Growth
A History and a Reckoning
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1.0 • 1 Rating
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
One of Barack Obama’s 10 Favorite Books of the Year
One of the New Yorker’s Best Books of the Year
Finalist for the Financial Times Best Book of the Year
A vivid account of the past, present, and future of economic growth, showing how and why we must continue to pursue it while responding to the challenges it creates.
Over the past two centuries, economic growth has freed billions from the struggle for subsistence. Yet prosperity has come at a price: environmental destruction, desolation of local cultures, the emergence of vast inequalities. Many respond that now is the time to shrink our economic footprint. But Daniel Susskind argues that such “degrowth” would be folly. Instead, we must keep growth but redirect it, making it better reflect our values.
Growth: A History and a Reckoning shows how policymaking in the second half of the twentieth century came to revolve around a single-minded quest for greater GDP. The growth obsession has been met with the assertion that “we cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet.” Susskind shows, though, that growth is a product not of resource exploitation but of new ideas. In that sense, growth really can be infinite.
Still, he says, critics are right to insist that we can no longer focus on upsides alone. We must confront tradeoffs: societies will have to deliberately pursue less growth for the sake of other goals. These will be moral decisions, not simply economic ones, demanding the engagement not just of politicians and experts but of all citizens.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Economic growth is a double-edged sword, according to this thought-provoking treatise. King's College London economist Susskind (A World Without Work) suggests that world history was characterized by poverty and stagnation before an Enlightenment-era cultural shift toward "reason... over superstition" saw the application of the scientific method to such problems as increasing factory output, creating unprecedented economic expansion with the arrival of the Industrial Revolution. Ever since, growing the economy has become the obsession of governments eager to wash away political antagonisms in a tide of prosperity, Susskind contends, arguing that this blinkered focus on increasing GDP has produced toxic downsides too glaring to ignore, environmental destruction and inequality primary among them. While Susskind rejects the "degrowth" movement (he posits that the rapid adoption of solar panels shows how certain forms of growth can be a net good), he recommends convening assemblies of randomly selected citizens to propose ways to balance economic boosterism against social and environmental objectives, such as deciding how much to curb foreign competition for the benefit of domestic workers. The high-level discussions evaluating the merits of economists Paul Romer's and Joel Mokyr's theories about the origins of human prosperity can be dense, but the discerning analysis is worth the effort. This brings clarity to a pressing and intractable quandary.
