IN T R ODUC T ION

The power to become habituated to his surroundings is

a marked characteristic of mankind.
—­John Maynard Keynes

Three facts, s­ imple but remarkable, have defined the economic history of
­human beings ­until now.
The first is that, for most of the 300,000 years that ­human beings
have been around, economic life was stagnant. ­Whether a person was a
hunter-­gatherer in the Stone Age or a laborer working in the eigh­teenth
­century, their economic fate was very similar: both are likely to have lived
in poverty, engaged in a relentless strug­gle for subsistence.1
The second is that it was only very recently that this stagnation came
to an end. Modern economic growth began just two hundred years ago,
when living standards in certain parts of the world started a dizzying
climb. If the sum of ­human history ­were an hour long, then this reversal
in fortune took place in the last ­couple of seconds.2
And the third is that ­human beings have managed to maintain their eco-
nomic ascent. Whenever growth happened in e­ arlier centuries, it had been
­limited and fizzled out. But this time it was both significant and sustained,
as if some long-­pent-up productive power that had lain hidden for mil-
lennia had fi­nally been unleashed.3 This is what makes modern economic
growth entirely unlike anything that had come before.
The first half of this book is about this extraordinary history: why ­there
was no growth for so long, why it suddenly began, and how it has been
sustained. In the twentieth ­century, pursuing economic growth became
one of the defining activities of our common life. And at least ­until re-
cently, despite the mysteries that remain about growth’s true ­causes, we
have been relatively successful at this pursuit.
As time has passed, we have used this growing material prosperity to
achieve extraordinary outcomes: Freeing billions from the strug­gle for

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subsistence that haunted our ancestors. Making the average ­human life
longer and healthier than ever before. Funding discoveries that have trans-
formed our understanding of the world—­splitting the atom, cracking the
ge­ne­tic code, exploring the stars.
But it is also increasingly clear that the pursuit of this prosperity has
come at an enormous price: The destruction of the natu­ral environment.
The desolation of local cultures and communities. The emergence of vast
inequalities between t­ hose who have received the greatest share of this
wealth and ­those who have not. The creation of technologies whose dis-
ruptive effects on our work and ­political lives we might not be able to
properly control.
And so, growth now pre­sents us with a dilemma. On the one hand, it
is associated with many of our greatest triumphs and achievements. But
on the other, it is also related to many of the greatest prob­lems we con-
front t­ oday. The promise of growth pulls us, at times desperately and vi-
olently, t­ oward pursuing ever more of it. But its price pushes us away
from that chase with a power­ful force as well. It is as if we cannot go on,
and yet we must.
The second half of this book explores this dilemma: how it emerged,
how we have failed to engage it, why we lack serious ideas for responding
to it—­and what we ­ought to do. In recent years, I have come to believe that
confronting the growth dilemma is one of the most impor­tant tasks that
now ­faces humankind. Our failure to do so ­until now means that we are
on a dangerous path. Taking the challenge seriously is not only a chance
to change that direction of travel for the better, but, as we ­shall see, an
opportunity for moral revitalization, to create a renewed sense of collec-
tive purpose in society in pursuit of what ­really ­matters—­not simply a more
prosperous economy but the many other ends that p ­ eople care about,
from a fairer society to a healthier planet.
Taken together, then, this book tells the full story of growth—­its mys-
terious past, its troubling pre­sent, and its uncertain ­future, which now
falls to us to shape. In part this is a book of ideas: about how some of
the greatest minds have tried (and often failed) to understand this impor­
tant phenomenon, how our leaders accidentally put its pursuit at the
center of our ­political lives only a few ­decades ago, and how economic
growth quickly became one of our most trea­sured and dangerous ideas.
What follows w ­ ill carry us well beyond the bound­aries of any par­tic­u­lar
discipline, raising exciting and unsettling questions: why ­human existence

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was so miserable for so long, w ­ hether living standards can improve for-
ever, what exactly we ­ought to value in society, and if we ­ought to care
for trillions of ­people who are yet to be born.
But this is also a practical book, a guide to how we should address the
growth dilemma in the real world. Although the story I tell roams from
the remote past to the distant f­ uture, its lessons ­matter most for thinking
about how to act in the pre­sent moment.

