Cowen is a creative thinker who teaches economics at George Mason University. The scope of his new book is indicated by its subtitle: “A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals.” As for the title (not to mention the overall thesis), it is a subtle extraction from a sentence on the first page: “We need to develop a tougher, more dedicated, and indeed a more stubborn attachment to prosperity and freedom.”

Distant future / So what of that tradeoff of one life for 39 billion? Assume, as benefit–cost analysis does, that future lives must be discounted just like other benefits (e.g., money) are. Assume a discount rate of 5%. How many lives in 500 years are equivalent to one life today? Multiply 1 (one life) by 1.05 (1 plus the discount rate) raised to the 500th power (500 years). The result is 39,323,261,827 (lives). The magic of compound interest is always amazing. Cowen notes that, under this line of thinking, one life today “could even be worth the entire subsequent survival of the human race, if we use a long enough time horizon for the comparison.” It is difficult not to agree that this result hurts “common-sense morality,” which would seem to counsel that one life does not outweigh 39 billion or more.

It may thus be argued that, as far as human lives are concerned, the discount rate for the far future should be zero or at least much lower than what we usually assume. This means that if we have to choose between different paths of economic growth—what individuals will be able to consume in goods or leisure as time passes—the path that is consistently higher should always be chosen. It is moral to choose to have more today only if this choice also implies that individuals in the future will obtain more than they would have received otherwise. We must have a “deep concern for the distant future.”

The practical implications are massive. One implication is that environmental problems, such as climate change, gain a heightened importance if they will retard economic growth long-term. More generally, we should be concerned with the long-term future of our civilization.

Need for economic growth / Like interest, economic growth is compounded—growth applies to the result of previous growth—and produces the magical inverse of discounting. Indeed, the same math underlies both processes. At a growth rate of 1%, income doubles every 69 years. At a growth rate of 10%, which we saw in China during its liberalizing spree, income doubles every seven years. What’s great about the growth of income—or gross domestic product, which is the same thing—is that “wealthier societies offer greater opportunities and freedoms to pursue one’s preferred concepts of happiness.” Life expectancy, diet quality, and leisure time grow. Since 1870, in developed countries a typical employee’s working time outside the home has decreased by nearly half. No wonder that, as recent research confirms, economic growth makes people happier.

Money may not buy happiness, but it certainly makes life easier. Cowen would probably add that, in the long term—if, for example, incomes have been multiplied by 39 billion after five centuries—it does buy happiness ceteris paribus.

Sustainability / It is true that standard income (GDP) figures don’t provide a complete picture of how production contributes to happiness. To GDP, Cowen prefers a theoretical concept that he calls “Wealth Plus,” a measure of well-being that incorporates leisure time, domestic production (goods and services produced in the home), and “sustainability,” along with standard economic production. (Instead of “Wealth Plus,” by the way, he should have written “Income Plus” because wealth is a stock while income and GDP are flows.)

If we must choose between different paths of economic growth, the path that is consistently higher should always be chosen because of its benefits.

Cohen rescues the idea of “sustainability,” which has become a mantra in environmental discourse. His notion of sustainability includes the environmentalists’ “environmental amenities” and “the prerequisites for a durable civilization.” Over and above individual preferences, which can be “irrational or misguided,” he welcomes the “plural values” that may be required for the good society.

“Sustainability” is largely left undefined and raises many problems that Cowen brushes aside a bit too easily. Keep in mind, however, that Stubborn Attachments is a short book obviously written for a general public of intelligent laymen.

Problem of aggregation / Sustainable economic growth, Cowen argues, helps resolve problems stemming from clashing preferences among different individuals, especially in the long run where growth produces “an overwhelming preponderance of benefits.” “The wealthier society will, over time, make just about everyone much better off.” All problems are flattened by the benefits of long-term growth. Just let “happiness talk”! Turning Keynes on his head, Cowen basically says that in the long run we are all good.

Do the long-run benefits of economic growth sidestep the aggregation problem, as Cowen claims? This problem, best represented by Kenneth Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, is the mathematically demonstrated proposition that, under realistic conditions, it is impossible to derive from the preferences of all individuals a consistent and non-imposed “social welfare function” telling us what “society” wants. This amounts to saying that “society” cannot want anything that would be consistent and equally representative of all individuals’ preferences. Cowen suggests that all individuals will agree on what Wealth Plus means. This agreement is precisely what appears to be impossible.

For example, how do “we” choose a path of economic growth or reach any other social choice? Who is this “we”? For the reader conscious of this problem, the constant use of “we” in Stubborn Attachments becomes annoying.

A related problem that pops up is the scientific impossibility of comparing the utility or happiness of different individuals. We can only indirectly measure ordinal utility, that is, the degree of happiness of a given individual. We cannot measure cardinal utility and add it over many individuals, even indirectly. Cowen recognizes this problem but dismisses it. It does seem to make sense to say that most individuals are better off in a wealthy society than in a poor society, but it may be because the “we” has been more effectively silenced—the state has put its nose in fewer activities—in the former than in the latter. The reader—or at least this one—would have liked to hear more from Cowen on that.

Principle of economic growth / As we’ll see shortly, epistemic humility is in order. If we suspend difficult questions about aggregation and interpersonal utility comparisons, and focus instead on social coordination and common-sense morality, we get Cowen’s “Principle of Growth”: “maximize the rate of (sustainable) economic growth” and, when in doubt, choose growth. This seems to make sense.

