Stubborn Attachments

Time How should we weight the interests of the present against the more distant future? This relates to a more metaphysical question: do we have legitimate reasons to weight the present more heavily simply because it is the here and now?

Aggregation Aggregation refers to how we resolve disagreements and how we decide that the wishes of one individual should take precedence over the wishes of another.

Economists use the concept of gross domestic product (GDP) to refer to the total value of goods and services produced over some period of time, usually a year or a quarter. The rate of economic growth is the rate at which GDP increases.

Current GDP statistics have a bias toward what can be measured easily and relatively precisely, rather than focusing on what contributes to human welfare.

The history of economic growth indicates that, with some qualifications, growth alleviates misery, improves happiness and opportunity, and lengthens lives. Wealthier societies have better living standards, better medicines, and offer greater personal autonomy, greater fulfillment, and more sources of fun.

In the mid-nineteenth century, a typical worker might have put in somewhere between 2,800 and 3,300 hours of work a year; that estimate is now closer to 1,400 to 2,000 hours a year.

Antibiotics and vaccines have existed for only a tiny fraction of human history, and it is no coincidence that they emerged in the wealthiest time period humanity has ever seen. There is also a strong and consistent relationship between wealth and rates of infant mortality; small children do best when they are born into wealthier countries, and that is because wealth supplies the resources to take better care of them.

In 1880, about four-fifths of individuals’ discretionary time was spent working, according to economist Robert Fogel. Today we spend about fifty-nine percent of our time doing what we like, and that may rise to seventy-five percent by 2040.

One study predicts that if the leading twenty-one industrial countries were to boost their R&D by half a percentage point of GDP, U.S. output alone would grow by fifteen percent. But it doesn’t end there: output in Canada and Italy would grow by about twenty-five percent, and the output of all industrial nations would increase by 17.5 percent, on average. In the less economically developed countries, output would increase by about 10.6 percent on average.

The more rapidly growing economy will, at some point, bring about much higher levels of human well-being—and other plural values—on a consistent basis. If some set of choices or policies gives us a higher rate of economic growth, those same choices or policies are akin to a Crusonia plant.

A wealthier economy also gives us more “fleeting” experiences of happiness. An individual will admit to being happier if he has recently found a dime, or if his soccer team won a big game. These sources of happiness will likely be more frequent and more consistent in the wealthier society.

Social welfare programs can buy the loyalties of special interest groups and decrease feelings of desperation, both of which can help cement social order. Furthermore, social welfare programs make many citizens feel better about their state, again boosting public order as well as political consensus and stability.1

So rather than redistributing most wealth, we can do better for the world by investing in high-return activities like supporting immigration and producing new technologies with global reach, such as cell phones and new methods for boosting agricultural productivity.

Ideas, and their non-rival nature, are often cited as the fundamental source of increasing returns. Once an idea has been generated, it can be used many times by many different people at very low marginal cost. The first idea spreads, begets subsequent ideas, and so growth increases.

We are then left with the view that consequentialism is strongest when we pursue values that are high in absolute importance.

We can be, and must be, partially utopian in our personal and political commitments. We should not be afraid to think in terms of the big picture, rather than evaluating everything on a case-by-case basis.