Stubborn Attachments

What single choice today could make your great-grandchildren dramatically freer, healthier, and more fulfilled? In Stubborn Attachments, Tyler Cowen argues that the answer is to orient your personal ethics and our public policy around one big idea: maximize sustainable economic growth—subject to near-absolute human rights. Cowen contends that growth, properly understood, is a moral engine that compounds into vast increases in human well-being and other plural values over time. But to stick with that choice, you must learn to think far into the future, embrace rules and rights, and keep your cool under deep uncertainty.

Cowen’s claim is bold: if you get the growth rate a bit higher and keep it sustainable, the compounded benefits will dwarf the short-run trade-offs and pull along other values like health, education, opportunity, culture, and even mercy. He calls the target "Wealth Plus"—a richer measure than GDP that folds in leisure, household production, and environmental quality. The upshot is a practical ethic you can live by: prioritize policies and norms that raise the long-run growth rate, protect core rights as side-constraints, and cultivate the faith and patience needed to value people who don’t yet exist.

Why Growth Is a Moral Priority

Cowen asks you to imagine a "Crusonia plant"—a mythical crop that yields more every year, compounding its bounty without extra work. Sustainable growth, he argues, is the social analogue. When we build productive capacity, good institutions, and new ideas, we set up a self-renewing process that keeps lifting lives. History backs this: in 1900, fewer than a quarter of U.S. homes had running water, gas or electric lighting, or refrigerators. Today, nearly all do. Work hours fell, life expectancy surged, and common killers like polio and typhoid retreated. The big wins came not from one-time windfalls but from decades of cumulative growth (see also Steven Pinker’s broader case in Enlightenment Now).

The case isn’t just domestic. Migration to richer economies multiplies a person’s earnings and life chances, while remittances and return migration spread know-how back home. R&D done in rich countries diffuses globally (Cowen cites estimates that modest R&D boosts in leading economies raise output worldwide). In that light, a pro-growth agenda in wealthy nations is not parochial; it’s a cosmopolitan lever that helps the global poor, albeit with lags and imperfections.

Thinking in Deep Time

To see why small gains in growth dominate, you have to think over very long horizons. At two percent annual growth, incomes double roughly every 35 years; at one percent, you wait nearly 70. Cowen shows that if U.S. growth had been just one point lower from 1870 to 1990, 1990 America would have been no richer than 1990 Mexico. That’s the power of compounding in reverse. He argues we should hold a "deep concern for the distant future," rejecting the habit of heavily discounting future people’s well-being. He even offers an intuition pump from Einstein’s relativity: there’s no good reason to care less about someone simply because they’re farther away in time (just as we wouldn’t care less for an astronaut whose clock runs slower on a near-light-speed journey).

Rules, Rights, and Uncertainty

Cowen is a two-thirds utilitarian and an "obsessive about rules." He insists that core human rights must constrain growth-chasing—"nearly absolute" side-constraints that keep us from trading torture or murder for gains. He also tackles a common critique: if the long run is radically uncertain, won’t consequentialism paralyze us? He flips that worry. When the stakes are massive and near-term (e.g., stopping a bioterror attack), consequences matter decisively despite long-run unknowns. When stakes are tiny and ambiguous (e.g., a dog’s sprained leg in a D-Day thought experiment), don’t let small, fuzzy considerations dominate vast, uncertain ones. The remedy is to "think big": bundle decisions toward large, robust gains—like growth and institutional stability—that can rise above the froth of uncertainty.

Core Rule

Maximize the sustainable rate of economic growth (Wealth Plus), subject to near-absolute human rights.

What This Means for You

Cowen’s framework realigns familiar debates. Redistribution? Do it when it strengthens long-run growth—think education, nutrition, or stabilizing safety nets that maintain social trust. Immigration? It’s among the most powerful anti-poverty tools we have. Environmental policy? Focus on growth-threatening risks (e.g., climate-induced storms) even as you accept some one-time adjustment costs (like coastal relocations) if the growth engine is preserved. And in your own life, the ethic looks like this: work hard, build skills, save and invest, start or improve institutions, contribute to social trust, and give charitably at the margin. Cowen himself donates this book’s earnings to "Yonas," a guide he met in Ethiopia, aiming for a tangible, growth-enhancing lift for a family and community.

By the end, you’re invited to hold two convictions at once: be stubborn about the big rules—growth and rights—and modest about the detailed policy means, where you’re probably wrong more often than not. If you can do that, Cowen suggests, you’ll help make our civilization stronger, more durable, and more wondrous for people yet unborn.

