Does government spending boost patriotism?
We demonstrate an important complementarity between patriotism and public-good provision. After 1933, the New Deal led to an unprecedented expansion of the US federal government’s role. Those who benefited from social spending were markedly more patriotic during WWII: they bought more war bonds, volunteered more, and, as soldiers, won more medals. This pattern was new – WWI volunteering did not show the same geography of patriotism. We match military service records with the 1940 census to show that this pattern holds at the individual level. Using geographical variation, we exploit two instruments to suggest that the effect is causal: droughts and congressional committee representation predict more New Deal agricultural support, as well as bond buying, volunteering, and medals.
That is by Bruno Caprettini & Hans-Joachim Voth, forthcoming in the QJE.
Locus of Control and Prosocial Behavior
We investigate how locus of control beliefs – the extent to which individuals attribute control over events in their life to themselves as opposed to outside factors – affect prosocial behavior and the private provision of public goods. We begin by developing a conceptual framework showing how locus of control beliefs serve as a weight placed on the returns from one’s own contributions (impure altruism) and others contributions (pure altruism). Using multiple data sets from Germany and the U.S., we show that individuals who relate consequences to their own behavior are more likely to contribute to climate change mitigation, to donate money and in-kind gifts to charitable causes, to share money with others, to cast a vote in parliamentary elections, and to donate blood. Our results provide comprehensive evidence that locus of control beliefs affect prosocial behavior.
Here is the full paper by Mark A. Andor, et.al. It is always worth asking which political philosophies encourage such locus of control beliefs, and which do not. That will tell you more than almost any other metric. Wouldn’t it be nice if people would wear little buttons — “My philosophy does not encourage locus of control beliefs” — how simple life would be!
Friday assorted links
1. Thomas Cairns review of Talent.
2. How robust are various systems to the introduction of less skilled people?
3. Some ramblings about crypto regulation and proof of stake.
4. These CEOs are from which country?
5. How to improve conversations. Not exactly my views, but useful nonetheless. For normal people.
Share of births outside marriage, by country
Here is the link.
Thursday assorted links
1. “Guessing C For Every Answer Is Now Enough To Pass The New York State Algebra Exam.”
2. Markets in everything: “The classes cost around $100 per dog and are so popular that Mr. Will’s six-year-old business, Rattlesnake Ready, is booked solid into fall.” WSJ, interesting throughout.
3. There is no great stagnation in snake legs.
4. “IOWA STATE FAIR’S BIG BOAR CONTEST HAS ONLY 2 ENTRIES AMID SOARING INFLATION, HEAT.” Highly recommended.
5. Dwarkesh Patel on eternal growth.
6. Like it or not, the government is governing (NYT). Basically most of what you’ve read about Congress and American government over the last fifteen years turns out to be wrong.
7. Podcast with Sriram Krishnan of a16z, and with Aarthi Ramamurthy, largely about India. Which Indian city has the best food, which have been my favorite movies of 2022, and how did he and his wife meet?
Not so simple as just giving the IRS more money
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. After detailing the very backward, often-1970s level of IT at the IRS (yes it will horrify you), the column continues;
It’s easy to say that the IRS has not had the staff or the money to do the necessary upgrades. But hold on: These software upgrades are supposed to save money by enhancing productivity, letting organizations do more work with fewer people. A reasonable person can be forgiven for asking whether an agency with a $13.7 billion budget really doesn’t have enough to front some cash.
You might argue that IRS was too liquidity-constrained to shell out the cash up front, but is that argument believable? The improvements from better software usually pay off rather quickly, precisely because the software is labor-saving. The US has plenty of small to mid-sized businesses and non-profits with shrinking staffs and budgets. Yet most of those institutions have been able to upgrade to better software, often repeatedly. Unlike the IRS, many state tax agencies at least use scanners, and those are hardly the wealthiest or most nimble institutions in American society.
When I see that the IRS reduced staff by 22%, I imagine an alternate reality in which the IRS had replaced a good deal of its office staff with better information technology, as many American businesses started to do in the 1990s. In this parallel universe, the staff of the IRS is down and the productivity of the IRS is up, as has happened to so much white-collar office work. But that is not the world we live in.
The advocates for additional funding should better understand why not everyone in America is thrilled with the agency’s new budget boost. It’s not just a bunch of kooks who fear “an army” of weapon-toting IRS agents, or rich people who feel they shouldn’t have to pay their fair share. It’s normal people who think it’s a bad idea to reward an agency that seems so dysfunctional.
