Model Argument Against Benjamin Friedman
Not against the idea that growth is good (heaven forbid), but against what Friedman says is good about it.
(Cogency warning: this is a sketch, and only sketch. Blog as dialectical scratchpad.)
Friedman argues that economic growth “fosters greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness, and dedication to democracy,” and that these are moral goods.
This is a varied list, is it not? Let’s just assume that Friedman is arguing that growth actually produces more fairness and democracy and not just “commitment” and “dedication.” Anyway, many of the things on the list strike me as the vehicles through which growth creates moral consequences.
This of course all depends on what you think “morality” is about. What do I think morality is about? I think morality is, on the one hand, about people realizing the ends that make their lives meaningful and, on the other, about the constraints on individual and collective opportunistic behavior that enable individuals to realize their meaningful ends in cooperation with others.
It turns out that my foundational theory of what morality is FOR says that the function of morality is, by and large, to enable gains from cooperation. That is, the point of morality is to produce cooperative surpluses. (That morality does enable gains from cooperation is an evolutionary possibility condition for morality. If it didn’t enable cooperative gains by constraining opportunistic behavior, morality wouldn’t exist.) But economic growth just is periodic expansion in the overall size of the surplus in the broader network of cooperation. So, the way I see it, economic growth is more or less what morality is for.
For instance, fairness matters because cooperative surpluses matter. If we cannot divide the gains from cooperation according to terms that each party finds mutually agreeable, then we will not cooperate, and so there will be no gains to divide. Fairness is morally desirable because gains from cooperation are morally desirable. If growth produces more fairness, then great, because fairness leads to cooperation, which leads to cooperative surpluses, and better cooperation leads to bigger surpluses, which is what we want! The moral consequence of fairness is: growth! And if Friedman is right and fairness is a moral consequence of growth, then growth is a moral consequence of itself. Growth is its own reward!
Surplus is desirable because we’re individually better off with a piece of the surplus than without a piece. That’s why we cooperate. And by “better off” I mean: helps us realize our meaningful ends. I actually mean more than that. The surplus often opens up the space of ends, making formerly infeasible ends feasible. Some of these ends will be more meaningful for us than the ends in the pre-surplus feasible set. So surpluses can make available more meaningful ends, and therefore more meaningful lives. And meaningful lives is the real bottom line.
If increasing cooperative surpluses in the service of meaningful lives is what morality is for, then it may seem that growth is basically what morality is for. Maybe we’ve got a scalability issue here, and surpluses arising from huge impersonal networks of cooperation have too many negative external effects, and so defeat the ability to put our shares of the surplus to use in building meaningful lives. Morality collapses in on itself at a certain scale. I doubt it. But the real point is that this is a question about whether morality is scalable or self-defeating. If we can point out that growth has moral consequences, but all we’re doing when we point that out is that growth helps consolidate the preconditions for growth, then we will have gotten exactly nowhere.
Either growth facilitates our ability to live ever more meaningful lives in cooperation with one another or it doesn’t. If it does, that’s the worthy moral consequence of growth. If growth does that in part by promoting itself through increasing cosmopolitanism, broadening opportunity, increasing demand for liberal political institutions, etc., then great. But we should just take the argument straight home to meaningful lives rather then getting hung up in the socio-political instrumentalities. If growth doesn’t facilitate our ability to live ever more meaningful lives in cooperation with one another, then growth is immoral, even if the antecedents of growth are morality itself. Then our task would be to pick out where the scale problem begins, and try to refurbish morality, and our moral sensbility, to reflect its own limitations of scope.
Well, I’ve got some real problems with that, but it was fun! What’s your beef?
February 15th, 2006 22:13
I like it! The purely logical part of me submits that cooperation is good IFF it allows human genetic traits to propogate and increase in number. That suggests one limit to scale - when we get so rich and powerful that we stop reproducing and human genetic variability and richness decreases.
For the more emotioanl side of me, cooperation is the best way to move humanity off of a single planet, thus reducing the possibility of human extinction. Once we reach the point where we can no longer become extinct, growth and cooperation are no longer strictly necessary.
There’s probably more than one interesting short story and possibly an interesting novel in those concepts.
February 16th, 2006 00:17
Interesting post.
Although for that socialist John Dewey — as it is for all progressives — growth (not nature, not history) is the only standard for morality. An example of how this plays out is that one can only tell the health of a political community by how ever more democratic it is constantly becoming. Dangerous idea, to say the least! (But then a lot of people are under the dangerous illusion that democracy and tyranny are necessarily inconsistent).
February 16th, 2006 10:27
Very interesting post. One quick question: if growth doesn’t facilitate our ability to live ever more meaningful lives in cooperation with one another, does it necessarily inhibit that ability? If not, then growth is not immoral (according to your definition), but rather amoral. Is this possible, and does it matter?
February 16th, 2006 10:38
Brad, Great point. I think that’s a real third option.
One of my problems with my argument is that I need to address the egalitarian critique. If the market surplus is divided unfairly, it may be that it enables people at the top to live ever more meaningful lives, but the externalities of the exchange network fall most heavily on those at the bottom, impeding their ability to put their share of the surplus to meaningful use. So growth could be both facilitating and impeding meaningful lives all at once.
If this was true, then it’s a classic recipe for instability. To my mind, a big part of the point of the Rawlsian difference principle is to guard against this kind of destabilizing inequity. If the less well off revolt against the system, out of a sense of unfairness, then that is withdrawal of cooperation, and the size of the surpluses will contract.
This is in fact what is brilliant about Friedman’s argument. His argument is the answer to the ealitarian critique. He is saying, in effect, that growth tends to self-correction. That it endogenously creates demand for the resolution of destabilizing inequity. What he leaves out is that the good thing about this is that by serving fairness growth enables yet more growth.
February 16th, 2006 15:17
“So, the way I see it, economic growth is more or less what morality is for”
I like it. I like it a lot.
I then maul this into “Morality is a derivative of economics”.
It rather neatly describes why there is divergence of “morality” in different cultures whom have had to arrive at different solutions to their historical challenges. It also is very effective at describing the variation of morality within a given culture across the financial strata, both long term and short term. In other words, Long term poverty, or depravity of those in excess wealth, as well as crimes of opportunity, such as looting, are all equally described.
It is helpfull in reasoning through a debate I am having on whether morality is instinctual, and thus geneticly fixed, or it is learned.