Stubborn Attachments Is a Book about Uncertainty

A lot of smart people have reviewed^[1] Stubborn Attachments, Tyler Cowen's book about the importance of maximizing the rate of sustainable economic growth and respecting human rights. One question that keeps coming up in these reviews and discussions is "What’s the rights constraint doing in the book? Why are we supposed to promote rights at the same time as we pursue growth?"

Guesses include "Maybe the rights are just there to make the growth more palatable" and "Maybe it’s Straussian, meant to demonstrate that rights are silly".

However, I think both of these guesses are wrong. This question can be answered by saying that the fundamental idea of the book is not "economic growth is good" but rather "here's how to reason under extreme uncertainty", and that once you adopt Tyler's view about how to reason under extreme uncertainty, both principles (growth and rights) fall out as the only two important considerations.

The problem of the rights constraint

The question that one reviewer, Applied Divinity Studies ("ADS"), poses is "Why, in this concise, deliberate, and otherwise elegant philosophy, is there this weird side constraint?". There are a few reasons to worry about a side constraint:

1. Philosophies with more than one basic element are less elegant, and sometimes the truth is likely to be elegant. We don’t want to be adding epicycles in order to save a bad theory instead of choosing a better, simple theory
2. We'll have to do extra work to know how the two elements should trade off against each other in specific cases
3. Maybe the two elements are not actually basic and are both generated by another single, more basic, element that hasn’t been explained yet

The (unsatisfying) way ADS solves the problem

Applied Divinity Studies solves the problem of the rights constraint in the following unsatisfying (to me) way. First, ADS looks at the following possible answers to the question of "what's the rights constraint doing here?", and rejects them:

Rejecting bad views

1. "The side constraint is there as a diversion, meant to make the rest of the book more palatable"
2. "The side constraint is there because it's Straussian, meant to show us that rights are silly"

Both of these are rejected (rightly) because Tyler says no pretty explicitly in the book:

We need not defend such rules-based perspectives on the grounds that they are a highly practical "noble lie." It is nice to see the practical benefits of rules recognized, but the noble lie approach is too cynical. It assumes that rules are philosophically weak to begin with when they are not. So rather than viewing belief in strict rules as a noble lie, view it as a very important noble truth.

And then there's also this next possibility:

3. "The side constraint is there because liberties are essential to growth"
   ADS rejects this one by talking about how Tyler is actually advocating for something stronger than just liberties. Moreover, the example of China's growth, even under Mao, was not done in a very liberty-respecting way, making me pretty skeptical that this is a viewpoint we should have.

ADS's preferred view

Having rejected those 3 hypotheses, ADS settles on something like

4. "The side constraint is there because, if we followed the logic of maximizing sustainable economic growth, we'd end up in favor of economically convenient genocides. The only way to avoid being in favor of economically convenient genocides is to insist on human rights" (not a quote; my paraphrase of "the principle of growth alone does not ensure even the most basic of human rights" and the few paragraphs before it).

What this view means for the bigger argumentative structure of Stubborn Attachments

ADS thinks that the book has the following overall structure:

A. Pick a thing you value, any value at all
B. Well, look at that, it seems like economic growth trumps your value! You should pursue economic growth as a means to pursue your value
C. Oh, but then you might be inclined to do an economically convenient genocide, and that wouldn't be good. Worse, it'd undermine the claim that economic growth is a trump card over any value you might choose
D. So what if we just rule out doing economically convenient genocides?
E. Alright, let's put in this side constraint protecting rights so that the trump card remains intact
F. Therefore, the correct principles to shoot for are growth and rights at once

I think this is a plausible way to read the book, but I think that there's a more elegant answer that also makes better sense of other parts of the book.

My preferred view of the book's overall argumentative structure

Summary of the view

My preferred view of the book's overall argumentative structure is more like the following:

G. Good things are better than bad things
H. We need to act in order to achieve good things
I. But there's a huge froth of uncertainty, and our actions might be counterproductive
J. So we should have faith
K. And also we should only pursue the actions with really high expected value and which are likeliest to rise above the froth of uncertainty
L. The actions that pass this test best are growth and rights, so we have to pursue both

See the Addendum at the end for textual support for this reading.

Advantages of my view of the book’s structure

It seems to me that all of the following are better explained by my preferred view of the book's structure:

• the existence of chapter 6 "Must uncertainty paralyze us?",
• the discussions of faith,
• all the discussion of skepticism and belief
• the way rights are defended most explicitly

And most important, the reason for writing all this, I think my preferred view of the book's structure gives a good reason for the focus on rights rather than making it seem like a dangling afterthought.

