Results for “stubborn attachments”
79 found

The most controversial claim in *Stubborn Attachments*

by  Tyler Cowen

Except that the claim generates virtually no controversy.  I argue that moral comparisons are possible only within the “cone” of an episode of (potentially) sustainable economic growth.  So you can compare a growth-maximizing policy to a non-growth-maximizing policy, and judge the former to be superior, at least subject to human rights constraints.  It is within that realm that (some) aggregation problems can be solved.

You cannot, within my framework, ask how many chicken lives are equal to a cow life, or for that matter to a human life.

You cannot resolve the Repugnant Conclusion, or many issues of scale.  Here is some further relevant discussion.

You cannot ask if the presence of highly populated alien civilizations would raise or lower the import of existential risk for humans.  (For external reasons I think it lowers the import of existential risk.)

You cannot readily answer any question about the potential moral import of living in a simulation.

I am not saying those questions must be discarded, only that they are much harder to answer.  And perhaps we won’t make much progress on them at all.  At some point “simple pragmatism” will have to step in.  “Are we living in a simulation?  eh!  What’s for breakfast!?”

This is one way in which my framework differs from that held by many Effective Altruists.

Samuel Brenner reads *Stubborn Attachments*

by  Tyler Cowen in

An excellent review and interpretation, here is one summary part:

…the fundamental idea of the book is not “economic growth is good” but rather “here’s how to reason under extreme uncertainty”, and that once you adopt Tyler’s view about how to reason under extreme uncertainty, both principles (growth and rights) fall out as the only two important considerations…

My preferred view of the book’s overall argumentative structure is more like the following:

G. Good things are better than bad things
H. We need to act in order to achieve good things
I. But there’s a huge froth of uncertainty, and our actions might be counterproductive
J. So we should have faith
K. And also we should only pursue the actions with really high expected value and which are likeliest to rise above the froth of uncertainty
L. The actions that pass this test best are growth and rights, so we have to pursue both

I would stress this is a complement to other interpretations rather than a substitute for them, in any case an excellent short essay.  And here is “About Samuel Brenner.“

The Spanish-language Kindle edition of *Stubborn Attachments*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The various subtleties of the title “Stubborn Attachments” do not translate well into Spanish, so here is “El imperativo moral del crecimiento económico: Una visión de una sociedad libre y próspera de individuos responsable.”

You can order it here, and I expect a print edition will be coming in due time.

I thank all of those involved for helping this project come to fruition, and thank Gonzalo Schwarz for doing the translation.

Transcript of my Stanford talk on *Stubborn Attachments*

by  Tyler Cowen in

You will find it here, along with the video link, previously covered on MR without the transcript.  Recommended, this was an almost entirely fresh talk.  Here is my beginning paragraph:

I’d like to do something a little different in this talk from what is usually done. Typically, someone comes and they present their book. My book here, Stubborn Attachments. But rather than present it or argue for it, I’d like to try to give you all of the arguments against my thesis. I want to invite you into my internal monologue of how I think about what are the problems. It’s an unusual talk. I mean, I think talks are quite inefficient. Most of them I go to, I’m bored. Why are you all here? I wonder. I feel we should experiment more with how talks are presented, and this is one of my attempts to do that.

In the Q&A I also discuss how to eat well in the Bay Area.

My *Stubborn Attachments* essay for Cato Unbound

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here it is, here is one excerpt:

The classics of political philosophy deal with wealth and economic growth awkwardly at best. John Rawls, in his Theory of Justice and elsewhere, was suspicious of economic growth outright. Rawls feared that the savings rate of the first generation would lead to deprivation, and a diminishment of the well-being of the worst-off group (that first generation), and so he toyed with John Stuart Mill’s idea of the stationary state. Robert Nozick evinced a good understanding of markets in his Anarchy, State, and Utopia, but still he focused on individual libertarian rights as an underpinning for a free society. Like Nozick, I believe in individual rights, but I don’t think they settle most questions, and I don’t find modest levels of taxation under democratic conditions to be morally problematic.

In part I wrote Stubborn Attachments to respond to Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, first published in 1984. In that wonderful book, Parfit wondered whether consequentialist reasoning could in fact produce coherent recommendations, for either individuals or societies. Yet there is no talk in Reasons and Persons of economic growth, or how a much better future might help resolve aggregation problems. Nonetheless Parfit did produce an important appendix on why the social discount rate should be zero, and you can think of Stubborn Attachments as trying to think through the broader implications of that argument.