Cowen wants you to care about the right kind of growth. He calls it "Wealth Plus," a measure that goes beyond GDP to include leisure, household production, and environmental quality. The point isn’t to nickel-and-dime national accounts; it’s to sharpen your moral target. If a policy raises headline GDP but destroys the climate, burns out workers, or wrecks families, it fails the Wealth Plus test. But if it raises productivity while preserving or expanding leisure, strengthens households, and sustains nature, it’s like planting a Crusonia tree—delivering compounding benefits across generations.

From Free Lunches to Crusonia Plants

Economist Frank Knight’s mythical "Crusonia plant" grows more valuable every period with no extra effort. Cowen adopts it as a metaphor for social processes—think institutions and norms—that autonomously generate rising value over time. Sustained, positive-sum growth fits. Once you’ve seeded markets that reward discovery, law that protects property and contracts, and culture that prizes education, value accumulates with less and less handholding. When you’re torn between policies, "choose the Crusonia plant"—the option with ongoing, self-sustaining yields.

([Context]: This echoes Paul Romer’s "ideas as non-rival goods"—once an idea exists, many can use it at near-zero marginal cost, fueling increasing returns.)

Proof from History: The 1900–Today Revolution

Cowen catalogs how growth remade daily life. In 1900, only about 24% of U.S. homes had running water; a mere 12% had gas or electric lighting, and 18% had refrigerators. Nearly half of households had more than one person per room, and the high school graduation rate hovered near 6%. Work was punishing—2,800–3,300 annual hours in the mid-19th century vs. 1,400–2,000 today. Deadly disease was common: U.S. presidents from Washington to Garfield suffered malaria; polio and typhoid were routine. With modern growth came antibiotics, vaccines, central heating, cars, air travel—and enough wealth to fund science itself.

If an 18th-century visitor met Bill Gates today, Cowen suggests, what would most astonish him are not Gates’s yachts but the shared amenities you take for granted: flush toilets, smartphones, air conditioning, and cheap flights. The "splendors" aren’t baubles; they’re autonomy machines—ways you learn, move, and choose your life path.

Does More Money Buy Happiness?

Yes—more than you think. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers find a roughly log-linear link between income and self-reported well-being, even at higher incomes (Angus Deaton finds similar results). Some older studies saw a "flatline" at moderate income, but Cowen argues language and aspiration effects muddy surveys. People recalibrate what they call "happy" as life options expand. Meanwhile, revealed preference speaks loudly: people strive for higher incomes and migrate to rich countries. Within a nation, wealthier individuals report higher happiness on average, even if status games nibble at the edges.

Global Spillovers and Catch-Up

Growth in the rich world rarely stops at its borders. Educational exchanges seed tech hubs abroad (think Indian and Israeli ties to Silicon Valley). Migrants earn more, remit cash home, and often return with skills and networks. China’s "catch-up" growth—adopting Western technologies and exporting to wealthy markets—moved hundreds of millions out of poverty. As China and India surged, global inequality fell, even as some rich-country middle classes felt squeezed. Today much of Africa is picking up steam, boosted by technology diffusion (e.g., the leapfrog to mobile phones).

Key Claim

Economic growth—properly defined as Wealth Plus—is the only durable exit from squalor and the best overall bet for expanding plural human goods.

Sustainability and Fragility

Sustainable growth never means "growth at all costs." Civilizations are fragile; Michael Shermer’s informal database puts average duration near 400 years, and post-Rome closer to 300. Some modernizers went too fast and cracked (the Shah of Iran’s forced sprint comes to mind). Wealth insulates against shocks (Greece’s crisis shows what happens when buffers fail). That’s why Wealth Plus builds in environmental stewardship and social stability—because growth that breeds collapse isn’t growth at all.

Your takeaway: stop treating growth as a narrow economist’s fetish. See it as the moral flywheel behind better lives. Then ask of every big choice: will this raise the long-run rate of Wealth Plus?

If you undervalue future people, you’ll underinvest in their world. Cowen pushes you to shed the habit of "discounting" human well-being just because it lies in the future. He offers a simple norm: hold a deep concern for the distant future, and let that conviction guide trade-offs. In practice, that means favoring choices that, over time, produce clearly higher well-being—what he later formalizes as an "overtaking criterion."

