Why Long-Term Economic Growth Should Be a Moral Priority

Across history, human life has been transformed most profoundly by one force: sustained economic growth. Higher productivity, better technology, rising incomes, and expanding knowledge have dramatically reduced poverty and disease while increasing life expectancy and opportunity. Yet public debates and policy choices still focus overwhelmingly on short-term concerns. Inspired by Tyler Cowen’s book Stubborn Attachments and his related interviews, this article explores a central claim: if we care about morality in a serious, consistent way, we should care far more about the long-term future than we currently do.

The core idea is simple but radical: future people matter just as much as people alive today, and small, sustained improvements in growth can translate into astronomically large benefits for them. At the same time, we must respect robust human rights and guard against catastrophic risks that could permanently derail civilization.

The Moral Priority of the Long Run

Most political debates are driven by news cycles, election calendars, and economic statistics that cover months or years. Moral philosophy, however, asks us to step back and consider much longer horizons. If humanity avoids self-destruction, our future could last millions of years and include enormous numbers of people. In that context, the question “What should society prioritize?” becomes deeply ethical, not just technocratic.

Longtermist thinking builds on a few basic premises often discussed in population ethics and welfare economics:

• Future individuals are morally relevant: The fact that someone will live decades or centuries from now does not make their suffering or happiness inherently less important.
• Our actions can influence the far future: Institutions, technologies, and norms we shape today can persist, compound, or lock in trajectories for many generations.
• We face deep uncertainty: We cannot precisely forecast long-run outcomes, but this ignorance does not excuse neglect; it instead calls for robust, high-impact choices.

From these premises, it follows that the stakes of long-run policy decisions are enormous. Even modest changes in the long-run growth rate can drastically affect the number of people who live good lives in the future.

Growth as a Central Moral Objective

In this framework, sustained economic growth is not just a technical or financial target; it becomes a moral priority. Economic growth has historically been closely associated with reductions in extreme poverty, better health, and higher life expectancy. Over the twentieth century, for example, global real income per person increased multiple times over, while life expectancy and literacy dramatically improved.

Cowen and like-minded thinkers propose that societies should aim to maximize a broad measure of long-run prosperity sometimes labeled “wealth plus”: not only GDP per capita, but also institutional quality, environmental health, social trust, knowledge, and cultural richness. These components reinforce one another and help sustain productive, innovative societies over centuries.

On this view, promoting these forms of wealth over centuries is among the most important things we can do to improve the world.

The Power of Compounding

A central reason long-run growth matters so much is the mathematical logic of compound growth. If an economy grows by a few percent per year, the effects accumulate exponentially over time. A small increase in the growth rate, sustained for centuries, can yield vastly higher living standards for future generations.

• At 1% annual real growth, income per person roughly doubles every 70 years.
• At 2% annual growth, it doubles in about 35 years.
• At 3% annual growth, the doubling time is around 24 years.

Over long horizons, the difference between 1% and 2% growth is not just a small improvement; it can mean multiple doublings of living standards that alter the entire shape of civilization. This is why Cowen argues that even modest, sustained gains in growth can be morally decisive when extended over large populations and long time spans.

Why Discounting Human Welfare Is Problematic

Standard economic models often apply a discount rate to the future, reducing the weight of benefits or costs occurring decades from now. While discounting is sometimes appropriate for monetary flows or investment decisions, discounting human welfare simply because it occurs in the future raises serious ethical concerns.

Philosophers and economists have distinguished between:

• Pure time preference: Valuing well-being less purely because it occurs later in time.
• Prudential reasons to discount: Accounting for uncertainty, opportunity costs, or changing needs over time.

Several influential analyses, including the work behind major climate reports, argue that pure time preference for human welfare should be near zero on ethical grounds. In other words, a happy or suffering person in the year 2300 should count roughly as much as a comparable person today, purely as a matter of moral concern.

This shift in perspective greatly elevates the importance of long-run policies, from climate stabilization to safeguarding against nuclear war and emerging risks.

Human Rights as Non-Negotiable Constraints

Prioritizing growth does not mean that “anything goes” in pursuit of higher GDP. Cowen and related thinkers emphasize that society must respect a set of robust human rights that act as side constraints on policy.

Typical examples of such rights include:

• Rights against torture and cruel treatment.
• Basic civil and political liberties, including freedom of expression and association.
• Protection from arbitrary imprisonment or violence.

The idea is not to enumerate a perfect list but to affirm that some actions are morally off-limits even if they might appear to produce net gains in aggregate welfare. International human rights instruments, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, embody aspects of this intuition at the global level.

In practice, this means rejecting growth strategies that rely on large-scale coercion, systematic abuses, or severe inequality of basic rights. Over the long run, societies that protect rights also tend to generate more sustainable growth by attracting investment, encouraging innovation, and maintaining legitimacy.