And:

You should always ask what are the weakest points of any book, including this one. For me, it is the fear that progress has a mean-reverting character and that improvements end up as temporary rather than sustainable. In that case, the idea of enduring benefits would be an illusion, and even if pursuing such benefits were a good recommendation we might end up with the empty set in terms of policy recommendations. Historical pessimism would trump my recommendations, and we would be devoting our energies to the proverbial rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Furthermore, Stubborn Attachments gives little guidance on how to offset the claims of humans versus the claims of nature. The benefits of economic growth are specified for human beings, and it is less clear that such economic growth is good for the animal kingdom as a whole, given the encroachments of humans and also the tortures of factory farming. If it is any consolation, however, I don’t think other philosophers have solved that problem either. Utilitarians, for instance, offer no plausible guidelines for weighting the well-being of non-human animals versus the well-being of humans, nor have they shown how it might be feasible to follow such guidelines.

Philosophical critiques will be forthcoming, so stay tuned!

Michael’s short review of *Stubborn Attachments*

by  Tyler Cowen in

From my email, he said this was the entirety of his review:

A reflection on how to best worship humans or some form of enduring human community as a god or gods. From a religious perspective, such an approach may at first seem illusory, but an attentive reader will be left wondering how close that illusion is to the actual truth.

A Progressive review of *Stubborn Attachments*

by  Tyler Cowen in

By Joshua Kim, here are a few excerpts:

An oddity of Stubborn Attachments is that Cowen is reluctant to apply his pro-economic growth philosophy to real-world political choices.

[TC: that is on purpose of course]

Stubborn Attachments would have been more persuasive if Cowen was more willing to explore the implications of his philosophy on the political and policy choices before us. The question is, are progressive values are at odds with the belief that long-term economic growth is the engine of progress?

And:

Nor does Cowen answer the question of at what point a wealthy society should be able to provide a measure of economic security to all of its citizens? Does the guarantee that work should come with a living wage and that everyone deserves access to health care and education incompatible with a long-term focus on economic progress?

As is always the case with a Cowen book, his writing will make you think. Stubborn Attachments is too abstract for my tastes.  But I’m happy to have spent 3.5 hours arguing with Cowen.

If he reads MR, he can always spend more.

*The Economist* covers *Stubborn Attachments*

by  Tyler Cowen in

Philosophers are accustomed to discussions about how to value lives distant from our own in time and place; economists are not. But in a new book, “Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals”, Tyler Cowen of George Mason University argues that the moral status of human lives ought not to be traded off over time in the same way that a bond portfolio might be. He puts the results of discounting in evocative terms: given a 5% rate of discount, one human life today is worth 132 a century hence. Is it really ethically acceptable to save one life now at the expense of so many in the future? The lives of humans born decades from now might be difficult for us to imagine, or to treat as of equal worth to our own. But our own lives were once similarly distant from those taking their turn on Earth; the future, when it comes, will feel as real to those living in it as the present does to us. Economists should treat threats to future lives as just as morally reprehensible as present threats to our own.

Here is the full article, on Twitter attributed to Ryan Avent.

Coleman Hughes reviews *Stubborn Attachments*

by  Tyler Cowen in

Excellent review, in Quillette, here is part of the closing sequence:

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

In a cultural landscape where partisan skirmishes regularly induce something approaching bloodlust on both sides of the political aisle, it’s safe to say that most Americans are roundly rejecting Cowen’s thesis at the moment. But perhaps that means the message of Stubborn Attachments is needed now more than ever.

Recommended, here is the link.

*Stubborn Attachments* opening week

by  Tyler Cowen in

I thank all of you buyers and reviewers for making the opening week of Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals such a success.

The book hit #1 in 4 Amazon browse subcategories over the last week:
– Macroeconomics
– Commerce
– Philosophy
– Theory of Economics, and also Comparative Economics

*Stubborn Attachments* blurbs

by  Tyler Cowen in

You can find them here, note you may need to click on the right to read the furthest right-hand side of the page.  Here are excerpts from those blurbs:

Tim Harford: “His best, most ambitious and most personal work.”

Cardiff Garcia: “I think you’ll find that following the logic in Stubborn Attachments is as fun as it is intellectually provocative.”

Mason Hartman: “The book invites you to fight it.”

Cass Sunstein: “It’s a book for right now, and a book for all times. A magnificent achievement.”

Tomorrow is publication date for the book, you can order here, and here is some background on Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals.

Note I am donating all of the proceeds to a man in Ethiopia.