Why Pure Time Discounting Fails

Economists often discount future dollars because a dollar today can be invested and grow. But that logic doesn’t apply cleanly to well-being. Cowen asks you to imagine a macabre comparison: with a 5% discount, one death today equals about 39 billion deaths 500 years from now. Or one life now could, in principle, outweigh the entire future of humanity if you look far enough out. Your moral intuitions likely balk. Future people will experience joys and losses just as vividly as you do; they’re not sitting around "impatiently" waiting for birth. So why count them less?

Cowen’s famous quip with Derek Parfit drives it home: would it justify your early cancer death to learn Cleopatra once wanted an extra dessert? If not, you already reject heavy pure time discounting of harms and benefits.

Einstein’s Astronaut and the Block of Time

Relativity offers another nudge. If we send astronauts close to light speed, their time dilates relative to ours; they’ll return to an Earth millions of years older. Should we value their safety less as their "now" diverges from ours? That seems absurd. On a "block universe" view, time is like another dimension; moral weight shouldn’t ebb only because something is farther along the axis. You wouldn’t devalue a suffering person because they’re far away in space; don’t do it because they’re far away in time.

Risk, Not Time, Justifies Some Discounting

Cowen concedes one adjustment: risk. If a benefit is uncertain, discount it by the chance it doesn’t arrive. But that move actually raises the stakes for making the future less risky. If climate change, pandemics, or wars imperil future well-being, you should invest now to reduce that risk. Paradoxically, discounting for risk is an argument for stronger long-run protection, not apathy.

When the Past Teaches You About Rates

Flip the arrow. If your ancestor stole $1,000 from mine in 1854, compounding it forward at 7% says you owe me over $65 million today. That’s implausible on its face; inheritances dissipate, and you probably don’t have that cash. The lesson? Simple compounding over very long spans can mislead moral accounting. By analogy, don’t use high discount rates to make future harms vanish, nor naive compounding to inflate past claims to absurdity.

The Overtaking Criterion

Cowen’s practical tool is the "overtaking criterion." Choose the path that, after some period, is systematically better and then stays better. If a policy causes a small, temporary cost now but reliably boosts the long-run level of Wealth Plus, take it. The criterion avoids forcing a precise discount rate while capturing the core intuition: sustained gains that clearly overtake and dominate should guide you.

Guiding Thought

If one growth path will unambiguously and durably overtake another—choose it, even if it requires giving up a discrete benefit today.

Gamma Discounting and Human Psychology

A cousin idea—"gamma discounting" (Martin Weitzman)—shows that uncertainty about future rates pushes effective discounting down over very long horizons. People also intuit this: they might treat today versus 40 years as very different, but 300 vs. 400 years as almost the same. These observations bolster Cowen’s central move: while you may not set discount to literal zero, your moral stance should grant the distant future substantial, not token, weight.

In your decisions—personal giving, voting, career, or investing—ask: which option creates an overtaking stream of benefits for future people? That’s the compass Cowen wants you to carry.

What do you do when people’s values clash? Cowen’s answer is to enlarge the frame until a clear preponderance of benefit emerges. Over long horizons, policies that raise the sustainable growth rate make most people much better off—so much so that they can resolve many aggregation problems that stump us in the short run. But the pursuit of growth sits under a strict canopy of rights: there are things you simply do not do, even for better averages.

From Arrow’s Impossibility to Practical Preponderance

Social choice theory (Arrow’s theorem) shows it’s hard to combine individual rankings into a coherent collective choice without paradox. Cowen doesn’t deny that. He argues instead that once you bring in information about happiness and well-being—and stretch the time horizon—many apparent deadlocks dissolve. A mere one-point increase in the growth rate, held over time, yields dramatic divergence: a 3:1 gap in aggregate output after about 110 years; a 5:1 gap after 161 years. If you define output as Wealth Plus, the associated health, education, leisure, and environmental gains scale with it.

Compare South Korea to the Democratic Republic of Congo over the last half-century. The long-run, growth-aligned path carried more of almost every plural value: living standards, women’s rights, education, and personal autonomy. These aren’t close calls once you look beyond the near term.

The Two Principles

Cowen distills his framework into two rules:

• Principle of Growth: Maximize the sustainable rate of Wealth Plus.
• Principle of Growth Plus Rights: Near-absolute human rights are side-constraints on the growth maximization project.

Rights are deliberately tough and non-tradable; otherwise, the compounding benefits of growth would steamroll them over long horizons. Think Nozick’s "side constraints," without endorsing every libertarian implication. These are prohibitions on murder, torture, and abuse, not positive entitlements that duplicate the growth goal.

