Tyler Cowen’s new book is full of interesting ideas, with a focus on the central importance of economic growth, which he views as the overriding issue for policymakers. This claim is built on three components:
1. Tyler accepts the broad conclusions of academic research on happiness, which generally show a positive link between psychological and economic well-being. Tyler believes that greater wealth leads to greater happiness, especially when wealth is defined broadly to include a clean environment, leisure time, human rights, etc.
2. Tyler believes that future utility should be discounted at a zero percent interest rate; in other words, future utility should be regarded as being every bit as valuable as current utility.
3. Tyler advocates a value system that is closely related to consequentialism—a pluralistic approach that is mostly utilitarian, plus certain basic human rights.
When these ideas are combined, boosting economic growth becomes far and away the most important public policy concern.
I don’t recall Tyler linking his argument to John Rawls “veil of ignorance”, but it may be helpful to do so. Rawls asked us to consider what sort of policy regime we’d favor if we had to choose the regime without knowing which of the 7.3 billion humans we would become. Tyler can be seen as going one step further, asking us to contemplate the policy regime we’d favor if we did not know which of the hundreds of billions of current and future humans we’d become. When looked at from this perspective, a zero rate of interest for discounting future happiness seems obvious. His approach breaks down temporal distances in much the same way that Rawls’ original thought experiment broke down geographical distances.
There’s also a link between Tyler’s argument and Bryan Caplan’s long-time advocacy of open borders. Caplan is saying that those who favor income redistribution in advanced countries are not paying enough attention to the vastly bigger gains to be achieved if we take seriously the value of lives in distant places. Tyler argues that those focusing on domestic redistribution are paying insufficient attention to both those who live in distant places and those who live in distant (future) periods of time.
Tyler’s core hypothesis has the virtue of being important, non-obvious, and probably true. Thus my overall evaluation of the book is quite positive. He wisely avoids getting bogged down in specific policy debates—rather his goal is to point us in the right direction—to give us a useful way to think about the merits of various policy options. It’s also short and easy to read, you can finish it in a couple hours. (Or 15 minutes if you read as fast as Tyler.) But a book review would not be useful without mentioning a few reservations. (Here I rely on memory, so I may be overlooking or misinterpreting some of his points):
1. I’m not convinced that economic growth makes us happier. It seems to me that the brain is sort of hardwired to be at a certain level of happiness, at least once basic needs have been met. Even if new products like iPhones are beneficial when viewed in isolation, they have negative externalities in the sense of reducing our pleasure in other goods. To take an obvious example, people today derive less pleasure from a fuzzy screen 19 inch black and white TV than they would have in 1960. We are on a hedonic treadmill. And no, empirical studies of happiness do not refute this claim, which matches my own life experience. Ask yourself this question. Why do Americans feel so much physical pain, in a country where medical progress has eliminated most of the extreme pain experienced in the 19th century? Even I am old enough to recall cavities being filled without painkillers (at age 12). I find that the more pain I eliminate from my life, the more sensitive I am to smaller pains.
Despite this reservation, I end up in the same place as Tyler on most policy issues. Even if there is only a 20% chance that more wealth makes us happier, it’s worth striving for. And there are many indirect ways in which wealth might make us happier. It might push us to spend more on a clean environment. It might reduce the risk of human rights abuses. It might lead to medical breakthroughs that improve health. Growth should be the default option, even if we are agnostic about its benefits. I’d also argue that the sort of classical liberal society that leads to economic growth is also the sort of society that leads to pro-happiness cultural changes, for reasons essentially unrelated to growth. Thus people in free market places like Denmark are happy partly because a classical liberal society encourages people to treat their fellow human beings better than would be the case in a more bureaucratic and regulated society. Most of the occasions when I get angry at strangers occur because bad public policies have thrust me into situations I’d rather avoid, such as arguing with health insurance companies, or the DMV, or the TSA, or the IRS. I don’t tend to yell at the person who cuts my hair, or serves me in a restaurant. Rent controls and minimum wage laws encourage businesses to be cruel to tenants and employees.