I say make the funding conditional on progress in advance. Overall I remain astonished how little critical scrutiny the Biden bills are being subject to. By the way, here is a standing history of attempts to reform the IRS/give it more funding. Most have failed.
Emergent Ventures India, fourth cohort
Here is the latest EV India cohort, and I am delighted to see more applications from young women and teenagers. I note also that a lot of the applicants for EV India are increasingly from smaller towns, or were raised in small towns before moving to larger cities for their projects.
EV India now has 75 winners! And I met most of them in Udaipur this last weekend. Here is the list of new winners:
Siddharth Kanungo is a chemical engineer by training and founder of Primer, an interactive conversational learning platform. Primer is designed for self-learners to learn subjects like mathematics, physics, computer science, that are usually offered in a university-level setting.
Keertana Subramani is a 23-year-old educator and social entrepreneur who wants to provide high-quality, accessible learning experiences. She received her EV grant to build SUVY Classes, a platform that vets and trains tutors for quality, and offers engaging, live classes for any learning need, and at twenty cents a day.
Arun Iyyanarappan is a 28-year-old electrical and software engineer passionate about creating alternate systems for electric power consumption. He received his EV grant to build a cost-effective solar powered house to show proof of concept for electrifying homes in rural areas at low-cost.
Gowtham Tummeda is a 21-year-old student interested in biology and programming and views biology as a software problem. He received his EV grant to build an end-to-end AI platform for biological data analysis. His larger ambition is to use the platform to model, design and simulate changes to strands of DNA at protein level using Deep Mind’s Alpha Fold.
Tejas Sidnal is an architect and researcher from Mumbai. He is the founder of CarbonCraft, a design and material innovation startup converting carbon emissions into building materials by fusing material knowledge of clean technologies with traditional techniques. He received an EV grant to reduce the curing process for Carbon Tiles from 28 days to under four hours for tiles that store captured carbon.
Hiya Jain is an 18-year-old interested in using EdTech to make education equitable. She received her EV grant to travel to San Francisco and better understand the EdTech space. She is currently working on UnMold, a project connecting high-school students in developing countries to PhD students running high information, low pressure, cohort-based courses to inject inspiration into a system.
Shruti Karandikar is a 16-year-old high school student from Bangalore. She has started ‘Screens for the Unscreened’ to collect phones, tablets, and laptops and donate them to underprivileged students. This is being converted into a non-governmental organization called ‘Mobilize’.
Sainadh Chityala is a 22-year-old engineering student. He received the EV grant to develop software to power self-driving cars in unpredictable and chaotic driving environments in urban India.
Samarth Bansal is a 28-year-old independent journalist and programmer in India. His reporting has appeared in Indian and foreign press like the The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, Hindustan Times, The Hindu, Mint, and HuffPost, etc. He writes The Interval, a fortnightly newsletter. He received his EV grant to merge his two interests – developing AI platforms for journalism and serve the news at higher speed and lower cost.
Apurwa Masook is a 23-year-old structural engineer who graduated and cofounded and spearheaded India’s first Indigenous Student Rocketry Mission. He is the founder of Space Fields, a team of hustlers, engineers and space aficionados working towards affordable access to space. He received his EV grant to support Space Fields’s efforts in developing a low-cost high-performance green compositepellant to power next generation of Launch Vehicles.
Snigdha Poonam is a 38-year-old journalist and author from Delhi. She has written about identity politics, income inequality, tech culture, and crime. Her first book, Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing Their World, won 2018’s Crossword Award for nonfiction. She received an EV grant to travel across India to for her investigative work on scams and fraud in the contemporary Indian political economy.
Aniruddha Kenge is a 20-year-old student of industrial design with an interest in carbon-based materials, especially graphene. He is working towards decarbonizing plastics and making their use, reuse, and production sustainable, swiftly. He received his EV grant to develop hemp fiber-based bio-composites in India that can replace multi-use plastics.
Keya Krishna is a 16-year-old high school student in Washington DC interested in the intersection of science, technology, and public policy. She received her EV grant to measure pollution exposures at a hyper-local level with a high level of spatial and temporal granularity, specifically focusing on the pollution exposure of school-going youth.
