Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals
Cowen's philosophical argument that sustained economic growth — broadly defined to include environmental quality, leisure, and human capabilities — is a moral imperative because it is the only reliable mechanism for improving human wellbeing across long time horizons.
The book is deliberately short and rigorous, building from a few premises about discount rates and intergenerational ethics to a conclusion that growth should be treated not as one priority among many but as the overriding policy goal.
Cowen acknowledges the provocativeness of this position and engages seriously with objections from both the left and the right.
For product leaders, the book reframes the question of what technology companies are for: not growth as a metric to satisfy investors, but growth as the compound process through which future generations inherit a better world.
It is the philosophical foundation beneath the techno-optimist position, stated more carefully and honestly than most of its popularisers manage.
Central argument
Cowen argues that sustained economic growth — defined broadly to encompass environmental quality, leisure, and human capabilities, not just GDP — is a moral imperative rather than one policy goal among many. The core move is philosophical: because small differences in long-run growth rates compound into enormous differences in future welfare, and because future people vastly outnumber present ones, we are ethically obligated to weight growth nearly above all other considerations. From this, Cowen derives that political and institutional choices should be evaluated primarily by whether they sustain or undermine this compounding process.
Critique
The argument's power depends on treating long-run growth as a stable, legible variable that policy can reliably target, but this premise is more contestable than Cowen's tight logical structure acknowledges. Compounding over centuries requires predicting which present-day actions actually translate into future welfare gains — a problem of deep uncertainty that the model largely brackets rather than solves. A thoughtful critic would also press on whose growth counts: the broad redefinition of growth to include capabilities and environment does philosophical work that is never fully operationalized, leaving the framework open to co-optation by the narrower GDP-centric growth politics it ostensibly transcends.
Why it matters for product
For a CPO, Cowen's argument reframes the legitimacy question that sits beneath every product strategy debate: growth metrics justify themselves not by satisfying investors but by being the mechanism through which products compound value into the future — which changes how you evaluate short-term feature trade-offs against platform investments. More concretely, it provides a philosophical vocabulary for resisting metric myopia in roadmap conversations: if the ethical case for growth rests on compounding over long time horizons, then product decisions that sacrifice sustainable capability-building for quarterly engagement lifts are not just strategically weak but morally incoherent on the book's own terms.