2. Even if economic growth makes people happier, the rate at which it does so is almost certainly far lower than the rate at which it boosts real GDP/person. It wouldn’t surprise me if utility rose by only one or two percent each time RGDP per capita doubled—at least from levels where basic necessities are already being met. So Tyler’s discussion of compound growth may oversell the benefits of economic growth in utility terms, even if those benefits are positive. On the other hand, this argument also suggests that many moral philosophers overstate the benefits of redistribution, so the happiness skepticism cuts both ways, and doesn’t necessarily impact his policy conclusions.
In a few places, Tyler sort of slides from a zero discount rate for future utility to a zero discount rate for future real consumption. If I’m right about the diminishing marginal utility of extra consumption, especially for the affluent, then taking a bit of consumption away from the (presumably affluent) people of the year 2218 will have only a trivial impact on their utility. I wish I had saved less when young, as an extra $100 in consumption back then would have been worth more to me than an extra $2000 today.
3. I think Tyler might have done a better job clarifying the issue of redistribution. Tyler mentions (without endorsing) the provocative argument that we might be better off redistributing money to the rich, who are more likely to save and invest the funds. Unfortunately, when discussing redistribution, our society tends to focus on income, which is the wrong variable. Yes, the rich might invest an extra dollar in income, thereby helping future generations. But that’s not relevant to the real issue, which is consumption redistribution. One commenter suggested that it might be better if I invested $10,000 rather than donate the money to a family in Ethiopia. But that’s dodging the real question—don’t I have an ethical obligation to donate $10,000 of my current consumption? The rich should never feel any guilt about investing money rather than giving it to charity. Where they perhaps should feel a bit of guilt is in spending $500 million on consumption, rather than donating a significant share of those funds to the poor. I think Tyler might have benefited by making the income/consumption distinction clearer in his redistribution discussion.
4. Tyler focuses on the gains from a higher rate of long run economic growth. But we know very little about how best to achieve a sustained increase in growth. I’d guess that roughly 99% of growth initiatives boost the level of GDP (by making the economy more efficient), but not the long run growth rate. In my mental model of growth, there is a gradually increasing “global potential” in RGDP/person, which is determined by things like the state of science and technology. Then countries are arrayed at anywhere between 0% and 100% of that potential, depending on supply-side policies. A fruitful supply-side reform will generally move you closer to potential, without boosting that global potential. That’s still “growth”, but it’s not sustainable in the long run. Thus reforms in North Korea might move them from roughly 10% of potential to the roughly 60% of potential achieved by places like South Korea, and then level off. Reforms in South Korea might move them closer to Switzerland or Singapore. But to boost the global potential we need breakthroughs in basic science and technology, which are difficult to achieve. I’m pretty sure that Tyler would agree that those basic scientific breakthroughs that engender many new products and services are among the most valuable steps in promoting long run growth. On the other hand, a labor market reform that slightly boosts the labor force participation rate may also boost wealth and be worth doing, but won’t permanently impact the economic growth rate.
5. I wasn’t convinced by his defense of pluralism over simple utilitarianism, partly for reasons outlined in my earlier post. But as I also pointed out, my “rules utilitarianism” leaves me in almost the same place, for policy evaluation purposes.
6. I don’t think Tyler’s insistence that certain ethical assertions are “objective” truths is useful. It’s enough to say that we hold certain beliefs with a high degree of confidence—there’s really nothing more that can usefully be said. The denial of objective truth is not an embrace of “relativism”, it’s an acknowledgement that the confidence we have in moral claims lies along a continuum from 0% to 100%.
Some will see Tyler’s book as a defense of the more “right-wing” side of the equity/efficiency debate. But I honestly don’t see anything here that would greatly concern a center-left economist from the 1990s. One can still advocate a role for the government in the environment, antitrust law, infrastructure, funding basic research, and redistribution (with a focus on boosting opportunity for the less fortunate). On the other hand, the center-left has recently moved away from its pro-saving stance of the 1990s, with less support for progressive consumption taxes, budget surpluses, etc. I’m still strongly pro-saving, but I feel increasingly out of step with the times. (This feeling is something I often experience—I got into blogging because the profession was ignoring monetary policy back in late 2008.)
It will be interesting to see if Tyler can help to reverse this unfortunate move of the profession away from the neoliberalism of the 1990s, with its emphasis on the importance of boosting saving. I certainly hope he succeeds, even as I believe he slightly overstates the case for emphasizing growth, for the reasons listed above.