The Pre­sent Urgency

It is hard to think of a time when the pursuit of “more growth” has seemed
more vital. As the twentieth ­century came to an end, leaders ­were confident
that they knew what they ­were ­doing, that steadily increasing prosperity
was a sensible and achievable shared goal. In the United States, econo-
mists spoke of the “­great moderation”; in the United Kingdom, politicians
celebrated the “end of boom and bust.” The idea that sustained growth
could be achieved through modest interventions was taken for granted.
And our apparent success created the impression that an expanding
economy was the norm, with any slowdown to be regarded as an unfor-
tunate but temporary exception.
­Today, that assuredness feels misplaced. Almost ­every country has
slumped its way into the twenty-­first ­century, though the timing differs:
Japan and Germany started spluttering in the mid-1990s, the US and UK
in the mid-2000s, China in the 2010s. Most economies, battered by two
­decades of crises—­including the dot-­com bust, the 2007–2008 financial
crisis, and the Covid-19 pandemic—­are a sluggish shadow of former
selves. We increasingly realize we cannot take growth for granted. In re-
sponse, ­political leaders, in almost e­ very country, have thrust “more
growth” to the very top of their list of priorities. But it is far from clear
they or ­those that advise them understand what must be done to achieve
it. This book, in part, hopes to fix that.
Yet if only the prob­lem ­were as s­ imple as that. For at the same time,
it is also hard to think of a moment when the pursuit of “more growth”
has seemed more dangerous. Of course, the dangers that it brings—­its
threats to the stability of the climate, the health of the social order, the
strength of our communities, the availability of good work, the quality of
our politics—are not new. But having been left to simmer in the second half
of the twentieth ­century, ­these challenges have emerged far more intensely

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at the start of the twenty-­first. It is not a coincidence that radical move-

ments, from far-­left “degrowthers” to far-­right national populists, are as-
cendant. The more moderate parts of ­political life have slumped to the
occasion.
Historians, when trying to make sense of the pre­sent, like to look to
the past for guidance. “What are the pre­ce­dents for this moment?,” they
ask, trying to learn what they can from the answers. Unfortunately, when
it comes to the growth dilemma, that sort of backward-­looking exercise
is unlikely to bear fruit. The world we inhabit is quite unlike anything
that has come before: for almost all of history, life was stagnant, growth
rare and fleeting. The dilemma that we face, this sense of being wrenched
in opposite directions, is an uncharted challenge: humankind has never had
to choose in such a dramatic fashion between ever-­increasing prosperity
and the other features of the world that we care about. Psychologists talk
about how a person might experience cognitive dissonance, the ­mental
discomfort that comes from holding irreconcilable views at the same time.
­There is a sense in which the same phenomenon now applies to society as
a ­whole: growth has an irresistible promise and an unacceptable price;
it is miraculous and devastating; we need a lot more and vastly less. The
challenge we face is not only new but disorienting.

The Story of Growth

In order to grapple with the f­ uture of growth, we must first understand
how it began. And so, Part I sets out to explore ­these origins: why living
standards suddenly spiked ­after several hundred thousand years and how
economists have strug­gled to understand the p ­ rocess in the relatively short
time since. Given growth’s extraordinary importance—­indeed, as we ­shall
see, it is hard to think of anything that is more impor­tant—we still know
surprisingly ­little for certain about its c­ auses. That said, though, we do
know enough to make some sense of what happened in the past and, per-
haps even more importantly, what is pos­si­ble in the ­future.
­Today, we live in socie­ties that prioritize growth, where our collective
success is determined by how much stuff we are able to produce in a given
amount of time. Economic life is often dominated by a single question:
­whether our country’s gross domestic product, or GDP, has gone up or
down. That prioritization gives the impression that growth must have an
illustrious history as an idea. But it does not. The idea of pursuing growth
would have been unimaginable to most classical economists; indeed, it

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would have been impossible for them to even quantify how much growth
was happening, since useful ­measures of the size of an economy only
emerged in the 1930s. In fact, growth gained its pre-­eminence almost by
accident. But it was a lucky accident. For as the twentieth c­ entury un-
folded, it turned out that GDP is correlated with almost e­ very ­measure of
­human flourishing. This fortuitous circumstance is the focus of Part II.
Growth is not only impor­tant, though—it is also dangerous, as noted
before. Part III turns to this downside of growth, uncovering all the dimen-
sions in which the phenomenon is making our lives worse. As we ­shall see,
­there are two increasingly p ­ opular responses to the growth dilemma. One is
to continue pursuing growth but tinker with the GDP ­measure, the sort of
activity proposed by many technocratically minded policymakers and econ-
omists. The other is a more dramatic proposal: to give up on that pursuit
altogether and deliberately slow down our economies through “degrowth,”
the sort of path advocated by influential public figures like David Attenbor-
ough and Greta Thunberg. Neither of t­ hese ideas alone can solve the
growth dilemma—­they are at best insufficient, at worst needlessly self-­
destructive. But neither should they be ignored, for both of them reveal
impor­tant truths that ­will help us respond to the challenge that we face.
Taken together, Parts I–­III provide the intellectual toolkit for under-
standing the idea of growth. Parts IV and V then put ­these ideas to practical
use, exploring what we actually o ­ ught to do about the growth dilemma
in the real world. The starting point is that giving up on growth would
be a catastrophe, not only abandoning what ­ought to be basic ambitions
for society—­from eradicating poverty to providing good health care for
all—­but suffering from a failure of imagination about how we might
flourish in the f­ uture. And so, I set out how we can achieve more eco-
nomic growth, as well as showing why many of t­ oday’s ­popular remedies
are likely to be misplaced.
Yet at the same time, we cannot continue to muddle on and ignore the
enormous costs of our pursuit of prosperity. It falls to us to explic­itly con-
front the tradeoffs presented by growth’s promise and its price. To begin
with, we should avoid ­these tradeoffs where we can, seeking out the kinds
of growth that do not impose a price on society. Where that fails, as it
inevitably ­will, we should attempt to weaken ­these tradeoffs, using ­every
tool at our disposal to change the nature of growth and make it less de-
structive. But in the end, we must also recognize that weakening the trade­
­ ill be to accept ­these
offs may not be feasible e­ ither. And so, the final task w
tradeoffs, to resign ourselves to the fact that they cannot be sidestepped