Uncertainty, Risk, and Existential Threats

Long-term thinking must grapple with radical uncertainty. We cannot know which specific policies will maximize growth centuries from now, and well-intentioned interventions can misfire. Rather than paralyzing us, this uncertainty should push us toward robust strategies that tend to work across many possible futures.

One major concern is existential risk: events that could permanently curtail humanity’s potential, such as uncontrolled pandemics, nuclear war, or runaway climate change. Even if the probability of such a catastrophe is low, the potential loss — the entire future of humanity — makes prevention extraordinarily important.

From a longtermist perspective, it can be morally urgent to:

• Reduce the risk of nuclear conflict through arms control, diplomacy, and robust safeguards.
• Strengthen global health systems and pandemic preparedness.
• Limit the worst-case scenarios of climate change through sustained mitigation and adaptation policies.
• Develop governance frameworks for transformative technologies, such as advanced artificial intelligence and biotechnology.

These efforts may not always have conspicuous short-run payoffs, but they could be among the most important contributions we make to the long-run flourishing of civilization.

Growth vs. Redistribution: A Tension Revisited

One contentious aspect of a growth-centered philosophy is its uneasy relationship with redistribution. Many political traditions, especially egalitarian and progressive ones, emphasize using public policy to reduce inequality in the present. A strong focus on long-run growth can be seen as competing with near-term redistribution, especially if higher taxes or regulations dampen investment and innovation.

Critics argue that an excessive growth focus might:

• Underestimate the harms of high inequality to social cohesion and political stability.
• Neglect those who are currently poor or marginalized in favor of hypothetical future gains.
• Provide cover for policies that benefit economic elites while claiming the moral high ground of “future prosperity.”

Defenders of the growth-first perspective respond that over long horizons, the scale of benefits from higher growth — including for the global poor — can greatly exceed what is achievable through redistribution alone. Historical evidence suggests that rapid, broad-based growth has been central to lifting billions out of extreme poverty.

A reasonable synthesis is to view inclusive growth as the target: policies that expand the long-run economic pie while ensuring basic protections and opportunities across society. This can include investments in education, health, and infrastructure; open trade and migration; strong rule of law; and targeted social safety nets that do not excessively undermine incentives to innovate and work.

Practical Principles for Long-Run Thinking

Given deep uncertainty and limited knowledge, we cannot derive a simple formula for all policy decisions. Still, the longtermist, growth-oriented view suggests several guiding principles:

• Favor durable improvements: Prioritize reforms that strengthen institutions, knowledge, and human capital in ways likely to endure.
• Target large levers: Focus on areas where small changes can have outsized long-run effects, such as innovation policy, education quality, and global economic integration.
• Protect critical systems: Treat the avoidance of existential and systemic risks as a foundational responsibility rather than an afterthought.
• Respect rights and pluralism: Maintain strong rights protections and open discourse so that societies can course-correct as they learn.
• Stay epistemically modest: Acknowledge uncertainty, avoid overconfident technocratic schemes, and favor policies that have worked across contexts or are easily reversible.

These principles do not resolve all policy disputes, but they reframe the conversation: instead of asking only “What helps now?” we also ask “What sets up our descendants for a flourishing, resilient future?”

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q1: Does a focus on long-run growth ignore people who are suffering today?

A long-run perspective need not dismiss present hardship. The claim is that, after safeguarding basic rights and meeting urgent needs, there is immense moral value in improving the trajectory of future prosperity. Many policies, such as strengthening health systems and education, simultaneously help today’s poor and support long-run growth.

Q2: How is “wealth plus” different from traditional GDP?

“Wealth plus” is a broad, informal idea that includes not only market output but also institutional quality, environmental health, knowledge, and social capital. It recognizes that long-run well-being depends on far more than short-term production statistics.

Q3: Isn’t it impossible to predict what will benefit people hundreds of years from now?

Exact predictions are impossible, but we can still identify robust patterns. Societies with secure property rights, education, scientific capacity, and stable institutions have repeatedly achieved higher living standards and resilience. Investing in these areas is a reasonable bet even under deep uncertainty.

Q4: How does this view relate to climate change policy?

Climate change is a paradigmatic long-run issue. A near-zero ethical discount rate for human welfare supports strong action to limit severe and irreversible climate damages. At the same time, a growth-oriented perspective encourages low-carbon innovation, such as clean energy technologies, that both protect the climate and support future prosperity.

Q5: Can individuals meaningfully influence the far future, or is this mainly about government policy?

Governments play a central role, but individuals and organizations also matter: choosing careers that contribute to innovation or risk reduction, supporting effective institutions and charities, and advocating for long-term policies can all shift the trajectory of the future in small but meaningful ways.

Written by

Medha Deb

Medha Deb is an editor with a master's degree in Applied Linguistics from the University of Hyderabad. She believes that her qualification has helped her develop a deep understanding of language and its application in various contexts. Medha specializes in the areas of beauty, health, sports, and wellness and is committed to ensuring that the content on the website is…