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But in general, the lack of attention to economic growth seems like another example of how normative political theory is divorced from the real world.
It's in many ways a life/health analogy.
You could construct a link to some biology/systems theory argument that robustness/adequate replacement and innovation will equal the earmarks we call growth.
Growth per se can have, and for a lot of progressives does imply, a kind of cancer or chaos metaphor. Not to mention the current obesity hysteria. It may be that those embedded meanings that must be expllicityl defeated or distinguished in order to look at a long horizon of growth without paralyzing disquiet. Pure scale itself can be distressing psychologically and physically.
I'm a graduate student in philosophy out here in AZ. Dave Schmidtz hasn't said anything like that explicitly, I don't think. But that's just because most libertarians don't say weird things like: "A good government should always do x." Most modern libertarians, I think, know too much about public choice economics and the like to make such statements. They're more worried about confining state power, and how institutional structures work. They aren't, say like Rawls, in the business of giving abstract lists of normative conditions for ideally just institutions. And Dave, in particular, is not exactly interesting in that project. But I know you know that.
Now, that egalitarian liberals don't say anything to that effect is indeed a scandal, if it is true. This means that those *in the business* of doing abstract political institutional theorizing didn't think to add that to their list of quasi-utopian demands for an institution to meet. And that would seem to be a mark of some kind of moral deficiency.
But nonetheless, it would be not just a little weird for someone like, for instance, Nozick to say "All good governments will promote economic growth." Don't you agree?
In your clarified request are you claiming that you're having difficulty finding writings that link economic growth with individual people having "more money, more freedom, more life-options, better health, longer lives, etc."?
[ToJ, 2nd Ed., p 255]
It sounds to me that Rawls is saying that a fully just society requires NO GROWTH. Justice, at certain historical-economic stages, requires growth instrumentally. If we are still at a level of relatve deprivation, justice demands we leave the next generation a little better off than we were. But growth, per se, is not an element of justice.
Actually, Rawls never thinks systematically about growth as far as I can tell. Growth is implicit in a lot of what he says. For example, the idea that the tax rate is limited by the incentive to productivity. But he takes a barely dynamic perspective. If taxes are too high in period one, there will be less to distribute in period to. The end. He's not really thinking about the overall size of the economy. Similarly, when talking about just savings, he seems to be more concerned with the idea that we don't consume all the resources and leave future generations with less rather than the idea that what future generations will have is compounded by the rate of growth.
Also, this gets me thinking about the argument for the difference principle. Rawls labors hard to make the argument more than instrumental. But his only really good arguments are instrumental. If the poor are getting a raw deal, they'll destabilize everything, and that's no good for anyone. B. Friedman's argument about growth is just like that. If growth is too slow, we'll get nasty and illiberal.
I am not sure how a theory could value growth for itself, or what that would mean.
1) My confusion primarily stems from how you can say that something other than individuals can have value for the purposes of justice, in a non-instrumental fashion (value in itself or 'per se'). What do you mean by this?
2) Why is Sen any closer than Rawls is to what you're looking for? Basing this comment solely on the discussion above, Sen wants growth (maybe) for basic capabilities and Rawls wants it for a just basic structure. What is the reason why they are not they about equally bad (or good)?
About growth as an element of justice. Well, really, I think justice is the wrong word. I mean an element of the kind of society we have most reason to affirm, endorse, want, etc. I agree with both your points. I'm talking fast and loose. Sen is no better, unless he thinks that there is no limit on the development of human capabilities, which is what I think, and why I don't think there is a point of absolute development at which it is permissible to allow growth to stall.
A more interesting argument about future generations turns on Parfit's insight that the big deal about what we do now policy-wise is not how it will affect future people, as if there are a bunch of people with determinate identities, who already exist at a future time in the way that other people co-exist with us at a different place, but how it will determine whether or which people will exist in the future.
Growth correlates with lower rates of reproduction. Are the possible beings not made actual because of high growth harmed by it?!
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.
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
*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.)
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."
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.
Yes, Barry's book came out last year.
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".
(I figured the nanotech joke referced a book maybe tyler cowen or you made fun of a while back.)
http://radicallibertarians.blogspot.com/2006/02...
My basic point is that the question is too restrictive.
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.
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.