Why Rules Matter (Even When Margins Are Small)

Consider Derek Parfit’s firing squad puzzle: if six shooters each fire into an innocent victim’s heart, can any single shooter be guilty when their "marginal product" is zero? Cowen says yes—because we judge the act under a generalizable rule: "don’t shoot innocents." If you focus only on marginal impact, you would license group atrocities where no single person is fully culpable. Many real situations rhyme with this (corruption, minor scientific shortcuts, casual abuses) where the grouped pattern is the problem, even if a single instance seems "harmless." Rules knit our choices into social patterns that matter.

Ethical Architecture

Let big rules govern: maximize sustainable growth; honor rights. Embed smaller norms within, and don’t get lost in case-by-case exceptions.

East Asia’s Ethical Achievement

For a real-world test, Cowen points to the East Asian growth miracles—Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and China (with sustainability caveats). These were not only economic feats; Cowen calls them "the highest manifestation of the ethical good in human history to date" because they lifted vast numbers into better lives. That’s a provocative framing, but it fits the two principles: they pursued growth broadly, often under improving institutions, and the results compounded across generations.

How You Use This

When debates deadlock—say, over a reform that raises growth but causes transition pain—zoom out. Ask whether the policy is likely to raise the long-run rate of Wealth Plus while respecting rights. If yes, recognize that over time the preponderance of benefits will grow large relative to transitional costs. It’s not a blank check for cruelty; it’s a disciplined way to choose in a plural world.

What if the future is so uncertain that you can’t credibly forecast consequences? Cowen embraces that uncertainty and uses it to strengthen, not weaken, a rules-and-rights framework. His move: focus on clearly large, near-term stakes where consequences matter; treat small, fuzzy stakes with humility; and let near-absolute rights protect us when the fog is thick.

When Consequences Clearly Count

Start with a vivid case. A terrorist brings an engineered pathogen to the U.S. If unleashed, a million die. Should you stop him? Of course. Even acknowledging long-run uncertainty—maybe the thwarted attack shifts who’s born next century—you still act. The short-run human stakes are large and robustly negative for civilization; a biowarfare cascade would breed chaos and tyranny. When immediate, massive harms loom, consequentialism bites hard despite the long-run fog.

The Dog’s Leg and the Principle of Roughness

Philosopher James Lenman offers a contrast. Suppose two D-Day beaches are tactical equals, but landing on the northern beach breaks a dog’s leg. Should that minor harm settle the choice? Probably not. Cowen articulates a "Principle of Roughness": when outcomes differ in complex, uncertain ways, small changes often don’t tip the scales. This is especially true when small and ambiguous harms sit next to massive, uncertain goods and evils.

Your lesson: elevate big, clear stakes above small, murky ones. That’s not callousness; it’s proportionality in a foggy world.

Why Near-Absolute Rights Fit

Consider a baited dilemma: kill one innocent baby to raise GDP by $5 billion. Economists sometimes price a statistical life near $5 million, but Cowen insists you’re asking the wrong comparison. It’s not "baby vs. $5B." It’s "baby vs. a froth of massive uncertainty with a $5B element." In that framed world, honoring the baby’s right not to be killed—your near-absolute rule—becomes the sane compass. The upside is highly uncertain; the moral downside is definite and grave.

There is an extreme edge-case exception: if aliens will otherwise destroy Earth, killing one to save all may be justified because there is no remaining uncertainty; everything ends. That’s "rights consequentialism" at the boundary of apocalypse, not a recipe for everyday trade-offs.

Lifeboat Ethics vs. Growth Ethics

In lifeboats—bounded contexts with little prospect of growth—benefits are small and zero-sum. There, rights claim more of the field: don’t toss a weak passenger overboard to eke out another hour. In growth-rich contexts with large, compounding stakes, orient to big, robust gains (e.g., institutional reforms that raise Wealth Plus) while preserving rights. Different settings, different emphases—but the same architecture.

Practical Signal

When you can’t see far, trust thick rules—especially rights—and favor actions with large, near-term benefits to civilization. Be modest about everything else.

Group Harms and the Need for Rules

Parfit’s firing squad puzzle (no single bullet was decisive) generalizes to many modern problems: a small bribe, a minor data fabrication, a "harmless" visa corner-cut. The grouped pattern destroys institutions. Rules against these are not fictions; they are civilization-preserving. Growth depends on trust; trust depends on rules observed even when the marginal personal gain seems harmless.