PS. For a more comprehensive review of Stubborn Attachments, check out this excellent piece by Coleman Hughes. (And then get depressed thinking about he fact that it was written by an undergraduate—I cringe when I look at my college papers.)
READER COMMENTS
John Alcorn
Nov 23 2018 at 6:16pm
Dr. Sumner,
Your blogpost is full of insights and wisdom. A gem, really.
But you give too much credit to John Rawls. Rawls embraced nationalism and rejected open borders.
Scott Sumner
Nov 24 2018 at 2:06pm
Yes, I knew that but forgot. Still, my interpretation of his thought experiment is the correct one, and his is incorrect. He lacked the courage of his convictions.
Thaomas
Nov 23 2018 at 6:58pm
Absolutely equating the far future and present makes no sense to me on grounds of diminishing marginal utility. The far future if we don’t massively screw things up (as doing nothing about climate change for too long or sufficiently wrong “somethings” will screw things up) will be imaginably richer than we are. Of look at this in the past. Should the median subject of the Roman Empire c 100 CE (a follower of Stoic philosophy, let’s suppose) be indifferent between eating one more cabbage or a median citizen of of the US having one more cabbage to to eat in 2018?
Should we not use a progressive consumption tax to transfer one dollar to a first decile person if that would result in one dollar higher world GPD in 2118 than if we did the tax and transfer? That’s not a trade off that looks attractive to me and I wonder if the beneficiaries of 2118 would not agree.
Mark Bahner
Nov 27 2018 at 10:32pm
I haven’t read the book, and I’m not sure I will. However, I did read Cowen and Parfit’s “Against the Social Discount Rate.” I was not persuaded of this conclusion:
I don’t think anything is predictable even 100 years in the future, let alone 1000.
For example even Cowen and Parfit write, “Nuclear wastes may (emphasis added) be dangerous for thousands of years.” Plutonium can be a nuclear waste…but it can also be used as a nuclear fuel. Who can say whether reactors that use spent nuclear fuel from present reactors won’t be common 50+ years from now…let alone 100+ years from now?
And even “destruction of a species” (extinction) is not necessarily a permanent thing anymore. The woolly mammoth may be back from extinction within a decade…let alone 100+ years. Who could have predicted that even a few decades ago?
Mark Bahner
Nov 27 2018 at 10:37pm
Oops! I meant to make this comment as separate comment, rather than as a reply to Thaomas.
Thaomas
Nov 23 2018 at 7:20pm
Is it really fair to fault the center left for not advocating progressive consumption taxes when it is a regressive and growth inhibiting that they were not able to prevent in 2017?
Eric
Nov 24 2018 at 12:51am
Your analogy with John Rawls isn’t particularly apt, as he would have come with the opposite conclusion to Tyler’s. Rawls’ veil of ignorance led to the difference principle, which claimed that the policies of those chosen by those under the veil is the one that maximized the welfare of the least well-off, since anybody in the veil could ‘end up’ on the bottom. Applied temporally, this would suggest a policy that maximizes the benefit of earlier generations, not later ones, since earlier generations are almost always the less well-off even with a tiny rate of economic growth. The result would be a far higher social discount rate than zero, and would have disturbing implications for left-leaning Rawlsians regarding environmental issues like climate change.
In fact, a Rawlsian argument would be my greatest objection to Tyler’s thesis (though I haven’t yet read his work, and I’m not a Rawlsian myself). While Parfit and others came up with many thought experiments to refute the notion of a social discount rate, there are many others one can counter with (which is why I dislike using hypotheticals in moral philosophy generally). For example, say that had growth-reducing redistributive policies in 1870 would’ve prevented us today the luxury of cell phones, laptops and high-speed internet, or even radiation therapy, but would’ve substantially improved the lives of the poor back then, which would’ve involved working less than 70 hours a week and not living in cramped infested living spaces. I feel that the general moral intuition regarding this would be ambiguious at best, if not a reasonable majority favouring the redistributive policies. Indeed, given how powerful economic growth really is (as Tyler showed), I feel like those who favour redistributive polices today would gladly support having the far-better-off-in-the-future pay for improving the lives of the poor today as well using similar fairness arguments – and thus a zero social discount rate would be the most unfair system of justice of all.
