Growth
A History and a Reckoning
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- $29.99
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
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 and made our lives far healthier and longer. Yet prosperity has come at a price: environmental destruction, desolation of local cultures, the rise of vast inequalities and destabilizing technologies. Faced with such damage, many now claim that the only way forward is through “degrowth,” deliberately shrinking our economic footprint. But to abandon humanity’s progress would be folly. Instead, Daniel Susskind argues, we must keep growth but redirect it, making it better reflect what we truly value.
In a sweeping analysis full of historical insight, Susskind shows how policymaking came to revolve around a single-minded quest for greater GDP. This is a surprisingly recent development: economic growth was barely discussed until the second half of the twentieth century. And our understanding of what drives it is more recent still. Only lately have we come to see how humankind emerged from its millennia of stagnation: through the sustained discovery of powerful and productive new ideas.
This insight undermines the mantra that “we cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet,” for the world of ideas is infinitely vast. Yet growth’s critics are right to insist that we can no longer focus on its upsides alone. We must confront the tradeoffs, Susskind contends: sometimes, 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.
