"What does growth mean, and why is it important?
Great question. There are practical reasons why growth is crucial, but there are also moral reasons. The practical ones are that the world stagnates if you don’t have growth. And there are a couple of billion people for whom a great deal of economic growth is needed to bring them out of poverty.
Now, the moral reasons are, for example, that if there’s no growth, and you, for whatever reason, want to earn more money next year, then somebody else has got to earn less. So, the desire to better yourself, which is very natural, will always be at somebody else’s expense in a no-growth world.
These numbers are rough, so I don’t want anybody writing to me saying that I got the decimal place wrong or whatever. But 112 billion human beings have lived since the beginning of human existence. 104 billion have died. 80 billion or so died of infection. And those 80 billion had an average lifespan of about 30 years. Then Alexander Fleming discovered how to cultivate penicillin, and capitalism figured out how to manufacture it in bulk, leading to an enormous transformation of human existence. Now, you or I can expect to live till we’re about 93.
That’s economic growth. People think of economic growth as some dry set of numbers. Well, it’s not. It’s Alexander Fleming discovering how to cultivate penicillin and the capitalist process spreading that knowledge around the world. So I say to people, “Well, you say you don’t want economic growth. Well, how would you like to only live to 30 instead of 93?”"
Great question. There are practical reasons why growth is crucial, but there are also moral reasons. The practical ones are that the world stagnates if you don’t have growth. And there are a couple of billion people for whom a great deal of economic growth is needed to bring them out of poverty.
Now, the moral reasons are, for example, that if there’s no growth, and you, for whatever reason, want to earn more money next year, then somebody else has got to earn less. So, the desire to better yourself, which is very natural, will always be at somebody else’s expense in a no-growth world.
These numbers are rough, so I don’t want anybody writing to me saying that I got the decimal place wrong or whatever. But 112 billion human beings have lived since the beginning of human existence. 104 billion have died. 80 billion or so died of infection. And those 80 billion had an average lifespan of about 30 years. Then Alexander Fleming discovered how to cultivate penicillin, and capitalism figured out how to manufacture it in bulk, leading to an enormous transformation of human existence. Now, you or I can expect to live till we’re about 93.
That’s economic growth. People think of economic growth as some dry set of numbers. Well, it’s not. It’s Alexander Fleming discovering how to cultivate penicillin and the capitalist process spreading that knowledge around the world. So I say to people, “Well, you say you don’t want economic growth. Well, how would you like to only live to 30 instead of 93?”"