I would also note the fact that a lot of happiness comes from relative status, not just absolute status, especially in more developed countries. What follows is that the poor might not actually be getting much happier in the future at all, despite further economic/technological improvements – indeed they might not have gotten happier in recent decades despite attaining cell phones and other luxuries. Of course, this argument would refute those in favour if redistribution as well, since redistributive polices often reduce the social status of the poor, even when raising their consumption. This argument also doesn’t apply globally, where there are many for whom absolute necessities are their most pressing needs.
Scott Sumner
Nov 24 2018 at 2:00pm
Eric, You said:
“Rawls’ veil of ignorance led to the difference principle, which claimed that the policies of those chosen by those under the veil is the one that maximized the welfare of the least well-off, since anybody in the veil could ‘end up’ on the bottom.”
Don’t confuse the veil of ignorance thought experiment with the much more dubious conclusion that it leads to the difference principle. I believe Rawls was wrong on that point.
Much of your comment is about redistributing wealth over time, whereas Tyler’s argument is actually about not discounting future utility. In fairness, Tyler blurs this distinction at times, as I point out in the post.
Rein
Nov 24 2018 at 6:52am
If RGDP growth has little (direct) impact on happiness of middle class, I think we should focus on the impact of RDGP growth on the happiness of lower classes. If there is little correlation, wouldn’t you then agree that the cynicism of the (far) left towards policies that favour RGDP growth over more social policies is justified?
Scott Sumner
Nov 24 2018 at 2:01pm
Rein, Perhaps the cynicism is justified, but so is the cynicism of people like me who believe the left doesn’t know how to help the poor. You don’t help the poor with rent controls, tariffs, minimum wage laws, and other intrusive regulations. Nor do you help the poor with our current health care regime, or our public education system. Bernie Sanders says he wants something like Denmark, but his proposals are radically different from Denmark’s policy mix.
Warren Platts
Nov 24 2018 at 9:32am
I have not yet obtained the book. However, based on this review and a long interview with Tyler, it appears the claim that the moral summum bonum is that global GDP growth is what should be maximized. Thus a pp of increased growth in the China police state is worth as much as a pp of growth in USA. More precisely, it is implies a policy that sacrifices U.S. GDP growth is recommended if the reduction is outweighed by GDP growth elsewhere. Put baldly, beggar-thy-neighbor trade policies conducted by our trading partners combined with unilateral free trade on our part are to be encouraged.
As such, the moral summum bonum is suspiciously self-serving, in that it recommends maintaining the globalist, “New International Economic Order” status quo: U.S. elites will continue to see fat consumer surpluses; the U.S. working class will continue to get screwed. Average U.S. GDP/capita will continue to be lower than it would otherwise be if economic nationalism ruled the day.
Scott Sumner
Nov 24 2018 at 2:03pm
Warren, You said:
“beggar-thy-neighbor trade policies”
More than 200 years ago, Smith and Ricardo showed the idea of beggar-thy-neighbor trade policies is a complete myth. I’d encourage you to study their writings.
Warren Platts
Nov 24 2018 at 3:48pm
Not sure what you mean here, sir. Is it that beggar-thy-neighbor policies are conceptually incoherent or is it that such policies in principle cannot achieve their stated goal of using trade policy to enhance one country’s welfare at the expense of one’s trading partners? If the latter, that is apparently not the case. According to one Nobel winner, using an explicit Ricardian model, it turns out that,
“With employment less than full and Net National Product suboptimal, all the debunked mercantilistic arguments turn out to be valid. Tariffs can then reduce unemployment, can add to the NNP, and increase the total of real wages earned (or do the same for non-labor factors in an extended model).”
As for Smith, when reading Wealth of Nations it must be kept in mind that Smith was the Scottish Commissioner for Managing and Causing to be Levied and Collected His Majesty’s Customs, and Subsidies and other Duties in that part of Great Britain called Scotland, and also the Duties of Excise upon all Salt and Rock Salt Imported or to be Imported into that part of Great Britain called Scotland.
This was no mere sinecure. Smith actively sought out the full-time position, and performed his duties diligently (his signature appears on 90+% of all correspondence generated by his office); apparently, it took up so much of his time, he was never able to finish his third book. Thus, the view that Smith was against tariffs generally would require that he be some sort of hypocrite. I, for one, am not prepared to make such an accusation against a great moral philosopher.
