Episode 118: Tyler Cowen discusses Stubborn Attachments
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What is Tyler Cowen’s “Stubborn Attachments” view on utilitarianism and future generations?
Hi, I'm Caroline Wall. I'm an alumni of the University of Chicago and I work on Elucidations Podcast. Utilitarianism, an ethical framework that deems actions good when they increase or maximize the amount of happiness in the world. has abundant opposition in the twenty first century. One argument against utilitarianism takes issue with happiness as the sole criteria for ethical status. Things like justice, truth, and aesthetics may be just as ethically valuable to us as happiness, and their value may not simply be a matter of how much happiness they cause. But if we can't translate these values into the currency of utilitarianism, happiness, then we can't easily talk about whether one action does a better job of maximizing versus another.
It would be like comparing apples and oranges. Tyler Cowen might argue that apples and oranges aren't so hard to compare. An economics professor at George Mason University, Cowen co authors Marginal Revolution, a popular economics blog, and hosts another excellent podcast, Conversations with Tyler. Cowan devotes considerable attention to the idea of a plurality of goods, such as justice, truth, aesthetics, and happiness, while also maintaining that these goods are commensurable. In this episode of Elucidations, we'll discuss this plurality, along with other elements of Cohen's ideal society and the possible routes he envisions for us to get there. Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoy the episode.
Hello and welcome to Elucidations. I'm Matt Teichman, and with me today is Tyler Cowan, professor of economics at George Mason University, and uh the author of numerous books in economics and numerous articles in philosophy, and we're here to discuss his recently published moral philosophy book, Stubborn Attachments. Stubborn Attachments, a vision for a society of free, prosperous, and responsible individuals came out in twenty eighteen from Stripe Press. He's also host of the podcast Conversations with Tyler, which I highly recommend. Uh it's a long form interview podcast that features interviews with all kinds of people, academic and non academic. I guess one thing I'll mention about your podcast that I really like is the um
Combination of seriousness and levity. I don't really hear that very often in a long form interview podcast. Lots of uh questions from left field.
Maybe the levity is unintended, and I'm just strange.
So I found your book really interesting and one way I might describe your approach to moral philosophy is to start with economic growth. Economic growth ends up being something that gets heavily prioritized in the approach to moral philosophy that you recommend. And I have kind of like a naive question about it. I had the impression from the book that um you were assuming a close connection between economic growth and economic health. And I was kinda wondering w are those the same thing and if so, why are they the same thing? So maybe to kinda illustrate, imagine you had like a small island with twenty people on it and new people were born at exactly the same rate as people died, so that at any given moment there were exactly I don't know, whatever, five hundred people on the island.
Could that population be healthy or Economically. You know, always doing the exact same amount of work and always producing the same amount of money and and not growing. Or, you know, does an economy need to always grow in order to be healthy?
The title of my book is Stubborn Attachments, A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals. And I think of this book as coming out of the tradition of social choice theory. How can we say ever that one outcome, socially speaking, is better than another? And one of the arguments is in a society where sustained economic growth is possible That if one society grows at a higher sustainable rate than another. After decades or even centuries, the one society will be much better off for virtually everyone. And that's the best we can do to solve aggregation problems is But to get to your island question, you
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Tyler Cowen’s “Stubborn Attachments” view on utilitarianism and future generations?
0:00–7:51
2
How does the island thought‑experiment illustrate the link between economic growth and societal health?
7:51–12:45
3
Why does Cowen argue that deontological rules become weaker when a society can generate large pluralist value?
12:45–19:56
4
What is the “wealth‑plus” metric and how does it differ from traditional GDP?
19:56–26:40
5
How does Cowen propose to solve aggregation problems by focusing on population‑level outcomes?
26:40–33:30
6
Why should we give equal moral weight to the well‑being of future people as we do to people today?
33:30–40:03
7
What policy changes does Cowen suggest to better support long‑term economic growth and future welfare?
40:03–46:27
8
What practical steps can individuals take to align their choices with the “Stubborn Attachments” framework?
46:27–52:39
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Elucidations
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