Abhilash Mishra is the Founder and Chief Science Officer of EquiTech Futures. He trained as a physicist and holds an M.Phys from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Astrophysics from Caltech. EquiTech Futures is a network of innovators from around the world using data science and AI to tackle societal challenges. Abhilash received his EV grant to develop and scale cohort-based courses, research residencies, and educational networking, through their programs EquiTech Scholars, EquiTech Residency, and EquiTech Institutes.
Reuben Abraham is the founding CEO of Artha Global, a new Mumbai and London based policy research and consulting organization that provides the scaffolding for efforts aimed at building state capacity. He was named ‘Think Tanker of the Year 2022’ by Prospect Magazine for putting together a large platform that enabled inter-disciplinary work to tackle the Covid-19 crisis in India.
Zi Cheng “Sam” Huang is a 26-year-old ethnographic researcher interested in elite spaces and cultural replication. Currently, they are assisting on a project about the beliefs of AI researchers. In their free time, they coach Peking University in competitive debating, effective altruism, and started a fellowship for talented young debaters to engage in effective altruism. With their EV grant, they seek to understand scaling education programs in India especially IITs.
Mohammad Ruhul Kader is an entrepreneur and writer from Dhaka, Bangladesh. He founded Future Startup, a digital publication covering the startup and technology scene in Dhaka with an ambition to transform Bangladesh through entrepreneurship and innovation. He writes about internet business, strategy, technology, and society. He is the author of Rethinking Failure: A short guide to living an entrepreneurial life. He received his EV grant to scale Future Startup into a leading destination to learn about entrepreneurship, tech, and business in Bangladesh.
Hemanth Bharatha Chakravarthy (21) and Benjamin Hoffner-Brodsky (22) are data scientists from Chennai and Davis with backgrounds in computational social science research and government. They founded Jhana, a Bangalore-based artificial intelligence lab, and are interested in simplifying and democratizing legal processes and information, and in building alignment and ethics tools for back-checking deployed AI systems. They are building a state-of-the-art, automatic legal search interface for lawyers and students.
Tushar Khandelwal (24), is a former investment banker turned social entrepreneur. He is the founder of Sigma91 – a career accelerator for ambitious teens, and has built a community of over 400 highly talented teenagers.
Akash Kulgod is a 22-year-old researcher, writer, and techno-optimist from Belagavi, with a degree in cognitive science from UC Berkeley. He is the founder of Dogluk — a startup-DAO aiming to augment the ability of dogs to detect disease by transforming their olfactory perceptual abilities into digital and multidimensional signatures. He is also a team member of the Rajalakshmi Children Foundation. You can follow his substack for his writing and podcasts about Dogluk, effective altruism, and the psychedelic revival.
Raghav Gupta is a 24-year-old industrial engineer and the founder of EquiDEI, a crypto-fintech startup. EquiDEI is a blockchain based protocol designed to monetize unbanked supply chain assets of small and medium sized enterprises in India, to provide low risk liquidity options. His ambition is to use his startup to generate wealth and liquidity and jobs for the SME ecosystem.
SealXX is a bioplastic solution to replace single-use plastics based on the concept of biomimicry, and it is founded and run by five teenagers across the world. At SealXX, they want to make the everyday products by mimicking protein-based natural processes by reducing the need for plastic reliance. Chandhana, Nithi, Roy, Nathan, and Elly, cofounders of SealXX were awarded an EV grant to develop and scale their biomimicry process.
- Chandhana Sathishkumar is a 17-year-old Neuroscience and BCI researcher, an author, TED-Ed Speaker, NFT artist, and Guinness world record holder. She has experience working alongside Walmart; with Brains@Play to develop Accessify (a brain-controlled browser extension); and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras to research fetal brains.
- Nithi Byreddy is a 17-year-old innovator and author researching the applications of carbon capture in climate science. She has worked on creating a blockchain-based solution to reduce people’s carbon footprint and has worked with IKEA to create sustainable innovations to reduce their carbon emissions.
- Roy Kim is a 16-year-old innovator and environmentalist interested in mimicking the mechanisms and designs of nature to create sustainable environments, mainly cities. In addition to working alongside Walmart, he is currently developing a theoretical ecological urban utopia and further exploring the applications of biomimicry in our society.
- Nathan Park is a 17-year-old entrepreneur who is interested in economics and business management. He is currently doing research on the economics of the housing market, and running a student-led, scientific publication called MIND Magazines that seeks to make science universally accessible to everyone.