Cowen’s payoff to you is a way to avoid paralysis: anchor to big gains and strict rights in the face of radical uncertainty, and stop obsessing over small, noisy margins that won’t matter in reflective equilibrium.

How much do you owe strangers in need—and what form should that help take? Cowen embraces a strong cosmopolitan impulse but insists that, over the long run, your most binding obligation is to support sustainable growth. That reframes redistribution: do it up to the point (and in the ways) that maximize the rate of Wealth Plus. Beyond that, you risk eroding work, entrepreneurship, social trust, and even the political support needed for open, high-growth societies.

Why Not Extreme Self-Sacrifice?

Classic utilitarianism can look like a demand to give almost everything away—sell your baby to save others, or spend your whole career as a doctor in the poorest village. Cowen calls himself a "two-thirds utilitarian" and a pluralist: human flourishing isn’t one number, and justice sometimes trumps utility. More importantly, if everyone lived as a utility-maximizing ascetic, civilization would stall. No investment, no innovation, no institutions—no Crusonia plant. The obligation to the global poor is real, but the growth engine that helps them most must not be gutted to feed it.

Redistribution as Investment

Support transfers that boost growth and stability: nutrition for kids, schooling, and safety nets that keep people attached to the labor market and reduce desperation. Such spending can buy political loyalty and bolster social order—fertile ground for investment. But be wary of transfers that sap work incentives, encourage rent-seeking, or create cultures of dependency and crime. Cowen notes empirical links between bloated non-infrastructure spending and lower growth (with the caveat that traditional GDP is an imperfect proxy for Wealth Plus).

Immigration: The Silent Giant

Few policies fight poverty like migration. A Central American who moves to the U.S. typically sees large income gains; her kids do even better. She sends remittances home, magnitudes larger than most foreign aid. Return migrants and diasporas spread skills and open trade and tech channels (think India and Israel’s links to Silicon Valley). The richer the destination, the larger the gains. A generous but not unbounded welfare state actually helps here: enough support to integrate; not so much that voters revolt or immigration slams shut.

Who Should Sacrifice?

Cowen uses game theory to defuse the guilt trap. In many public-goods problems (like global poverty), "someone ought to do something," but it’s indeterminate who. The best outcomes arise when those with the lowest costs of sacrifice (saints, exceptionally motivated agents, or those with comparative advantage) take the lead. The rest of us should strengthen norms and honor those sacrifices so that, probabilistically, the right people step forward. Meanwhile, you should work hard, build institutions, save, and give at the margin—actions that, in aggregate, power the Crusonia plant.

A Personal Example

Cowen donates this book’s proceeds to "Yonas," an Ethiopian guide he met in Lalibela. The aim is a growth-enhancing boost to a family enterprise, using modern payments to cross borders quickly—living the creed of targeted, compounding aid.

The Temptation to "Help the Rich"

Here’s a provocative twist: if the rich earn higher returns (Thomas Piketty’s claim) and some share "trickles" down, a naive utilitarian might want to funnel more resources to the rich to speed growth. Cowen raises this as a reductio: growth-focused ethics still sits under rights, social stability, and political feasibility. Too much inequality can choke growth; taxing the poor for the rich violates fairness intuitions and may destabilize democracy. The practical lesson is subtler: protect and extend high-return activities (entrepreneurship, innovation ecosystems) without violating side-constraints or eroding cohesion.

In your own choices, ask of any transfer: does it strengthen a person’s or a society’s capacity to produce Wealth Plus tomorrow? If not, be cautious. If yes, that’s redistribution aligned with the world you want to bequeath.

If you’re going to chase growth, you need to know where it comes from. Cowen introduces two lenses: the Solow model (catch-up and technology) and increasing-returns models (ideas beget ideas). Both agree on this: ideas—the fruits of human reason—are the wellspring. But each lens pushes different intuitions you can use in policy and personal thinking.

Solow: Recover Fast, Focus on Tech Progress

In the Solow view, output comes from capital, labor, and technological progress. As capital deepens, returns fall; that’s why poor but well-governed countries can "catch up" quickly by adopting known tech. After World War II, Germany and Japan recovered rapidly: once capital was destroyed, returns to new investment were high, and adoption sped the bounce back. Long-run growth, however, comes mainly from technology—new ways to combine labor and capital more productively. Boost savings and you accelerate a transition, but you don’t permanently raise the steady-state growth rate unless tech progress itself speeds up.