Therefore, the Commissioner of Customs and Salt Duties could not have been against tariffs in general. He considered tariffs to be a legitimate means of raising revenue, and that such revenue-raising tariffs would also provide protection for the workmen of Great Britain. In particular, Smith argued that if domestic production is taxed, then it would be “generally advantageous” that imports be taxed equivalently. Since U.S. domestic production is taxed to the tune of 30%, then if we were to take Smith seriously, we would impose a 30% tariff on all imports!
The myth is that Smith was for 100% free trade 100% of the time. A compilation of Smith’s arguments in favor of judicious tariffs may be found here.
Thaomas
Nov 27 2018 at 10:10am
Theoretically it IS possible for a country to increase its welfare by restricting trade if it can impose optimal import tariffs and export duties on goods and services in which it has a degree of monopoly power. This is not what is usually mean by “beggar thy neighbor” which is an attempt use trade restrictions as an alternative to proper monetary policy in a recession.
Jon Murphy
Nov 24 2018 at 7:08pm
To your first point about wealth and happiness, I think one major benefit, even if economic growth doesn’t necessarily make us happier, is that economic growth and international trade reduce the likelihood of war and conflict. Economic growth leads to a more peaceful world. Economic growth may not necessarily lead to more happiness, but war sure as shoot causes misery.
Warren Platts
Nov 24 2018 at 8:25pm
Sorry Jon, there is little to no evidence that trade reduces the likelihood of war and conflict. For example, England and France have historically been great trading partners. Yet from the period 1198 to 1898, there were at least 26 armed conflicts between the two countries.
World War One happened at the high tide of the last golden age of globalism. In 1913, the world trade/GDP ratio was about 21%, a figure that was matched until the late 1990s. Yet all that trade did not prevent WW1.
Meanwhile, the largest free trade zone over the last couple of hundred years has been the USA. However, the very worst war the USA went through was the Civil War. If it is the case that trade lessens the risk of war, then the Civil War never should have happened. Indeed, in general, civil wars of any kind would never happen if trade stopped wars.[
Then there is the Thucydides Trap. This is what happens when a newly powerful country threatens the prevailing hegemon. “It was the rise of Athens, and the fear that this inspired in Sparta, that made war inevitable,” according to Thucydides, author of the Peloponnesian Wars. On a PPP basis, China already has the world’s largest economy since 2014. It’s growth rate is 3 times the rate of ours. They are rapidly rebuilding their military. They have built illegal military bases on artificial islands in the South China Sea.
If China had been left in the trade embargo that we imposed in 1949, there is no doubt that the Chinese economy would be a small fraction of what it is today. As such, the China would not be much of a threat. It is trade that created the threat. Trade has made war more likely.
This goes back to my original comment: GDP growth among countries are not morally equivalent. It would be much better for the world if the USA’s growth rate exceeded China’s, even if that meant a somewhat slower global growth rate.
Mark Z
Nov 26 2018 at 5:03am
Sorry, but if one could measure how free trade was between England and France, and how belligerent they were toward each other, they would correlate negatively. Trade liberalization throughout the 19th and 20th century coincided with the end of the Angl0-French rivalry. Western Europe in general was never in history more peaceful than it has been since it formed a free trade zone.
On the matter of China, you are only displaying ignorance of US-China relations. From the 1950s to the 1970s the US was in a de facto proxy war with China over Korea then Vietnam, and a cold war over Taiwan; China built of nuclear arms and opposed Kruschev’s rapprochement with the US during this era.
Since China and the US have opened trade, China has signed the Nuclear non-proliferation treaty, stopped testing nuclear weapons after signing the Comprehensive Test Ban treaty; its relations have improved with Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, the major US allies in the region. US relations with China have improved since the 1970s and the threat of war has declined. Until maybe the last couple years at least…
Thaomas
Nov 27 2018 at 10:19am
I would add to Mark Z that most of China’s successful growth is a result of it’s internal turn toward Capitalism. A refusal of the US to trade with China would have reduced it’s growth but could not have prevented its becoming an economic power great enough to threaten the US and would certainly have increased hostility.