Nexteen is an innovation accelerator program for 13-19 years-old students with programs aimed at exposing students to exponential tech to work on global challenges. Here are some of their ambitious students:
- Vedanth Nath,16, is is a high schooler, football enthusiast, and the creative engine at Nexteen. Prior to Nexteen, ran Media House, and has worked in in the WASH Sector. He also leads Tech and Youth at LooCafe helping them become the largest Toilet-WASH Company in the country.
- Karthik Nagapuri, 22, is an innovator, Defi developer, and student getting his completing the last year of his undergraduate degree in Artificial Intelligence. At Nexteen, he’s building the tech infrastructure that would be useful for innovators who are part of the program. He also worked on Safe Block, a crypto wallet nominee system. He is also the winner of a separate EV grant for building open API framework and tech for LooCafe.
- Ayush Srivastava,19, is a serial entrepreneur who likes to work on operations of new startups to help them grow. He has helped operationalize several startups before Nexteen.
- Anvitha Kollipara,16, is an entrepreneur. She works on scaling, bringing international accreditation, and acquiring partnerships with companies such as Adobe for the non-profits she founded. She was named one of the top three teen change-makers by Forbes for her work with CareGood Foundation.
- Harsh Vardhan Shukla,19, is a YouTuber turned entrepreneur, completing his undergraduate degree in business development while working on the side on nanotech projects. He works on content production (videos) and podcasts.
Emergent Ventures India is now large enough for top-up grants and repeat winners! Some familiar names below:
- Nilay Kulkarni, a 22-year-old software developer from Nashik, for his fintech start up.
- Swasthik Padma to scale his start-up TrashTrap to scale Plascrete – a high strength building material made by converting non-recyclable plastic waste – for commercial use.
- Chandra Bhan Prasad to continue his excellent scholarship on Dalit capitalism and Dalit dignity.
- Naman Pushp, co-founder of Airbound, for his early efforts to explore sustainable on-ground mobility.
- Onkar Singh to continue developing his open-source CubeSat.
Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. The EV India announcement is here. More about the winners of EV India second cohort and third cohort. To apply for EV India, use the EV application click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.
If you are interested in supporting the India tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Shruti at [email protected].
Wednesday assorted links
1. The culture that is New Jersey.
2. The etymology of splooting.
3. “In this cohort study of 3191 patients with e-scooter or bicycle injuries, e-scooter injuries commonly occurred at nighttime and involved young adults who were not helmeted and most often intoxicated.” Link here.
4. Astaire-Reynolds.
5. The story of solo McCartney, volume I of a new biography.
6. The Japanese government is encouraging alcohol consumption, in a bid to boost tax revenue (FT).
7. Bitcoin’s longest-serving Lead Maintainer quits, naming no successor.
Still under-policed and over-imprisoned
A new paper, The Injustice of Under-Policing, makes a point that I have been emphasizing for many years, namely, relative to other developed countries the United States is under-policed and over-imprisoned.
…the American criminal legal system is characterized by an exceptional kind of under-policing, and a heavy reliance on long prison sentences, compared to other developed nations. In this country, roughly three people are incarcerated per police officer employed. The rest of the developed world strikes a diametrically opposite balance between these twin arms of the penal state, employing roughly three and a half times more police officers than the number of people they incarcerate. We argue that the United States has it backward. Justice and efficiency demand that we strike a balance between policing and incarceration more like that of the rest of the developed world. We call this the “First World Balance.”
First, as is well known, the US has a very high rate of imprisonment compared to other countries but less well known is that the US has a relatively low rate of police per capita.
If we focus on rates relative to crime then we get a slightly different but similar perspective. Namely, relative to the number of homicides we have a normal rate of imprisonment but are still surprisingly under-policed.
As a result, as I argued in What Was Gary Becker’s Biggest Mistake?, we have a low certainty of punishment (measured as arrests per homicide) and then try to make up for that with high punishment levels (prisoners per arrest). The low certainty, high punishment level is especially notably for black Americans.
Shifting to more police and less imprisonment could reduce crime and improve policing. More police and less imprisonment also has the advantage of being a feasible policy. Large majorities of blacks, hispanics and whites support hiring more police. “Tough on crime” can be interpreted as greater certainty of punishment and with greater certainty of punishment we can safely reduce punishment levels.
Hat tip: A thread from Justin Nix.
