6 ideas
The right measure of social progress is not GDP alone but 'Wealth Plus' — total production of goods and services including leisure time, household production, and environmental amenities. This corrects narrow income measures by valuing the things people actually want from prosperity, not just market output.
Because economic growth compounds exponentially over time, even small differences in the sustainable growth rate produce enormous differences in human welfare across decades and centuries. This makes maximizing long-run growth ethically dominant over most one-time redistributions or short-term policy gains.
Future people's welfare should be valued almost equally to present people's, so the pure rate of time preference applied to human lives should be approximately zero. Discounting future generations heavily is an arbitrary bias toward the present that cannot survive moral scrutiny once you treat distant people as real.
We cannot trace the full long-run consequences of any action because effects ripple unpredictably across centuries, so radical uncertainty swamps fine-grained consequentialist calculation. The practical response is to follow robust general rules — like growth and basic rights — rather than attempt to optimize individual outcomes.
Even while prioritizing maximum sustainable growth, certain human rights function as near-absolute side-constraints that cannot be violated for aggregate gain. This hybrid avoids the monstrous conclusions of pure utilitarianism while still treating growth as the central long-term goal.
Sustainability means preserving the economy's ongoing ability to produce wealth and adapt, not freezing current resource levels or consumption patterns. Viewed this way, the priority becomes maintaining institutions, knowledge, and capital that keep the growth engine running for future generations.