Tyler Cowen on the Great Stagnation’s End

Tyler Cowen is an economist at George Mason University, the co-founder of the blog Marginal Revolution, and host of the podcast “Conversations With Tyler.” But more than that, he’s a genuine polymath who reads about everything, goes everywhere and talks to everyone. I’ve known him for years, and while I disagree with him on quite a bit, there are few people I learn more from in a single conversation. In this conversation, I wanted to get at the connective thread in Cowen’s work: the moral imperative of economic growth. Growth doesn’t have the best reputation in left-wing circles these days, and often for good reason. It’s hard to look at a world where rising G.D.P. has driven rising temperatures and shocking inequality, and then to continue venerating growth as an all-encompassing good. Cowen admits those criticisms — particularly the climate one — but still argues that growth, properly measured, is central to a moral economy. The East Asian economic miracles are, he’s written, “the highest manifestation of the ethical good in human history to date.” Time, he argues, is a “moral illusion,” and the most important thing we can do for the future is set the power of compounding growth…