Conclusion and miscellaneous

I'm moderately persuaded by the view described above of how the book's argumentative structure works. However, I don't really address whether that argument is a good one. Now that I've made my case for what I think Tyler is saying, I want to quickly turn to the question of whether I agree with what he's saying. I think that the answer is basically a yes, and for somewhat standard longtermist reasons: the future could be very long and could be very big. It's hard to imagine a cause more important than making people in the future wealthier and more capable.

Still, there are a few caveats that I'd like to make

1. There is of course a lot of bad stuff (severe poverty, war, factory farming) going on in the near-term. It would be wrong to view the book as a call to drop everything and maximize economic growth. It's great that people are working on fixing near-term problems. Even if we were to grant that maximizing long-term economic growth (and rights) were most important, it doesn't follow that every single person should be working on those all the time. We should be thinking on the margin here.
2. As Tyler has pointed out, animals have suffered tremendously as a result of our economic growth, and there's a chance that suffering will continue or grow in magnitude as people get wealthier and more able to afford meat.
3. The future could end up really bad, even if it's much more wealthy.

I'll end by noting one final thing about the book which I find striking. What other Most Important Priorities have you read about which give the average person a substantial role to play in the most important tasks ahead of us? What a rare thing! Everyone can be a steward of the glorious and wealthy future: everyone who upholds norms and keeps society a little more functional, everyone who makes a couple clever optimizations, everyone who safeguards some knowledge and passes it down to someone who can make more and better use of it, everyone who raises strong and capable and moral children. All of these are crucial tasks that can be fulfilled by a huge swath of the population. Few competing "Most Important Priorities" can offer such an uplifting and universal message. Environmentalism is a fine priority, but what is the average citizen to do in support of it? Recycle and vote for Dems? Doesn't seem nearly as impactful or consonant with what people will recognize as a good, moral life. Even taking the Giving What We Can pledge, a commendable action, feels a little small in significance when compared to the mission of stewardship here: it's only 10% of your money that you'd be giving away. "What about the other 90% of my focus and efforts? Are those just selfish?" you might ask. What I mean to say is that Stubborn Attachments is shockingly human-compatible, and that might be what excites me most about it.

Addendum: Textual support for my preferred view of the book's structure

H. We need to act in order to achieve good things

"I'm a skeptic, sure, but I'm a skeptic with a can-do temperament who realizes how paralyzing skepticism can be"

The name of chapter 6, "Must uncertainty paralyze us?"

I. But there's a huge froth of uncertainty, and our actions might be counterproductive

"We need to be more modest when it comes to what we can possibly know ... Reconciling the need to accommodate both skepticism and belief is one of the trickiest tasks for any philosophy"

"Given such long-run uncertainty, how can we possibly pretend to assess the good and bad consequences of our actions?"

The discussion under the heading "Why the case for rights is compelling, and which rights are the important ones": "in this instance it is wrong to set up the comparison as 'baby's life vs. $5 billion' and then have to choose. The correct comparison is 'baby's life vs. a froth of massive uncertainty with a gain of $5 billion tossed in as one element of that froth'.

J. So we should have faith

"I will therefore be asking humans to have greater faith in the future"

"we can hold onto our faith in doing the right thing"

K. And also we should only pursue the actions with really high expected value and which are likeliest to rise above the froth of uncertainty

"anything we try to do is floating in a sea of long-run radical uncertainty ... Only big, important upfront goals, will, in reflective equilibrium, stand above the ever present froth and allow the comparison to be more than a very rough one"

L. The actions that pass this test are growth and rights, so we have to pursue both

"If there is any victim of the epistemic critique [that consequences are impossible to know, so action is impossible], it is the focus on small benefits and costs .... If we bundle appropriately and 'think big' and pursue Crusonia plants, our moral intuitions will rise above the froth of long-run variance"

Note that the only defense of rights in the entire book is in Chapter 6 "Must uncertainty paralyze us?" under the heading "Why the case for rights is compelling, and which rights are the important ones"

Agnes Callard, Eli Dourado, Joshua M. Kim, Strange Loop Cannon, Michael, Coleman Hughes, Steven Lee, Stuart Whatley, Art CardenGonzalo Schwarz, Noah Smith, Will Compernolle, Alex Zook, Luis Pedro Coelho, Robin Hanson (2), Scott Sumner (2), Sean Patrick Hughes, Vitalik Buterin, Arthur Johnston, Bryan Caplan, and Mason Hartman.

Thanks to Sydney Filler and Applied Divinity Studies for comments on earlier versions of this post. Thanks to Effective Altruism NYC for hosting a great reading group in which I first read this book. Thanks also to Uri Bram for putting me in touch with ADS and helping me set up a blog!