Stubborn Attachments, Tyler Cowen
Although this is a book of mostly economics by an economist, it's really a long essay on moral philosophy, and Tyler Cowen is probably best thought of as a philosopher who specialises in economics. One of the advantages of that approach is that rather than spending all his time talking about policy, Cowen argues for a philosophy of ethics that is, to some extent, policy neutral. Once you accept his conclusion, you can then start talking about how to implement it.
The main arguments are that economic growth is the primary driver of moral good and that long-run time-horizons matter much more than we think and we should act accordingly. The simple conclusion is to therefore maximise sustainable long-term economic growth. This will produce a world with more plural goodness in.
It is clear from the argument that this is not just a sophist's way of arguing for laissez-faire, supply side, children killing, Tory economics. But it is also clear that there is much more philosophical and justification for markets, growth and prosperity than there is for immediate redistribution (although Cowen favours some redistribution).
And Cowen is not concerned with brute money. He prioritises Wealth Plus, which covers GDP, leisure, unpaid work and other wellbeing measures. He notes that it is countries with high levels of Wealth Plus that develop a large basket of plural goods, ranging from lower infant mortality to better women's rights.
And this bundling cuts both ways. He is concerned with global warming and wants us to take a more long-term approach to fixing it. It represents a risk to long-run growth and we ought to accept some of the up-front costs of preventing it from causing harm, especially as those costs are likely to be recouped with catch up growth.
My favourite section was about the epistemic problem and the extent to which we can know what the consequences of our actions are. This is a succinct and straightforward account of the philosophy underlying the idea that we don't know what effect we have on the world at small, individual levels. But we can make sensible decisions about larger, more long-run events.
I can't tell you how the effect of slowing for a light ripples out across the town I live in. It might be the start of a chain that leads to the next Hitler being conceived. But we do have much greater certainty that preventing a terrorist attack is worth doing. This, combined with the roughly equivalent principle, (which talks about what sort of differences between two options actually matter), gives a solid foundation to common sense morality in politics.
You know the sensation. You see people endlessly arguing about tinkering policies, a few million here, a regulation there, that in the long run don't actually do anything much. I remember Cameron's family intervention policy, designed to help "fix" those families who suffer from intergenerational worklessness and other problems, ended up being studied and reported as having had basically no effect.
To it's believers, this was not part of the original discussion. That's because they believe in family and work and other values. All good stuff and I'm with them. But we get so bogged down in the immediate that we put far more energy into policies like that rather than thinking about maximising long-run growth as a whole.
This book is a short, challenging account of some accessible ideas from economics and moral philosophy about how we could think differently to improve the world. It's the sort of book I wish more people with passionate political beliefs would read. And it's perhaps the best crash course in ethics and economics I can think of. I would give it to any intelligent young person interested in broad societal questions who was being duped by humanities or politics teachers into taking the sort of intuitive approach to these topics that leads intelligent people into stupid thinking.