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or softened, and to decide w ­ hether we are willing to sacrifice some growth

to protect ­those other impor­tant outcomes that we care about—­protecting
the environment, lessening wealth i­nequality, and so on. D ­ oing this raises
two difficult moral questions on which ­there is likely to be ­immense dis-
agreement: What ­else are we to care about if not growth, and how much
should we care about the f­ uture? This is what I explore in the closing mo-
ments of the book.
It is inevitable that a book like this involves simplification. Large bodies
of thought can only be briefly explored, towering stalagmites of scholar-
ship must be shrunk down to a few hundred words. T ­ hose who have picked
it up expecting a detailed study of each challenge we face—­climate change,
­inequality, globalization, artificial intelligence, and all the o ­ thers—­will be
disappointed. That is not what it sets out to do. Nor ­will I pre­sent defini-
tive lists of policy interventions that are carefully tailored to tackle each
par­tic­u­lar challenge. T­ here are other books that attempt to do that. My
aim is dif­fer­ent: to sweep ­these challenges together and look at them from
a new vantage point. For though ­these challenges differ greatly in their
details, ­there is still a common thread that runs through them: the idea of
growth, and how we have become distracted by it. That is what this book
is about. And my hope is that this alternative view ­will not only provide us
with a chance to look at t­ hese familiar challenges in a fresh way, an op-
portunity to see them again as if for the first time, but deepen our under-
standing of the prob­lems that we face and why we have failed to tackle
them ­until now. I encourage every­one to keep an open mind, particularly
­those who are inclined to continue with our inherited approach. For
­whatever we are ­doing, it is not working. And time is ­running out.

The Case for Optimism

In the twentieth c­ entury, we lost our way. A ­ fter the insanity of the first
half, most countries de­cided to distract themselves with the pursuit of
prosperity in the second. T ­ here was no Big Bang when growth became the
priority, no single moment when GDP was formally crowned the “statistic
to end all statistics.”4 But gradually, it happened. Politics around the world
became focused primarily on making the economic pie bigger. Leaders
flourished or fell depending on ­whether they succeeded at that narrow goal.
And the defining ­political debate of the ­century turned out to be a technical
disagreement about how best to achieve this end: in short, would more
growth come from the ­free market or from central planning?

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Of course, other ends mattered during that time. Yet all too often, the
intensity of the pursuit of growth drowned out t­ hese other concerns. They
­were put aside, e­ ither ­because it was thought that more material pros-
perity would achieve them eventually or ­because they ­were simply believed
to be lesser priorities. But this inaction hollowed out our collective life.
For ­decades, we have paid too l­ittle attention to the threat of climate
change, the specter of ­inequality, the costs of globalization, and the threats
of disruptive technologies. And as a result we failed to engage with the
tradeoffs that a serious response to ­these challenges would demand. I be-
lieve that the historical failure to accept ­these tradeoffs, and wishful
thinking from leaders who acted as if we could always have every­thing
that we want at ­little cost, is why we now feel the tension between the
promise and the price of growth so intensely.
And ­there is something peculiar about this relentless pursuit of pros-
perity. Like the proverbial worker caught in the economic rat race, who
blindly chases a­ fter an ever-­greater wage while their life dissipates in the
background, our socie­ties have found themselves in the same sort of situ-
ation, exhibiting the same lack of self-­reflection as to what all this collec-
tive effort is ­really about. “The end justifies the means,” wrote the author
Ursula Le Guin. “But what if ­there never is an end? All we have is means.”
That line neatly captures our p ­ olitical life for the last seventy years:
economic growth, which r­ eally ­ought to have been just a means to other
valuable ends, over time became the end in itself. Our focus on growth,
despite the ­immense bounty it has produced, is coming at too high a cost.
As I think about the ­future, I am hopeful. We live in an age of anxiety,
where almost e­ very day brings stories of new existential risks and deflating
reminders of our supposed incapacity to deal with them. But my argu-
ment is an optimistic one: we have an existential opportunity in front of
us. This book describes a chance for moral renewal, a way for us to pay
more attention to the valuable ends that we have tended to neglect ­until
now. And we can do so from a position of strength, looking into a f­ uture
far more prosperous and technologically capable than ever before in our
three-­hundred-­thousand-­year history. We have the power not only to
make life good in the ­decades to come, in the words of the ­philosopher
Derek Parfit, but to make it better in ways that we cannot now even
imagine. Nothing, in my view, could be more impor­tant—­and how to do
it is what this book is all about.