How to reconcile this ode to economic growth with the “great stagnation” to which Cowen’s name is now associated? (See his book The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, 2011.) He anticipated that question and answers that “progress is unevenly bunched,” implying that the great stagnation is only temporary.

Consequences / Economists are natural consequentialists: they are interested in the social consequences of individual actions and public policies. But we face what philosophers call the “epistemic problem.” As Cowen phrases it, “We hardly know anything about long-run consequences.” How can we seriously evaluate individual actions and public policies?

It is a troubling problem. If Hitler’s parents had conceived him in a slightly different position in bed or at a different time, his genetic make-up would have been different. He would not have been Hitler. He could have become the grandfather of a second Mother Teresa or, better for economic growth, the father of another Jeff Bezos. Many things would be different today and in 500 years’ time. Changed genetic identities change the genetic identities that follow. This problem is especially acute if the long-term future is discounted at a lower rate because good and bad consequences loom larger in our eyes.

Cowen argues that the epistemic problem should not paralyze us. It should instead bring us to focus on big actions more likely to push in the right direction. “We should not discriminate on the basis of relatively small benefits and losses,” he writes, because “anything we try is floating in a sea of long-term radical uncertainty.” We should “pursue values that are high in absolute importance” and are consistent with doing the right thing given broad rules of moral action. This may not be a totally satisfactory answer, but Cowen is after some common-sense morality.

Cowen sees the case for (nearly) inviolable human rights as bolstered by the “froth of massive uncertainty” that covers long-term consequences.

Individual rights / Not everything must be sacrificed to economic growth, as “sustainable” as it might be. Cowen argues that the principle of economic growth must be constrained by “nearly absolute” or “semi-absolute” “human rights.” (Instead of “individual rights,” he uses the more faddish expression “human rights.” The latter term can be seen as the degenerated and politically correct version of the 18th-century “rights of man” or Adam Smith’s “natural liberty.” The degenerated version is quite certainly not what Cohen means by “human rights,” so I don’t contradict him by using “individual rights” instead.)

The rights Cowen has in mind follow Robert Nozick’s model in that they define strict constraints on what individuals (alone or in gangs) may do to others. Cowen is even less explicit than Nozick, and not necessarily as radical-libertarian, about what these rights are or should be. The “nearly” or “semi” qualification to the absolutist character of rights is intended to cover minor practical exceptions where exercising a right would generate very large costs. But it does not affect the Principle of Growth, which applies to a phenomenon for which, nearly by definition, the benefits are massively larger than the costs.

It follows that “the dual ideals of prosperity and liberty will be central to ethics” (Cowen’s emphasis). The motto is “Growth and Human Rights.” In a kindred political regime, one can do what one wants, provided only that it is compatible with what others want.

Cowen sees the case for (nearly) inviolable human rights as bolstered by the “froth of massive uncertainty” that covers long-term consequences. “Rights rarely conflict with consequences in the simple ways set out by philosophical thought experiments,” he writes. “We can think of radical uncertainty as giving us the freedom to act morally, without the fear that we are engaging in consequentialist destruction.”

The case of the baby’s life versus $5 billion illustrates these points. Such an alternative is meaningless because there is no way to know what would be the long-term consequences of killing the baby or, for that matter, of losing $5 billion of GDP. You might be killing baby Hitler, but then you might be killing baby Mozart—there’s no way to know. On the other hand, it is a bad rule to kill babies if one wants to preserve civilization and its institutions, which are the conditions for future economic growth. If killing babies doesn’t violate individual rights, nothing will. So, even in a consequentialist perspective, don’t kill the baby.

Stubborn attachment needed / What is “the appropriate scope of redistribution,” to borrow the title of one chapter? “Our strongest obligations,” Cowen writes, “are to contribute to sustainable economic growth and to support the general spread of civilization.” Some redistribution is warranted only to the extent that it contributes to these general objectives. The book contains an interesting discussion on why anybody living in a rich country is not morally compelled to give all his income to much poorer people in poor countries. One reason, of course, is that self-sacrifice by everyone would be self-defeating because there would be nothing to share; productive people in developed nations would soon lose their motivation to produce. Cowen continues to sail close to common-sense morality—or at least to what people in the classical liberal tradition consider such.

The book does not clearly answer the question of whether or when redistribution by the public sector is preferable to private charity. But the author obviously thinks that private charity (and perhaps some public redistribution) is good if it contributes to long-term growth. A short postscript explains how Cowen feels a stubborn attachment (the second and only other time the expression appears in the book) to a poor entrepreneur he met in Ethiopia, to whom he is donating the book’s profits.

One of the many originalities of Stubborn Attachments is how it invokes Ayn Rand, with some caveats. Rand almost certainly would not have given money to an Ethiopian quidam. But, as Cowen notes, she “is the one writer who best understood the importance of production to moral theory.” She also emphasized “the creative individual mind” and the importance of ideas, which are “the wellspring of economic growth.”

The author of Stubborn Attachments concludes that we should think big and entertain a utopian vision for the long-term future. Sustainable economic growth constrained by “semi-absolute human rights” should be our “working standard.” These ideas provide an imperfect ethics, but it hugs common-sense morality. In many ways, Cowen shows a path to an open and enlightened libertarianism.