CZ
Nov 27 2018 at 4:04pm
GDP growth is morally better when it happens in poorer countries because it makes more of a real difference to quality of life there. Both the US and China have added about $10 trillion in today’s dollars to their real GDP since 1990, but this same $10 trillion clearly improved more people’s lives in China more than in the US. As for the impact of the rest of the world, there is no support for your claim that growth in the US would be better than growth in China. Actually, developing countries grew faster and global poverty fell faster from 1980-today than 1945-1980 even if you exclude China from the data.
Todd Kreider
Nov 28 2018 at 1:49am
No, China and the US have not added $10 trillion since 1990.
US: $9.3 trillion to $17.7 trillion, so $8.4 trillion.
China: $1.7 trillion to $21.2 trillion, so $19.5 trillion.
(2011 dollars)
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.PP.KD?locations=US-CN
CZ
Nov 29 2018 at 8:27am
I am talking nominal, you are talking PPP (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD?locations=US-CN&start=1990). When comparing between different countries, nominal is the right measure to use. The fact that the same dollar goes twice as far in China further supports my argument that a dollar in China adds more to global well-being than that same dollar in the US.
Todd Kreider
Nov 29 2018 at 11:22am
No, PPP is the correct measurement to use when comparing countries. (Tyler Cowen doesn’t understand this but other econ bloggers do.)
Scott Sumner
Nov 25 2018 at 12:19am
Warren, Where does Smith come out in favor of the “beggar-thy-neighbor” argument?
Your argument about equivalent taxes is confusing two unrelated concepts, income taxes and sales taxes. And sales taxes in the US already apply to both imports and domestic goods, so their is no distortion needed fixing with a tariff. I’d recommend you read up on tax theory.
Benjamin Cole
Nov 25 2018 at 4:47am
I am for policies that benefit me, my interest group, my party, and my class.
I then parade behind the most glorious escutcheon I can fashion.
Thaomas
Nov 25 2018 at 12:46pm
I still have not read Stubborn Attachments [maybe after Christmas. :)] but everything I have read about it makes me think it is well worth reading.
<Cowen doesn’t reject redistribution per se; he is strongly in favor of redistributionist policies that increase growth, like ensuring that the poor are well-housed and well-fed. He only rejects forms of redistribution that reduce growth. The unconditional desire to reduce inequality, growth-be-damned, is “the thinking man’s equivalent of the savage’s short-run gratification,” Cowen writes. “It is our latest adaptive mechanism for feeling good about ourselves, at the expense of letting Rome burn.”>
I think it is still reasonable to conceive of SOME redistribution today that would reduce consumption in the far future. Accepting the moral equivalence of present and future lives do not imply that a dollar’s worth of 2018 consumption might not be worth more than a dollar’s worth in 2018 if people in the future are much wealthier than we.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that most “distributional” reforms are or could be made to be compatible with not reducing long run growth/ future era consumption. [A key to this would be shifting from progressive income taxation to progressive consumption taxation]
I do not share Cowen’s worry about “The unconditional desire to reduce inequality, growth-be-damned.” I am more worried about inequality increasing policies that claim to be growth enhancing but are not.
Weir
Nov 25 2018 at 5:34pm
“I wish I had saved less when young, as an extra $100 in consumption back then would have been worth more to me than an extra $2000 today.”
You could spend the $100 on two tickets to a production of Krapp’s Last Tape. You look forward to the show all year, and you tell everyone you’re going, and you get dressed up, and it’s a big deal. But it’s also pretty disappointing, and on the way home you pretend you liked it much more than you did.
Or you and your date could stay in, make dinner, do a little dance to a song called Future Me Hates Me by the Beths. Much more fun. And fifty years from now you swear you saw the play, even though you didn’t. What you’re remembering is a film of the show you saw on the internet a couple years afterwards.
So there’s no way of knowing what you ought to have done. You tell yourself that you’re the kind of person who chooses X over Y, and that has made all the difference. But if you hadn’t saved so much money when you were young you wouldn’t have lost so much in the crash. Or, alternatively, if you hadn’t spent so much on drinks and shows you’d have never met the VC who became your fairy godmother.
ChrisA
Nov 26 2018 at 1:02pm
My belief is that we are very likely to destroy ourselves with AI. So I actually wonder if, contra Tyler on economic growth, a devastating world economic depression, perhaps coupled with a major war or two, or maybe a serious black death style epidemic might be the highest utility option available to us. This is about the only thing I can see that would delay AI apocalypse.
