty much a stream of consciousness with very, very minimal editing. Beware.
Although, I haven’t read that many, Stubborn Attachments is definitely one of the better econ books that I’ve read. Devoid of mathematical notation, Tyler introduces classic economic concepts and thought experiments in a very non-hand holdy way. There’s a high density of concepts, but it consistently ties into the narrative of why investing in sustainable economic growth is important: our Crusonia plant and subscribes to the Principle of Growth. I generally think his philosophy is good: maximizing good, with the framework of good being plural to include both the resource-maximizing view and one filled with the more intangible forms of value (i.e. platonic beauty). Virtue is important to hold, and the necessity of upholding human rights constricts all of the well-being we intend to promote.
The Crusonia Plant is a key symbol throughout the book that he uses to represent “a gift that keeps on giving”, seeming to magically override the finite nature of resources - an everlasting positive-sum world. Like Milton Friedman would suggest, ongoing yield without end just seems unlikely or at the risk of other things going wrong. Cowen differs? He references how even if the concept of “free lunch” dissolved into impossibility, our existence implies that we got lucky at least once - at the start of humanity, when the Big Bang marked the start of a world worth trillions, with billions of people and much much data.
I’m still skeptical of this model that implies something like linear growth and in turn, a linear increase in prosperity. I lightly subscribe to the punctuated equilibrium model, in which, although the trend remains positive, it’s hallmarked by points of depression, chaos and general downturn. But, while still subscribing to economic growth being good - perhaps I’m sympathetic to the effective accelerationists, who suggest speed running through hard times to get to the other side.
Rather than Crusonia demonstrating unrealistic abundance, it more so encapsulates “sustainability”, in a way that perhaps isn’t only possible in some sort of fantasy.
“Economist Frank Knight wrote of the Crusonia plant, a mythical, automatically growing crop which generates more output each period. If you lay the seeds, the plant just grows; you don’t have to water it or tend to it. Imagine, for example, an apple tree that yields several apples each year.” “So, in a social setting, what might count as analogous to a Crusonia plant? Look for social processes which are ongoing, self-sustaining, and which create rising value over time. The natural candidate for such a process is economic growth, or some modified version of that concept. ”
—— Tyler Cowen is an unsuspecting longtermist. Ultimately, he holds a nuanced “zero-discount” thinking about future people. He states that “we generally don’t—and shouldn’t—apply a standard rate of positive discount to make the later period of time less valuable. Again, a positive rate of discount cannot be applied uncritically, especially over long periods of time.” Beyond sheer utility associated with monetary value, appreciating “platonic values”, inherent beauty, the objectively good, is another point for caring about the future. We care about these things due to their essence, and thus their existence isn’t at the mercy of who gets to appreciate them. Future people and their ability to experience platonic beauty is just as important as our own. I’ve vowed to spend some time getting into aesthetics, romantic philosophy and expressionism - and it was very cute to see convergences in an unsuspecting place (a la this book).
The premise coincides with longtermism in that future people matter, with a different argument that promoting sustainable long-term economic growth is the way to ensure their own well-being (not at the mercy of our own and potentially even to our present benefit). An economic-philosophy book, I appreciate the constant groundings to the basis of uncertainty in all argument. Agnosticism implies that when making decisions, take into account the Principle of Roughness: deeming relatively similar options as roughly of equal moral weight. Understand that no matter what is ultimately chosen, there’s no way to know whether you have chosen poorly or wisely. As such, the suggestion isn’t to wallow in analysis paralysis but to think big and act in accordance with large scale values and their related problems versus engaging with minutia.
—I noted at some point that he was very “assertive”, notably in the preface. He wasn’t going to hedge and would explain concepts in so far as they served his arguments, but wouldn’t debate the nature of the premises or arguments themselves (engage in meta ethical discussion). Aggregation problems are at the root of many economic moral dilemmas, and he flat out says that the quandaries can be resolved, and he made points that did just that (for the most part). It boiled down to his views of objective rightness and the fact that not everyone can be happy all the time (people’s articulations of their own happiness varies so much too!) and we should make decisions that generally make people better off - incorporating our plural values, positive rights and liberties.
