Economic Growth and the Interests of Future (and Past and Present) Generations: A Comment on Tyler Cowen

What principles vis-à-vis future generations should govern our policy choices? Tyler Cowen argues for a “Principle of Growth”: “We should make political choices so as to maximize the rate of sustainable economic growth.”1 Economic growth means the growth of inclusive gross domestic product (GDP), not just marketed goods and services, but also leisure time, household production, and environmental amenities.2 Cowen, as I read him, suggests that the Principle of Growth is justified by a welfarist, consequentialist moral theory. The core of the argument is that increasing economic growth both increases average wellbeing in future generations, and increases the well-being of the worst off in future generations (so there’s a distributive benefit as well).3 He worries about the nonconsequentialist moral precepts of commonsense morality, and suggests that those might be handled through a rights constraint, incorporated in a Modified Principle of Growth.4 I find welfare consequentialism quite plausible, so for purposes of this Response I will ignore rights and other nonconsequentialist constructs. I want instead to focus on a worry about the Principle of Growth that arises within welfare consequentialism. Welfare consequentialists say that the moral appropriateness of a choice is determined by its possible outcomes, and that the goodness of an outcome is determined solely by facts about individual welfare. To put this in the language of normative economics, welfare consequentialism says to maximize a social welfare function whose arguments are individual utilities, measuring each individual’s well-being.5