Stubborn Attachments

The historical case is where Cowen's argument gets its muscle, and he tells it without triumphalism. For most of human existence, life was short, sick, and precarious. Then, over the last two centuries, something changed. Sustained economic growth pulled billions out of the kind of poverty that had been the default condition of the species. Child mortality collapsed. Life expectancy roughly doubled in much of the world. Famine, once a recurring visitor, became in most places a political failure rather than a natural fact.

The link is not sentimental. Wealthier societies fund the research that produces vaccines and antibiotics. They can afford clean water, sanitation, and the institutions that keep both running. They buy their citizens something subtler too: autonomy. A person with material security has choices a person on the edge of survival simply does not — what work to do, whom to marry, whether to leave, what to believe. Growth, Cowen argues, is among the great engines of human freedom, not its enemy.

If growth were the only value, Cowen concedes, the argument would be dangerous. A single-minded pursuit of tomorrow's prosperity could be used to excuse almost any sacrifice today — the classic trap of every utopian project that treated living people as raw material for a better future. He has no interest in building that machine. So he bolts constraints onto it.

The first is that human rights are close to absolute. Whatever growth might gain, it does not license torturing the innocent, breaking basic freedoms, or treating individuals as mere inputs. Cowen plants rights as a firm side-constraint precisely because he distrusts the seductive logic of "the ends justify the means." A society that violates its members to enrich its heirs has already lost the plot; the flourishing it claims to pursue was supposed to be for people, not against them.

For all its talk of aggregates and growth rates, Stubborn Attachments is quietly doing something the economics profession spent a century learning to avoid: it is asking us to be better people. Beneath the graphs sits an old-fashioned claim that had become almost embarrassing to state plainly — that we have real obligations to strangers, including strangers not yet born, and that a serious life takes those obligations seriously.

This is the book's deeper move, and it is why the title lands where it does. Our stubborn attachments — to our families, our nations, our particular loyalties — are not obstacles to morality that a clear-eyed calculator should dissolve. Cowen thinks they are load-bearing. We cannot care about everyone equally and abstractly; we are built to care through the concrete ties we already have. The task is not to transcend those attachments but to let them widen, so that the circle of people whose welfare shapes our choices grows outward toward the future.

Stubborn Attachments arrives at a strange and bracing place for a book by an economist. It begins with discount rates and compounding curves and ends with a plea for decency, patience, and the courage to care about people we will never meet. The path between the two is what makes the argument hard to shrug off: if the future is morally real, and if sustained growth is the surest thing we know for widening human freedom and easing human suffering, then indifference to either is a failure we cannot dress up as sophistication.