Stubborn Attachments

In On What Matters, Parfit charted out a new direction for moral inquiry: the “Triple Theory” and how it unifies rule consequentialism, Kantianism and Scanlonian contractualism. In Stubborn Attachments, Cowen does much the same for our economic priorities: growth as the only game in town.

The core precepts are simple: material wellbeing matters, exponential growth is awesome and the moral discount rate should be zero. What follows is that we should orient our economic policy towards growth. It underwrites all other social goods, and lets us postpone our zero-sum conflicts by directing us towards a positive-sum future.

In just 100 pages, Cowen stakes out a bold new set of priorities, and one which him and Collison would go on to formalise as Progress Studies.