Growth: A History and a Reckoning

"Daniel Susskind has been on the prize’s longlist before—with a book on the future of work a few years ago. He’s part of the Susskind clan that has looked at everything from artificial intelligence in the professions through to the impact of tech on democracy. Growth is a big thinking book. It’s an economics book . It’s his look at how you resolve the dilemma that has emerged in the last 200 years of economic growth being both the most potent way of increasing prosperity and reducing poverty, while at the same time a catalyst for widening inequality and environmental depredation. So the good and the bad of growth: what is the solution to the tension between the two? He takes on some of the solutions. A traditional one is, ‘We just go for more growth. If we make that the objective, eventually these other problems fall away.’ He says that’s just going to lead to greater inequality and more environmental destruction. But he also takes on the counter view, that says we have to stop growing. He dismantles the degrowth argument quite effectively. What he lights on is the idea of human ingenuity. There’s a bit of a read across here, actually, to Tribal . Both these books talk about the pre-history of Homo sapiens and how hunter gatherers developed ways of using tools and so on. Susskind puts a lot of emphasis on the optimism inherent in human ingenuity. He is also keen—and this is where he argues against the degrowthers—that we shouldn’t be pulling in our horns on this, that it does involve taking risk. The one thing that we shouldn’t be doing is hampering our yearning for more prosperity and better lives by putting an artificial cap on it, as the degrowthers might argue. There’s certainly a lot of discussion of it in the bien pensant circles of academia. He doesn’t destroy degrowth—one of the things I like about the book is that it does examine arguments. Quite a lot of the first half of the book is about how growth emerged to be the one objective. GDP growth is the thing that most economies are measuring themselves by. How did that happen? He writes about the wars between various schools of economics in developing that. For a non-economist like me, there’s a lot of useful history of economics. I would certainly turn back to this book if I heard mention of a particular school of economics. There are some nice thumbnail sketches of where they went wrong, what happened when the next set of schools of economics took over and corrected the errors of the previous one. So he’s not positive about degrowth as a solution to this difficult dilemma that everyone wrestles with, but he is positive about economics, provided the key moral questions of how to tackle the trade-offs of growth are part of a political discussion between citizens. The other interesting thing, again, from a non-economist point of view, was his reminder that for most of human history, there was no growth. Often, depending on where you were born, you just stayed the same. Only in 1800 do all the charts—and he has many of them—suddenly show this hockey stick take-off in growth, with the Industrial Revolution fueling that. The winner of the 2024 Business Book of the Year Award will be announced on December 9th ."