So the core thesis of the book is that long term growth is a moral imperative.
The main critique in the review is that the book is not actionable, since it's hard to know in advance what will lead to growth.
I'm not sure the critique makes sense. It's valuable to have a policy north star from an ethical perspective. Although it's hard to know what will lead to long run growth, at a minimum it's possibl to know what will destroy growth.
If that is the conclusion I think it is correct. It has been shown time and time again that countries become successful not by being productive as such, but by not being unproductive. The most important factors for success are:
1. Staying out of wars, disputes and conflicts. 2. Economic and social equality. 3. Functional society and industries.
Essentially all countries who do badly fail at that. They are involved in conflicts, they have hierarchical societies and their industries are administrative, rather than technological.
So now you might ask, what about the US? It is certainly involved in wars, have inequality and dysfunctional society. Right, but mainly for part of society. The middle class and upper middle class have mostly been spared from any effects of that, at least until recently. Which means that this part of society is very successful.
> at a minimum it's possibl to know what will destroy growth.
can you name a few of the things we definitely know will destroy growth?
i'm asking because i hear "this will destroy growth" as an argument against policies i like (e.g.: a 70% marginal tax rate, controls on pollution) and i often think this is FUD.
I don't see why hypothetical people have any moral weight. Future people aren't as important as present people, no matter how many of them you imagine, because they aren't real. IMO the sole reason to care about the future of humanity is that a great many real, non-hypothetical people want to have children, and because those children will be born without their consent, we have a duty to provide a livable world for them.
So let's say that you have a magic button that will give every person on Earth now living a 10% improvement in their material living conditions for the rest of their lives -- and will completely destroy the world in 150 years.
That gives everyone now living a chance to have children who live full and complete lives. Grand children and great grandchildren maybe not so much.
Is it uncomplicatedly the obvious right thing to do to press the button? If not, I think you and Cowen are expressing similar or the same ideas in different ways.
I'd press it only if it wouldn't kill anyone, which would require the unlikely scenario of all humans agreeing to stop breeding. What I reject is the idea that "be fruitful and multiply" is an inherent good. If future humans actually do decide on voluntary extinction, that's their choice and they are doing nothing wrong. If hypothetical future people have rights [edit: I do believe hypothetical future people have rights in the sense of it being wrong to take actions that are reasonably expected to set up a causal chain of event that will kill people who don't yet exist, but I do not believe a future with 100B humans is better than one with 10B humans with the same quality of life], why don't we also ban gay marriage and votes for women etc. because it offends past people?
It most likely won't kill anyone who currently exists, which are the only people you're claiming have rights.
My point is that once you start considering the counterfactual world of 150 years from now in terms of, "What harm will it do to the people alive then," there's very little daylight between your views and Cowen's.
I don't think that Cowen believes that there's an absolute moral importance to have children, for example.
If you reject free will from a philosophical point of view (regardless of whether it's "real" or not in any other sense), then morality becomes nonsense. If you say that the hypothetical future people are actually already there in 4D spacetime, then nothing can be right or wrong because it's all fated. Morality assumes humans are able to alter the future.
This is a confusion. One's own decisions are part of the physics that relate the present to the future. Basically you're doing a half-correction here; you're taking the naive view that one's decisions are something separate and outside determinism, and then noting, aha, but there is nothing separate and outside determinism, and then concluding that therefore there are no decisions; rather than properly adjusting the notion of decision to a deterministic world. Because decisions definitely happen! It's just that the idea of them as something separate and outside of physics was a bad description, not something that valid inferences can be drawn from.
The Library of Congress also decided to archive Tyler's blog, Marginal Revolution [0].
Tyler has interesting views, and some of them are rather unconventional. E.g., he thinks that religion is good predictor of economic growth (citing Mormons as an example). Although Mormonism might be a good predictor of economic growth, I disagree that we should have more Mormons or religious groups. He said it in a podcast with Erik Torenberg [1].
My startup has been awarded his grant called Emergent Ventures [2] and have met and talked to him in that context. Super interesting person and has a surprisingly great network in Silicon Valley, although he is based in the East Coast. For example next week, he's interviewing Sam Altman [3].
The main critique in the review is that the book is not actionable, since it's hard to know in advance what will lead to growth.
I'm not sure the critique makes sense. It's valuable to have a policy north star from an ethical perspective. Although it's hard to know what will lead to long run growth, at a minimum it's possibl to know what will destroy growth.