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

We can already see that three key questions should be elevated in their political and philosophical importance, namely: What can we do to boost the rate of economic growth? What can we do to make our civilization more stable? How should we deal with environmental problems? The first of these is commonly considered a right-wing or libertarian

Expressed differently, when it comes to non-tradable and storable assets, markets do not reflect the preferences of currently unborn individuals. The branch of economics known as welfare economics holds up perfect markets as a normative ideal, yet future generations cannot contract in today’s markets. If we were to imagine future generations

The economic growth of the wealthier countries benefits the very poor as well, though sometimes with considerable lags. The distribution of wealth changes over time, and not all growth trickles down, but as an overall historical average, the bottom quintile of an economy shares in growth.10 You can see this by comparing the bottom quintile in, say,

The most prominent economic approach to growth, the Solow model, is named after MIT economist and Nobel Laureate Robert Solow, who laid out the basics of the model in the 1950s. The Solow model postulates a stripped-down economy-wide production function based on constant returns to scale. National output is the result of capital inputs, labor

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.

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

We need to develop a tougher, more dedicated, and indeed a more stubborn attachment to prosperity and freedom. When you see what this means in practice, you may wince at some of the implications, and you may be put off by the moral absolutism it will require. Yet these goals—strictly rather than loosely pursued—are of historic importance for our

Rather than letting it paralyze us, we can think of radical uncertainty as giving us the freedom to act morally, without the fear that we are engaging in consequentialist destruction.