Increasing Returns: Growth Breeds Growth

Paul Romer’s increasing-returns story emphasizes that ideas are non-rival—many can use them at once. The bigger the market, the stronger the incentive to invent; the more you invent, the richer the market becomes. Improvements beget improvements, making some shocks persistent. If you shrink an economy, you may downshift its innovation engine in a way that’s hard to reverse; if you expand it, you can set off virtuous circles. This picture raises the stakes: one-time hits aren’t always one-time—some bite into the growth rate itself.

Climate: Storms vs. Relocations

Cowen applies these models to environmental choices. Climate change may increase severe storms—ongoing hits that can lower growth by repeatedly destroying capital and scaring off investment. In contrast, some costs (like relocating coastal settlements) are one-time adjustments. A deep-future ethic tells you to prioritize risks that hit the growth rate (storms) over those that, while painful, are discrete (relocations). That’s a counterintuitive but powerful reordering of environmental priorities.

Institutional Persistence

Another lesson is persistence. Regions that were rich centuries ago—Roman territories, historical China, parts of England—tend to have better institutions and higher incomes today (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson; Comin, Easterly, and Gong). Prosperity and good governance reinforce each other. That makes boosting today’s institutions not just a local improvement but a gift with centuries-long echoes.

Operational Question

Does this policy change the growth rate—or is it a one-time level shift? Treat rate-changers as far more urgent.

Practical Bets You Can Make

Favor R&D, STEM education, and institutions of science; protect open trade and large markets; keep immigration channels for talent; and build legal rules that lower the cost of entrepreneurship. On climate, invest in resilience and mitigation where repeated shocks could erode growth. In your career, tilt toward work that creates scalable ideas, institutions, or platforms. These are the modern Crusonia seeds.

If you absorb one habit from this chapter, make it this: always ask "rate or level?" Then aim your effort where compounding is strongest.

Cowen refuses to collapse ethics into a single value. He’s a pluralist: flourishing includes well-being, justice, beauty, mercy, and different kinds of happiness. He’s also a two-thirds utilitarian: well-being carries major weight, but justice can trump it at times—you don’t harvest someone’s kidney because it would help more people. This outlook preserves common sense morality (work hard, care for family, be decent) while anchoring it to a growth-first ethic under rights.

Agonizing Less About Demands

Instead of browbeating you to give 50% of your income, Cowen asks you to do what common sense and growth ethics both endorse: be productive, save and invest, build and respect institutions, and give at the margin. That’s not a cop-out; it’s the operating system of a civilization that keeps compounding and, over time, helps the poor most. When game-theoretic indeterminacy clouds "who should sacrifice," strengthen norms so that low-cost sacrificers step up. You can still do more—you probably should—but not by wrecking the machine that produces the surplus.

The Elderly vs. the Young

Cowen wades into a thorny area: how we value life across ages. Using a "replacement" thought experiment, he argues we probably overinvest in extending elderly lives relative to investing in the young. The point isn’t that elders are disposable; it’s that in a world of scarce resources and compounding returns, dollars spent on children’s health, education, and opportunity often yield larger and longer-lasting gains in Wealth Plus. Political economy tilts the other way because the elderly vote at higher rates; a growth-first ethic corrects that bias.

Moral Humility About Policy Details

Even as he argues strongly for growth and rights, Cowen warns you to be epistemically modest about specific policy means. In politics, your favored approach might be the best of the lot, but you’re probably still wrong in absolute terms. Treat your ideological opponents with corresponding tolerance. The punchline: be stubborn about ends and rules; be humble about instruments.

Everyday Practice

Work, save, build, and contribute to norms of honesty and trust. Favor policies that invest in kids and future capacity. Argue for growth and rights with confidence—and argue for your favorite policy details with humility.

Utopian, But with Feet on the Ground

Cowen ends with a modest utopia: a society stubbornly attached to sustainable growth and rights, investing heavily in its future, guarding against fragility, and showing generosity at the margin. It’s open-ended—compatible with many "micro-visions" that don’t endanger the growth engine. If you feel a tug of skepticism, he shares that too. But he urges you to see your inner short-term pragmatist as a comforting voice that can deceive. We are wired to overweight the present. A better self leans into long horizons, faith in institutions, and the wonder of what compounding can bring.

That better self, he suggests, will make you a sturdier ally of future people who can’t vote, can’t pay you back, and yet depend on you all the same.