Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals

If our values are to rise in importance above the froth of long-run uncertainty about the effects of our actions, we must look to relatively large and important values.

As argued above, a sustainable increase in economic growth, properly understood, will boost many plural values in the medium and long runs. To be sure, some people will be worse off, and some values, in the short to medium run, will not be favored. In these respects, aggregation problems do not disappear. Nonetheless, the competing options do not g

For some more concrete recommendations, I’ll suggest the following: Policy should be more forward-looking and more concerned about the more distant future. Governments should place a much higher priority on investment than is currently the case, in both the private sector and the public sector. Relative to what we should be doing, we are currently

Martin Luther King Jr. brought much good to the world with respect to both justice and long-term economic growth. It would be fair to say that King did the right thing in choosing to pursue higher ideals rather than playing golf all day, even though he lost his life in doing so. The same can be said of Gandhi. Nonetheless, such obligations to sacri

First, believing in the overriding importance of sustained economic growth is more than philosophically tenable. Indeed, it may be philosophically imperative. We should pursue large rather than small benefits, and we should have a deep concern for the more distant future rather than discounting it exponentially. Our working standard for evaluating

I see the Crusonia plant as an entry point for resolving aggregation problems. A Crusonia plant would be more desirable than a plant that dies after a month and leaves no successors, even if this short-lived plant were quite lovely or brilliant. We could compare the two plants in terms of various qualities, such as their color or their scent, but a

We should be skeptical of ideologues who claim to know all of the relevant paths to making ours a better world. How can we be sure that a favored ideology will in fact bring about good consequences? Given the radical uncertainty of the more distant future, we can’t know how to achieve preferred goals with any kind of certainty over longer time hori

When it comes to the future of our world, we have lost our way in a fundamental manner, and not just on a few details. We must return to principles, but we do not always have good principles to guide us. We have strayed from the ideals of a society based on prosperity and the rights and liberties of the individual, and we do not know how to return

The key point is this: even if you’re not convinced that Napoleon really mattered, you don’t and indeed can’t really know this. There is a real chance that Napoleon being born, rather than a different child from a different act of conception, fundamentally changed world history. So in terms of expected value, it remains the case that small acts can

More broadly, the principle of Wealth Plus holds that we should maintain higher growth over time, and not just for a single year or for some other, shorter period of time. Maximizing the sustainable rate of economic growth does not mean pursuing immediate growth at the expense of all other values. Policies that prioritize growth at breakneck speed