Stubborn Attachments

Stubborn Attachments, by Tyler Cowen, attempts to build a moral framework for how we should think about the long-run future, arguing that sustained economic growth ought to be treated as a near-sacred value that we sacrifice for and defend.

Cowen's central claim is that compounding growth, extended over centuries, swamps almost every other consideration we might weigh. Because small differences in the growth rate produce enormous differences in wealth and wellbeing generations from now, he argues we should adopt what he calls a low discount rate on the future and treat the welfare of people not yet born as roughly as important as our own. It's a provocative starting point, and one that lingers in the mind well after you close the book.

Unfortunately, the book spends far more time in the seminar room than it does on the ground. Cowen circles the same abstractions repeatedly, wealth-plus, the veil of ignorance, the redemptive value of growth, without ever grounding them in the kind of concrete detail that makes an argument stick. I kept waiting for the chapter that would show me what any of this looks like in practice, and it never really arrived.

That is my core frustration with the book, and the reason it earns two stars: it is simply too philosophical. Cowen is content to gesture at conclusions and then retreat into caveats about how uncertain we should be, how much we cannot know, how our intuitions might mislead us. By the end I understood the shape of his argument but had almost nothing I could actually do with it. A framework that tells you growth matters enormously but declines to say much about how to produce it feels incomplete.

There are worthwhile ideas buried here, and readers who enjoy pure moral philosophy may find more to chew on than I did. But for a book that positions itself as a guide for how to think and act, it left me with a great deal of theory and very little traction. I came away admiring the ambition and wishing Cowen had written something far more practical.