Comments on: Moral Philosophy and Economic Growth

By: BillKorner

BillKorner — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 05:05:16 +0000

Yes, Hirsch is indispensible as I think Friedman agrees.

One reason philosophers have not emphasized the importance of economic growth is that its importance is too uncontroversial.

A better question, I think, is why philosophers have not taken more part in analyzing economic theories of what economic growth is and what’s so good about it. This is where the rubber really hits the road in deciding how growth figures into a social welfare function. And I think that philosophers have something to contribute to understanding the nature of such a function and the relation between its role in welfare economics and social policy making.

By: Joe

Joe — Sat, 04 Feb 2006 15:55:58 +0000

Hi. Interesting discussion. By happenstance I stumbled upon your site. I am a recent graduate in Philosophy and Poli Sci, I studied Egalitarianism extensively for my senior thesis and will soon be applying to go to grad school. I have two books that might or might not add to this debate. One is “The Limits of Social Growth”, by Fred Hirsch. His main argument that there is social, not physical limits to economic growth. There is a disjunct between material and positional goods, and Hirsch separates these very adroitly. Its a great read.
Two, Amartya Sen wrote a great work called “Developement as Freedom”. I have only browsed through it, so I have nothing really to add other than it touches on some of the themes here.
With economic growth, there is always the murky waters of defining what is “good” for an individual, and how material and positional goods fit into that discussion. Absolute scales don’t always work for assigning “value” to goods, so while having more might mean a higher material value, it might not correlate to a higher positional value, or vice versa.
Rousseauian paradoxes abound! I love it. Thanks for the time.

By: Russ Hicks

Russ Hicks — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 06:46:56 +0000

I thought of a book I own but haven’t read, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism by Michael Novak. A quick check of “economic growth” in the index led to a couple of places where he asserts that economic growth is necessary for democracy, but he doesn’t really develop an argument on this at least where I checked…

By: Francois Tremblay

Francois Tremblay — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 20:50:36 +0000

Here is the URL to the answer I posted on my blog :
http://radicallibertarians.blogspot.com/2006/02/morality-of-growth.html

My basic point is that the question is too restrictive.

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 20:38:33 +0000

Yeah, I’ll put 5 dollars down!

(I figured the nanotech joke referced a book maybe tyler cowen or you made fun of a while back.)

By: Will Wilkinson

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 16:47:13 +0000

Tim, The nanotech part was a joke. But I’ll put five bucks on it against catastrophic global warming!

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 16:04:37 +0000

“I am shocked because there does not appear to be a single major work on the morally mandatory character of improving the quantity and quality of holdings and life options, which, on its face, strikes me as a lot more important.”

Well, even if this improvment is more important than equality, meeting basic needs (sufficiency) for all seems a lot more urgent than this improvement. If these two conflict, I do not see how pursuing the improvement for some/many people is “morally mandatory”.

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 15:29:23 +0000

That should be “eternal middle age” not “external middle age”.

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 15:28:03 +0000

I’m willing to bet on his global warming scenario rather than your external middle age thanks to nanotech cell-repair.

Yes, Barry’s book came out last year.

By: Will Wilkinson

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 05:13:48 +0000

Tim, Awesome. Thanks. This book came out last year?

When someone says “the only alternative” the red flags go up. How’s this for an alternative: “over the next fifty years resources will be superabundant, population will peak then begin to contract, and global warming will have some undetermined adverse and positive effects.” I am willing to bet Brian Barry about this. Then again, he’ll be dead in fifty years, and thanks to nanotech cell-repair, I’ll be an eternal 45.

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 04:52:43 +0000

Will-
The last chapter of Brian Barry’s latest book, Why Social Justice Matters (2005) is called “Justice or Bust”.
The chapter begins: “Over the next fifty years, renewable resources will continue to become scarcer, world population will grow and global warming will have more and more adverse effects. The only alternative is a nuclear holocaust, which I would not recommend as a solution.”

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 04:42:08 +0000

I think Marxian types argued in the 1970s that continual economic growth was needed for the legitimacy of capitalist societies in the eyes of its citizens; however (it was claimed) continual economic growth could not last forever, so neither could liberal legitimacy.

By: Jacob T. Levy

Jacob T. Levy — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 03:25:16 +0000

Hm. Lots of libertarianish folk think that absolute deprivation is morally much more consequential than relative poverty. Growth as a value looks, to a straight distributivist, like caring more about [intergenerationally] relative wealth than like a concern with absolute well-being.

*If* (I assume counterfactually) it were the case that there was a maximum sustainable per capita income, then it’s hard to see what the moral advantage would be of getting there more slowly, with steady year-on-year growth, than of getting there right away, with growth ceasing thereafter. Similarly, even without the maximum-sustainable premise, if there’s some threshold of material well-being that’s morally very important, then it’s hard to see what’s better about *growth* than about *getting to that level.*

That is, it would be hard from a strictly what-stuff-does-each-person-have perspective.

If Will is right– and I think he is– that steady year-on-year growth is good for things like stable liberal democratic government, then that changes things. But it changes things in ways that are intellectually unfamiliar either to most welfarist utilitarians or to early Rawls and his progeny.

(I strongly suspect that Jon Elster and/or Adam Przeworski have written something like what Will’s looking for.)

By: Kent Guida

Kent Guida — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 16:05:55 +0000

Here’s a question for all you economists:
When did “economic growth” as the term is now used become common? Was there a comparable term used before that? Don’t recall Adam Smith, for example, saying anything about it.
If it is a term that did not come into use until the second half of the 20th century, that would help explain why it is not a common subject of political philosophy. That, and the fact that virtually no one writing about political philosophy knows diddly about economics — eg Rawls

By: Matt

Matt — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 04:11:20 +0000

Hi Will,

I don’t have anything substantial to add to what’s above, but in case you’ve not seen it Joseph Stiglitz has a very interesting review of Friedman’s book in the Nov/Dec. 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs. The review touches on some of the issues you mention. I’ve not read Friedman’s book so can’t say more on it.