Another thought – it seems like we are for sure in an infinite universe, and probably there is also a multiverse. Therefore there are infinite copies of all humans existing away with every conceivable things happening to them at any one time, good and bad. So overall utility cannot be affected by our actions – be evil or good – it doesn’t matter what you do – do as thou wilt.
Another thought – we cannot really predict the consequences of our actions due the chaos/butterfly effect. It maybe is that an act of pure evil causes the greatest utility, or an act of pure altruism causes the most misery. Let’s use Hitler as an example – perhaps his actions in precipitating WW2 actually resulted in the best possible world, all other possible actions in the 1930’s delayed war initially but then the great powers got nuclear weapons and used them. Or to take a more prosaic example – Tyler giving the Ethiopian guy money results in serious jealousy of his family such that they ostracise him and he and his family are overall more miserable than if he had never met Tyler.
I mention these issues to show some of the problems with “Moralism” of which utilitarianism is a branch. Moralism is the belief that there is in fact a right way to behave that is somehow defined by logic. Ethics and morality are simply tastes or preferences, and annoying as it may seem, you cannot make them a rational subject for discussion or debate.
Scott Sumner
Nov 26 2018 at 3:39pm
Weir, Good points.
Chris, I don’t see that perspective having many important implications. If we don’t know for sure, why not just go with the most likely outcome? What do we have to lose? Either we know nothing, in which case nothing matters, or we know a little, in which case we should act on that basis.
ChrisA
Nov 27 2018 at 8:36am
Scott – that is my point – we really don’t know the long term consequences of our actions or whether they even matter. The answer isn’t to be evil, or to do random stuff, it is to follow your moral preference, not because it is the “right” thing to do, but because that is how we are made. I think this is a bit like the debate on religion a century or so ago. Of course some elite intellectuals recognised that the classic fire and brimestone justice God probably was not a real model for the world, but they kept pushing this model on people because they feared people without a reward/punishment system would deviate from what was considered proper behavior, unleashing the beast in man. Of course most people now accept we don’t need religion to have an orderly society. But people still are not comfortable to be anchored to their moral intuition instead of a grand theory. So, like you do, they try to create some rational around their intuitions. But in reality the only thing that really makes us behave well is our genetic moral system. I could not (say) kill a baby even if you proved to me that it was the best thing to do from some philosophical point of view. And I think this is a good thing. Just look at all the horrors of the 20C that we perpetuated by people who were convinced their moral system was the correct one. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Celebrate the fact that morality is a preference not a logically derived system.
Scott Sumner
Nov 27 2018 at 3:03pm
Chris, My point is that utilitarianism is the moral system most likely to be true. Even if there’s just a 5% chance, that’s more than any other system, so let’s go with utilitarianism.
ChrisA
Nov 28 2018 at 1:41am
Scott – this sounds like you are making Pascal wager type bet. I am sure you know all the problems with that approach for religion, why would these objections not apply to ethics?
Mark Z
Nov 29 2018 at 11:20am
I’m not sure what Scott’s answer is, but I don’t think the problems with Pascal’s wager are as damning (no pun intended) as they may seem. If the cost of failing to following either no religion or a religion that imposes no consequences for failing to follow it is 0, then it makes sense to follow the religion whose consequences for disobedience (we might say ‘disbelief’ though Pascal was really arguing for following the creed even if one had intellectual doubts) that has the highest probability of being true (assuming the hells of all possible religions are equally bad). Even if the cost foregoing irreligion is nonzero (reasonable assumption), it still needs to be greater than the expected cost of the religion with the highest expected cost (probability of being true times negative consequences for failure to adhere).
Scott Sumner
Nov 28 2018 at 8:11pm
Chris, That’s not a good comparison. I see no rational reason to believe in any particular religious dogma. I do see a rational reason to believe in utilitarianism. So the cases are not equivalent.
ChrisA
Nov 29 2018 at 12:30am
Scott – I have tried to explain why utilitarianism is not rational already;
You cannot measure or weight utilities or determine them in any rational way. For instance can you calculate the utility loss or gain to the world from me eating a chicken?
You do not know how utilities change according to particular circumstances. You cannot even say what changes your own utility very accurately (See Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness).