Corporate campaign spending doesn’t matter much
To what extent is U.S. state tax policy affected by corporate political contributions? The 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling provides an exogenous shock to corporate campaign spending, allowing corporations to spend on elections in 23 states which previously had spending bans. Ten years after the ruling and for a wide range of outcomes, we are not able to identify economically or statistically significant effects of corporate independent expenditures on state tax policy, including tax rates, discretionary tax breaks, and tax revenues.
That is from a new paper by Cailin R. Slattery, Alisa Tazhitdinova, and Sarah Robinson.
Which is the hingy-est century?
A while back I linked to Holden Karnofsky’s argument that forthcoming times are likely to be the most important for determining the course of subsequent history, or “hingy-est” of all time. So I thought I should address the issue directly myself.
In my view the greatest danger to civilization is war, rather than AGI. Rather than rehashing that debate (see Holden’s view here), let’s just take the war view as given and see where it leads.
I see a few distinct possibilities:
1. The relatively peaceful world order since WWII will continue for the indefinite future, albeit with ongoing evolutions and modifications. If that is true then the second half of the twentieth century might be the hingy-est time because that was when we built enduring peace.
1b. But the postwar era doesn’t have to be the hingy-ist time under that view. It might be that “the finding of peace” was highly likely or inevitable, sooner or later. Maybe it was the Industrial Revolution that was more contingent, and without that we would have found ongoing peace but at much lower living standards. In that case the British seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could well be the hingy-est time.
But sadly, while I see #1 and #1b as possibly true, they are not for me the most likely scenarios. There is also:
2. Humanity will fight a very destructive war at some point. It will not kill everyone but it will slaughter a significant portion of the earth’s population and put the rest into something like “African living standards plus Balkans governance.” With no turnaround in sight, if only because it is so hard to cast off those institutions once they are in place. Protection against subsequent existential risks will be harder as well.
In that case the hingy-est time or century would be whenever that war comes, or whenever some set of preconditions made such a war inevitable.
To be clear, I think the chance of such a war is quite low in any given year. You don’t need to be shorting the market. Still, if you let the clock tick long enough, such a war is bound to come.
Now is the next 50-100 years the most likely era for such a war to arrive? I don’t see a strong argument why we should have such a definite intuition here. We’ve had some version of MAD with nuclear weapons for quite a few decades, and it has mostly worked out OK. At some point upping the firepower might shift that balance (drone assassins of political leaders? Or something that comes 137 years from now?). I don’t find it easy to have good intuitions on this question.
I am reminded of my earlier post on how long it took the NBA to truly adopt and exploit the logic of the three-point shot.
Even introducing strong AI doesn’t settle it for me. Strong AI might lengthen the reign of (relative) peace, rather than shortening it.
Many things, both positive and destructive, can take longer than you think. And as a general reminder, foreign policy outcomes are extremely difficult to predict, even across a small number of years much less decades.
So I don’t know when the hingy-est century or era is likely to be.
Tuesday assorted links
2. What crypto is doing in Argentina.
3. *Talent* makes the FT Business Book of the Year long list (FT).
4. Scott Sumner on Switzerland. I would note that Switzerland in the 19th century was not so wealthy, or seen as such a model of success. So I don’t think the answer is just “the Swiss people,” or for that matter “Swiss political decentralization.” The Swiss arrangements somehow fit very well into 20th century European economic growth, plus of course the country avoided two World Wars.
5. U.S. procurement is failing on the Stinger missiles front.
6. Long Matt Yglesias post on optimal taxation. Sadly gated but yes you should pay that tax!
Let’s make this a priority
The European Commission wants to boost output of its own raw materials needed for green energy. Its plans, which are still in their infancy, would lower regulatory barriers to mining and production of critical materials such as lithium, cobalt and graphite, needed for wind farms, solar panels and electric vehicles..
By 2030, EU demand for rare earth materials for wind turbines will increase fivefold, according to the commission, but global supply is only projected to double. Demand for lithium is likely to be almost 60 times as high as current consumption by 2050, according to the EU’s Joint Research Centre. The need for cobalt and graphite could be nearly 15 times higher.
Here is more from the FT.
What should I ask Katherine Rundell?
She is the author of the splendid new book on John Donne, reviewed by me here. More generally, here is from Wikipedia:
Katherine Rundell (born 1987) is an English author and academic. She is the author of Rooftoppers, which in 2015 won both the overall Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and the Blue Peter Book Award for Best Story, and was short-listed for the Carnegie Medal. She is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and has appeared as an expert guest on BBC Radio 4 programmes including Start the Week, Poetry Please, and Seriously….and Private Passions.
