Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…As far as I know, there’s almost no moral philosophers who support discounting purely the welfare of people in the future. But then a lot of people throughout society, I guess influenced by economics, don’t share that view. What do you think’s going on there? Is this potentially one of the biggest moral mistakes that we’re making, and philosophers should be shouting about this much more? Philosophers and economists should be shouting about it much more. I think some of the problem is a political one. I find it relatively easy to convince a lot of philosophers the moral rate of time discount should be zero, but relatively hard to get them to accept the practical implications of that, namely, that ongoing economic growth is a very, very positive thing — say, more important than redistributing income. Economists who tend to be more market-oriented — even economists somewhat to the left are more market-oriented than most philosophers — they’re so trained that there’s some embedded positive real rate of interest in an economy that to then get them to accept a moral framework, we are talking about well-being and macro effects and long periods of time. To think in those terms and come up with the right answer of zero — that’s the problem there. But economists tend to be pretty enthusiastic about economic growth because they study it, and they see its benefits pretty clearly. If people aren’t convinced by this argument . . . You were just pointing out to me that there’s a new book published called Time Biases. Have you managed to read that yet?…

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