The Weirdness of Wanting
On Tyler Cowen, Larry Temkin, and why flourishing is not a spreadsheet.
Why capitalism (and AI) makes us weirder, and why that’s (mostly) okay.
I have been thinking about a recent post by Tyler Cowen. It does a very “Tyler” thing: he takes a piece of standard economic machinery, adds a humane philosophical idea, and then suggests that capitalism is not making us worse so much as it is making us… stranger.
This argument is not necessarily a critique of capitalism, but it could be. At the very least, it is an observation about advanced capitalism. Link here to his post.
The core distinction he draws is:
Cardinal utility: How good something feels. How happy you are in the “felicific” sense.
Ordinal preferences: What you actually choose or want, as a ranking, even if it is not what maximizes your felt happiness.
Tyler’s argument is that these two things are drifting apart.
I want to explore that, but I also want to throw the philosopher Larry Temkin into the mix. Temkin argues the possibility that our “better than” judgments might not always be transitive. Meaning: life does not always behave like a league table.
Here is what I make of it*1.
1. Tyler’s argument explained
Imagine you have two different scoreboards in your head.
Scoreboard A: Happiness Points (Cardinal) This is the “how good did it actually feel?” scoreboard. Think of the warm glow of eating pizza or laughing with friends.
Scoreboard B: Choice Ranking (Ordinal) This is the “what do I pick first, second, third?” scoreboard. This is what you actually do.
Tyler says: In a simple world, these two scoreboards line up. He uses a deliberately simple example: a primitive economy where the only thing to buy is rice. If rice is what keeps you alive and stops the hunger pangs, you buy rice. Your choice (Ordinal) and your happiness-maxing (Cardinal) are basically the same thing.
But in a rich modern economy, your basic needs are covered, and you have infinite options. This means you can choose things for reasons other than “this will make me feel happy right now.” You might choose:
Identity: “I want to be the kind of person who runs marathons” (even if running hurts).
Duty: Checking texts because you care about your family (even if it stresses you out).
Curiosity: Traveling to a difficult place just to see what is there.
Meaning: Having kids or making art, which can be exhausting but deeply satisfying in a way that isn’t just “fun.”
Tyler’s claim is: As capitalism develops, the gap grows between felt happiness and what we actually choose. We get more choice, more discretion, and more weirdness.
He isn’t saying “capitalism makes us miserable.” He is saying: you can get more of what you want, while not maximizing the “happiness scoreboard.”
2. The strong version of this argument
If we steelman this, it reveals something:.
Humans are not built to maximize “calm contentment” as a single master value.
Once survival is handled, we spend more of life on “projects”: commitments, craft, status, learning, service.
Markets are unusually good at expanding the menu of possible projects.
Therefore, markets will often increase “preference satisfaction” (getting what you choose) faster than they increase “felt happiness.”
This suggests that a good life is not always a happiness-maximization problem. Sometimes, it is a self-authorship problem.
Tyler’s line that markets make us “weirder” is basically saying that capitalism is an engine for self-authorship at scale.
3. Where the framing creaks (Counter-arguments)
I potentially buy the main thrust, but I think it’s worth considering that the “Rice World” comparison is perhaps too clean.
A) The poor have agency too Even in simple or ancient economies, humans picked stress-inducing, non-happiness-maximizing things constantly. We chose rituals, taboos, sacrifices, revenge, and intricate social signaling. The gap between “what feels good” and “what we do” is not new; modern wealth just widens the menu.
B) Is it really “your” preference? Tyler is wary of calling everything an “addiction,” which is fair. But preference formation is industrial now. Between algorithmic nudges, advertising, and status games, you can be acting on a preference that feels “ordinal” (I chose this!) but was cultivated in you like a sourdough starter. The gap might not be “my deep projects vs. my happiness,” but “my manipulated wants vs. my happiness.” (Although do see my podcast with Samir Varma on practical free will ) and you probably need to think a little on how you view free will om this.