Rundell’s other books include The Girl Savage (2011), released in 2014 in a slightly revised form as Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms in the United States where it was the winner of the 2015 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for fiction, The Wolf Wilder (2015), and The Explorer (2017), winner of the children’s book prize at the 2017 Costa Book Awards.
And this:
…all her books, and her play, contain a joke at Belgium’s expense…
She is also an avid roofwalker, and more. Here is Katherine eating a tarantula.
So what should I ask her?
Eternal economic growth and Effective Altruism
Dwarkesh Patel surveys one angle of that debate in this short post, and also here. More commonly, from EA types I increasingly hear the argument that if an economy grows at [fill in the blank] percent for so many thousands of years, at some point it becomes so massively large relative to the galaxy that it has to stop growing. It is then concluded that economic growth is not so important, because all it does is help us arrive on the final frontier sooner, and be stuck there, rather than increasing net human well-being over time. (Then often one hears the follow-up claim that existential risk should be prioritized over growth.)
I am not persuaded by that argument, and here are a few points in response:
1. Growth may involve dematerialization and greater energy efficiency, rather than eating up the galaxy’s resources. Much of modern growth already has taken this form, with likely more to come.
2. Real gdp comparisons give you good information locally, when comparing relatively similar societies or states of affairs. The numbers have much less meaning across very different world states, or very long spans of time with ongoing growth. Comparing say Beverly Hills gdp per capita to Stone Age gdp per capita just isn’t an accurate numerical exercise period. It is fair to say that the Beverly Hills number is “a whole lot more,” and much better, but I wouldn’t go too much further than that. They are very different situations, rather than one being a mere exponential version of the other. The economics literature on real income comparisons supports this take.
This point most decidedly does not prove that “eternal growth” is possible. It does show that the “you can’t just keep on scaling up” argument against ongoing growth does not get off the ground. It is really just asserting — without actual backing — that “society couldn’t be very different from it is right now.” And note that points #1 and #2 are mirror images of each other.
3. In general I am not persuaded by backwards induction modes of moral reasoning. The claim is that “in period x we will hit obstacle y, therefore let us reason backwards in time to the present day and conclude…” Backwards induction does not in general hold, either practically or morally, especially across very long periods of time and when great uncertainty is present. I am not saying backwards induction never holds, but most of these arguments are simply applying some form of moral backwards induction without justifying it. A simpler and more accurate perspective is that the status quo already is highly uncertain, and we don’t have much of a workable sense of how things will run as we approach a “frontier,” or even exactly what that concept should mean. And this point is not unrelated to #2. We are being asked to draw conclusions about a world we cannot readily fathom.
4. The world is likely to end long before the binding growth frontier is reached, even assuming that concept has a clear meaning. In the meantime, it is better to have higher economic growth. This rejoinder really is super-simple.
3b. A super-nerdy response might be “are we sure we can’t just find more and more growth resources forever, especially if the final theory of physics is quite strange?”. It is hard for me to judge that one, but I find #3 much more relevant than any version of this #3b. Still, if we are going to look that far into the future, I don’t see any reason to rule out #3b. Which will keep alive the expected value of future economic growth.
5. Often I am suspicious of the method of ‘sequential elimination” in moral reasoning. It might run as follows: “I can show you that X doesn’t matter, therefore we are left with Y as the thing that matters.” Somehow the speaker ought to take greater care to consider X and Y together, and to realize that all of the moral reasoning along the way is going to be imperfect. The “ghost traces” of X may still continue to matter a great deal! What if I argued the following?: “Pascal’s Wager arguments can be used to show that existential risk cannot be allowed to dominate our moral theories, therefore ongoing economic growth has to be the thing that matters.” That too would be fallacious, and for similar reasons, even assuming you saw Pascal’s Wager-type arguments as something to be rejected.
A better approach would be “both X and Y are on the table here, and both X and Y seem to be really important. What kinds of consiliences can we find where arguments for both X and Y work together in similar directions? And that is where we should put our energies. More concretely, that might include finding and mobilizing talent, building better institutions, and making sure we don’t end up controlled by a dominant China.
In sum, the case for sustainable economic growth is alive and well, and not at the expense of existential risk.