“To think through these questions with a transparent example, let’s consider one of Derek Parfit’s “Mistakes in Moral Mathematics.” It goes something like this: if a firing squad of six shooters kills an innocent person, all of them firing accurately at his heart, can we say that any one of the shooters is a murderer? After all, any single shooter's “marginal product” was zero. Should we punish or invest resources into preventing the actions of any one of the shooters? Does it matter whose bullet arrived first? Should we refuse to prosecute group murders of this kind?”
“Virtually everyone would agree that participating in such a shooting is wrong. Even though a single additional bullet doesn’t change the tragic outcome, if we view that bullet as part of a generalizable rule about how to treat other people—“don’t shoot the innocent”—the sum total of rule-following behavior would save the life of the victim.”
“In this case both human rights deontology and a rule consequentialist approach point us in the right direction, namely not firing the additional bullet. Furthermore, the “marginal product alone matters” approach to questions of this nature would induce dire practical consequences. For instance, more and more murders would be carried out by large groups so that no single individual would be liable. Governments obviously don’t want to allow this moral or legal loophole, and that is one reason why a rules-based approach to morality is, to some degree, inevitable.” —— On a stylistic note, as a notorious “floor mat”, the book gave me a framework of writing in a way that empowers your reader to agree, disagree or find themselves (semi)confidently somewhere in the middle. Educate your reader on what is necessary and allow them to come to their own conclusions. Productive, but maybe not the “epistemically sound”, but reading this made me wonder why you should give a damn to begin with.
“Non-preference values seem to be the least eligible candidates for strong temporal discounting, and so a concern for non-preference values will strengthen the weight we should place on the future relative to the present.”
He introduces unique terms rooted in core economic concepts that better capture the measures for a blossoming society as he sees it. As an economic-philosophy book, he lays out the premise that the world (and the future world) can be very good. This goodness is important, and sustainable economic growth is the best way to achieve this goodness in the foreseeable future. The premises are laid out well and, at the start, make it easy to decide whether it’s worth continuing the book. Finding the premise sound, I read all 176 pages to solidify my general adherence to the ideas he presented. — Cultural pessimism doesn’t need to tarnish our ability to invest in the future: as it implies a conviction that we are tumbling into civilizational decline. This isn’t the case; we have the power to allow future generations to exist in a world that is even more prosperous than the present. Self-sacrificiality, on it’s own, isn’t necessary and can be self-defeating. In a world where everyone “defects” in the name of cooperation, we lose the fabric of our holism. When looking at political minutia, we should veer towards agnosticism, the principle of roughness, which suggests that the aggregation problems that exist in these examples of decision theory are hard to overcome. Absolute correctness is near impossible to reach except for a small minority. We should be cognizant of these kinds of radical uncertainty and hold our decisions with low confidence.
Our innate programming in theory is built for (long-term) survival is still in competition with our bodies that act for short-term reward. In understanding this, looking to the benefits of overriding self-defeating habits: our ability to stay on diets even if we crave fattening fast-food, withstand the desire to drink salty ocean water during thirst and engage in other harmful hedonistic desires when given the knowledge to inform our good decisions - we can be more optimistic that overriding the hardwiring that pushes us to prioritize merely the present, is in fact, beneficial.
Humanity’s plural values, as meaningful things, should be preserved and extended. Sustainable economic growth is the mode in which this can happen, and as such, we should work towards it. There’s an adherence to “human rights” being an intrinsically valuable thing. Within this maximization framework, the intangible should still be weaved into policy to keep the fabric of civilization as we know it intact. The ambiguous nature of personhood means reducing any given individual to a utile and making large-scale decisions, as such, is not only unfounded but morally wrong. That is a strong take, but it was nice to have the concept of nuance articulated so intellectually. Giving me the vocabulary to refute Benthamite utilitarianism as it’s needed. Let us look back to this (gem, RIP)
In favour of pluralism. This past winter I attended the Plurality Research Network Conference (long name lol), where we learned about different mechanisms for collaborative governance that included talks on leveraging crypto, many quadratic voting systems to redesigned boards for scientific journal reviews. I’m hoping to write a postmortem at some point, but generally, I think I’m getting a better understanding of the “Why?” behind all of this in the first place. Generally, I support “plurality”, but perhaps just on the meta-level of incorporating numerous values. Ironically incorporating plurality at the voting level seems to incur more collective action problems than the counterfactual - though I wish to be proven wrong.