Most politicians want more of it. Some eco-warriors think there’s too much of it. And according to the economist Daniel Susskind, too few people understand it. In Growth: A Reckoning, he claims to help with all three.The book starts with a canter through centuries of muddled thinking. Thomas Malthus and his contemporaries thought that growth was inherently unsustainable, as a growing population would eventually run out of resources. Later, development economists at the World Bank sustained a “‘fetish’ for investment”, relying on models that saw physical capital — stuff that people could touch — as key for generating development.
Most recently, there are “degrowthers”, who include the likes of activist Greta Thunberg and anthropologist Jason Hickel. Although their views are (too) often vaguely defined, the basic fear is that more economic growth will gobble the Earth’s resources, and so policymakers should seek less of it to prevent environmental catastrophe.
Susskind says the degrowthers are partly right in that there can be trade-offs between growth-maximising outcomes and environmental protections. “It falls to us to explicitly confront the tradeoffs presented by growth’s promise and its price,” he writes. Good policy is about minimising those trade-offs, and there is already evidence that it is possible to deliver higher growth alongside falling emissions.