Forecasting the future is impossible due to the butterfly effect so you cannot know the long term consequences of your actions, so the “correct decision” even if you could solve 1&2 cannot be calculated.
Very probably your actions do not matter for total utility in any event due to infinite universe/multiverse considerations.
Most likely you will act according to your in built moral intuition against any repugnant conclusion, meaning that any decision you make even if you claim it is based on utilitarian analysis will be biased by your internal moral compass. Even though you will claim it as logical.
Worse than all of this – utilitarianism – like all absolute moral theories – implies that other peoples actions if not in agreement with your analysis automatically makes them none-ethical or in simple terms evil. This approach has caused untold misery for the human race in the past as people sought to impose their moral judgments on others. Communists and Nazi’s were essentially utilitarians, performing monstrous acts in the name of the greater good. They were very likely wrong. If you think this is hyperbolic – speak to a few social justice warriors.
Mark Z
Nov 29 2018 at 11:53am
Atrocities committed in the name of a greater good isn’t really an indictment or moral judgment – indeed, absent moral judgment, one has no basis for making an indictment, and, at least for moral absolutists, atrocities they are liable to commit are more likely than not in opposition to their stated morals – as an indictment of the human imagination.
The Hitlers and Stalins of the world do likely see themselves as utilitarians. A utilitarian could correctly point out that they miscalculated the benefits that were supposed of their actions, and that the disutility they caused is precisely why they were so wrong. People doing bad things in the name of the greater good isn’t a valid philosophical criticism of the greater good. It is, however, a valid criticism of the practical utility of the concept of the greater good; the sheer range of possibilities a utilitarian faces in deciding what the optimum allows his biases, prejudices, and self-interest to color his decision, much like the vagaries of and noisiness of social science allow social science research to be all but determined by the political biases of practitioners, compared to the constraints more rigid framework of the physical sciences impose on their practitioners.
In other words (I admit I like this conclusion because of its irony), utilitarianism, if true, may not be very useful, or actually worse than useless, while the most useful morality may be some form of deontology, even if false.
Scott Sumner
Nov 29 2018 at 3:35pm
Chris, You said:
“Communists and Nazi’s were essentially utilitarians, performing monstrous acts in the name of the greater good.”
Actually, they were evil precisely because they were not utilitarians. The Nazis, for instance, valued the welfare of non-Jewish Germans higher than the welfare of others, and they valued the welfare of non-German Nordics higher than the welfare of Russians.
ChrisA
Nov 30 2018 at 7:14am
Ok Scott I will change my formulation about the Nazi’s – “they are the same as utilitarians in that they advocated monstrous acts for the benefit of the greater good”. While maybe not strictly utilitarian they are moralists in that they advocated a particular moral structure for society. It is this that I am arguing against. Absolute moral structures by definition create repugnant conclusions which is what I mean by monstrous acts. Of course you and Tyler and other semi-utilitarians are not monstrous people, so I am sure that any society that you controlled would not be like one that the Nazi’s advocated. You would be practical and especially shy away from doing horrible deeds even if you thought it would benefit utility overall. That is my point actually, you should simply be honest about this fact that you are driven by your own moral intuition and not a theory.
T Boyle
Nov 29 2018 at 3:14pm
Happiness is not a useful goal.
Happiness is nature’s reward for getting things to go better. Unhappiness, on the other hand, tells you that either things have gotten worse, or there are things you could do to improve matters – but are not doing. Happiness is supposed to be temporary: nature does not want you to sit in a warm glow, it wants you to enjoy the moment, then look for the next opportunity for improvement. The Buddha noted that life is unsatisfactory, not because there’s anything wrong with the outside world, but because that’s how we are.
Happiness is not the destination; it’s the compass.
Indeed, in a world of many opportunities, unhappiness – or dissatisfaction, its cousin – may be more common, because you have so many more opportunities to make things better. And, there’s nothing wrong with that. Left to their own devices, people seek challenges, and then struggle with them.
If happiness is not the goal, what is? I suggest it is improving welfare (which includes both material welfare and spiritual meaning). And there is no question that, all other things being equal, wealth improves welfare. Of course, so does achieving spiritual meaning.
Scott Sumner
Nov 29 2018 at 3:36pm
T Boyle, That’s a reasonable perspective, consistent with utilitarianism.
Comments are closed.