Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…In the book, and, I guess, here so far, you’ve been focusing overwhelmingly on the importance of increasing economic growth, kind of getting to a better future faster. When we’re talking about growth here, we might imagine time on the X axis and welfare being generated in the universe on the Y axis, and you want to increase that faster. Why focus on increasing the rate rather than making sure that that doesn’t go to zero? Well, keep in mind the core recipe is the rate of sustainable economic growth. If it’s going to go to zero, you’re knocked out of the box. So you’re maximizing across both of those dimensions, and I think, empirically, there are a large class of cases where more growth and more stability come together. National defense is the easiest way to see that. If your society stays poor, someone will take you over. And those who take you over are probably nasty and will harm you. It’s not the only way in which growth and sustainability come together. But at most margins, they do. So there’s a wide enough class of cases where we can do both things at the same time. I would note that earlier versions of this book — you know, I worked on this for about 20 years — the earlier versions had much, much more on existential risk, and it took me years to cut those out. I never repudiated any of the ideas. They just came up in enough other books. I felt I wanted to stick to my core notion of growth more than existential risk and stability. Okay, that’s answering some of my questions. Because in the book, you write, “Policies that prioritize growth at breakneck speed are frequently stable. The average civilization endured only 400 years, and this number appears to be declining. Our path in the future requires a tightrope act, balancing progress and stability along the way. And we should believe that the end of the world is a terrible event, even if that collapse comes in the very distant future. Similarly, the continual persistence of civilization 300 years from now is much better than having no further civilization at that time.” But then so much of the book is dedicated to economic policy and how would we increase growth rather than focusing on this other word, sustainability — what are the biggest threats to sustainability in the future? And you’re just saying it’s been done elsewhere, so you wanted to focus on the growth.…

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