C) The Time Problem Tyler writes as if “Cardinal Happiness” and “Ordinal Preferences” are stable. In reality, Today-Me prefers X, but Next-Year-Me thinks Today-Me was a fool. That isn’t a capitalism story; that’s a timeline story (or if you want to complicate it, a future persons story cf. Parfit).
4. Enter the Gremlin: Larry Temkin and Intransitivity
This is where I want to introduce Larry Temkin. I’ve chatted with Larry on the podcast, and his work on intransitivity is an idea you can throw into the mix.
Temkin’s provocation is that we hold many plausible moral values at once. When you push them hard, they can generate cycles in what is “better than.”
Option A is better than Option B.
Option B is better than Option C.
But... Option C is better than Option A.
This violates transitivity. It’s like a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors played with values.
Temkin suggests the world of value has a deep, messy structure. If you care about distinct values… like Liberty, Equality, and Utility… you cannot always arrange them in a neat line.
5. How Temkin supports Tyler
Temkin actually strengthens Tyler’s “weirder” thesis.
Tyler says more options allow our choices to drift away from happiness. Temkin adds: More options mean more value dimensions are in play.
Once you have plural values—comfort, meaning, status, justice, novelty, beauty—you are more likely to face trade-offs that do not collapse into one stable ranking.
So, capitalism isn’t just widening a gap. It is increasing the chance that your “ordinal preferences” aren’t a single ladder at all, but a shifting web. In that sense, “weirder” is structural. It is what happens when you live inside many values at once.
6. How Temkin complicates Tyler
However, Temkin also throws a wrench in the gears.
Tyler implicitly assumes that “preference satisfaction” is a coherent goal—that there is a mountain top of “what I want most” that we can climb.
But if preferences can be intransitive, there is no top of the mountain. There is a loop.
If your preferences cycle, you cannot “maximize” them. You can only pick a path.
This makes “optimizing your life” mathematically impossible in certain domains.
It exposes you to “money pumps”—where you keep trading A for B, B for C, and C for A, losing a little value (or money/happiness) every time.
Modern markets and AI recommenders are essentially giant machines for finding your psychological loops and selling them back to you. That isn’t “you becoming weirder” via self-authorship. That is you getting lost in a mirrored hallway.
7. My Conclusion: What about Ancient Weirdness
I may agree with Tyler’s basic point: Abundance expands the space in which we can pursue projects that are not happiness-maximizing.
I also think Temkin is quite probably correct: Once you take plural values seriously, neat rankings disappear.
Now, add AI. AI increases the weirdness. It expands the menu, personalizes the menu, and shortens the feedback loop between wanting and getting. This can help us commit to great projects, or it can amplify our intransitive loops.
And yet... were humans really less weird 4,000 years ago?
We were already dancing, trading shells, inventing gods, and using hallucinogens in the Australian desert to make meaning in a landscape that did not care about our meaning. “Maximize happiness” has never been the only game in town. Even rice-economy humans were not rice-only creatures.
So my take is:
Tyler is right: Capitalism expands the gap between happiness and wanting.
Temkin is right: “Better than” is not always tidy.
The combined view: Capitalism (and now AI) increases the number of trade-offs we face, and therefore increases the importance of meta-preferences—the stories we choose to live inside.
That isn’t necessarily a critique of markets. It is a reminder that flourishing is not a spreadsheet (cf. Effective Altruism, naive utilitarians and consequentialists).
And, is one reason amongst many that I write for theatre and performance, and podcast as well as invest and think about markets.
My thoughts in conversations with GPT 5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro; and ref Samir Varma, Larry Temkin and Anoushka.
Reading this after reading a review of Brink Lindsey's new book makes me wonder whether what we're seeing in current discourse is people who are good at managing this tradeoff so that we maintain plenty of meaning who are worrying about the consequences of having lots of people--who vote and otherwise exercise influence--who still act to maximize immediate happiness or who aren't good at figuring out how to find meaning once it's decoupled from survival (i.e., employment at nonpleasurable work).
Really good post and compelling argument