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Christopher F. Jones, "The Invention of Infinite Growth: How Economists Forgot About the Natural World" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)
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B
Hello, I'm Deidre Woolard of the New Books Network and the Economics Channel. I'm here today with Dr. Christopher F. Jones. He's an associate professor of history at Arizona State University, author of new book called the Invention of Infinite Growth. It looks at economic history through the years and economic theory explores changing attitudes towards resources, labor, value and of course, growth. Nice to see you.
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A
Thanks for having me here.
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B
So, Infinite Growth. Why was this your calling to write about this?
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A
Yeah, so it's an interesting pathway how I got to this book. My first book was a history of energy transitions. How Americans became hooked on coal, oil and electricity. The book is called Roots of Power and it studied 1820 to 1930, which is when Americans first began really using fossil fuels intensively. And as I tried to show in that book, it was pretty transformative the ways people lived, they worked and they played. And one of the themes in the book, and this is something many other energy historians have discussed, is that in the broad sweep of economic history, the general theory has been that there was very little economic growth in world history until about the year 1000. The economy grew as there were More people, but on a per capita basis, everyone lived on about the same amount. From 1,000 to 1,800. You maybe get a 50 to 100% increase in economic growth, but that's so fractional over 800 years to not even be noticeable. Then at 1800, we start the familiar hockey sticks. Growth goes up enormously. And this is an era where fossil fuel consumption goes up enormously. And as an energy historian, I traced in a lot of ways, energy aspects in which the economic growth America experienced could not have happened without the energetic abundance of coal, oil and electricity. And so that got me to think about growth in a very, very material sense. Tons of coal, barrels of oil, calculating how much goes into each economic process. And as I finished up that book, I began to wonder, hey, who thinks about economic growth the most? Well, economists. And why is it that in the intellectual ideas of growth, this material of history of energy doesn't seem to appear? And so that's really what began my fascination with this topic, was to see where do these material worlds of energy that I and other energy historians have thought are so important to the actual performance of the economy? How do they kind of disappear from economic models about how growth might continue into the future? And so I switched from being a material historian to an intellectual historian and did a deep dive into the history of economics to kind of trace how this came about.
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B
Well, it's interesting because you start, you do start way at the beginning with Adam Smith, the founder of it all. And I thought it was fascinating to see that as you go through talking about these different economists and economic theories, it does shift as the society industrializes the theories. It seems like kind of shift to meet what's happening.
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A
Yeah, I think one of the things that is really interesting, and I think one of the most important takeaway of takeaways of the book is that economists have not always believed infinite growth to be possible. And I think that that's really important because I do think part of why I studied this book is I think the great sustainability question of the next fifty hundred years is what does economic growth look like on a finite planet? And how do we reconcile the sort of tensions between desires for economic growth and a need for planetary sustainability, humans and other life. And right now, most economic thought on the subject is pretty downplaying of the natural world and argues that economic growth is much more important or even the solution to our economic, to our environmental problems. And I think that is unduly optimistic and worrisome. But what matters, I think, in thinking about this is also realizing that it is not a timeless feature of economic thought to assume that growth could continue and infinitely. And so all the classical political economists thought that there was actually limits to growth and that we would not be able to grow beyond a certain point. Malthus is the most famous pessimist of this, but we remember Adam Smith is an optimist, but actually about growth he wasn't. He and Malthus saw the same issues, and for them, it really came down to two main propositions. The first is that you needed land to produce almost any good that you had, and there was only so much land. And so when you ran out of land, that would be one set of limits. And the second limit was the law of diminishing returns. And that held that, say you have a piece of land and you want to make it more productive, you could apply more capital to it by putting fertilizer on it, or you could apply more labor to it by hiring an additional worker. And that first bit of fertilizer, that first extra worker will increase your output a good deal, but the next, less and less and less. And eventually you just have workers bumping into each other, making themselves more inefficient, or fertilizer actually fries the soil. And so you get to a point where there's only so much you can achieve. And they call this the stationary state. And that theory was sort of generally accepted through the time of John Stuart Mill. And then perhaps what's even more fascinating is John Stuart Mill, of course, famously writes his main textbook in 1848 for 100 years. Economists then stop talking about growth. And there's a really bizarre period where growth is just not a category for economists to talk about before picking it up in the World War II era.
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B
That's really interesting. Do you have any theories on why that might have happened?
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A
There's a couple different ideas on it, but it really is remarkable in a certain sense. Because what do we know about 1850 to 1950? Right? I mean, this is Industrial Revolution. This is the Industrial Revolution. This is an enormously transformative period. Life in 1850, people aren't going faster than a horseback for the most part. We have some trains, but not a lot. No electricity, no indoor plumbing. The sort of whole pace of life is so profoundly different from 1950. And so why are economists not paying attention to this? There's a couple different reasons. I mean, it would be wrong to say no one is looking at this expansion and talking about it. So they use words like material progress, expansion, development, which are proxies for Growth, but slightly different in important ways as well. One of the other sort of theories about this is there's actually no way to measure the economy during this time. And so the notion of sort of macroeconomic thinking, that the economy as an object you can understand, track and relate to, just doesn't exist. And Timothy Mitchell has done really important work on how in the 1930s, at least in the Anglo American economic tradition, the economy gets invented. And part of how the economy gets invented is you actually need the intellectual infrastructure to do this. When people sort of assessed the economy in the period before, they sort of looked around. Are ports bustling? Are factories hiring or firing? They use proxies like tons of railroad car shipments as a way to kind of infer the overall state of the economy. But there's no number of, like, what is the economy? And so what. What does become really crucial in this sort of transition around World War II to being able to conceptualize growth is the development of the statistics that underpin gross domestic product, the sort of national income accounting. And that really emerges. There's sort of bits of it in the 1920s, but the great Depression and the sort of need to figure out how bad it is combined then leading into World War II, start the regular collection of monthly statistics about what the overall economy is doing. And suddenly economists actually have a number that you can look at and you can see it going up and down. And that sort of statistical infrastructure makes a new conceptualization of growth possible.
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B
Well, and one of the things about that is as we gather more data, and sometimes I feel like we have more data than we need, but the view of what it signifies shifts. You talk about gross national product and grows to missed a product. And how that becomes this important metric. Does it. Does it become a bit of the tail wagging the dog because the data starts determining the economy rather than the economy determining the data?
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A
I think there's a certain element of that. I think that one thing that becomes really different and becomes really important for the discipline of economics and the role of economics in our society also is that with this regular data, correct economic policy now is argued to shift all the time. So in the 19th century, first half of the 20th century, of course, people are debating. They're debating tariffs, just as we are today. They're debating monetary policy, gold or silver standards, greenbacks. They're debating whether industrial policy makes sense. There's huge sets of economic questions that are hotly debated, but the sort of general presumption is, you can answer that correctly, that there is a correct Answer. You put that in place and you let it run forward with this regular data. Now we get economists making a different claim, which is that the economy is changing all time and we need different actions. And so if that's the case, we can't just set it once and leave it. But we actually need huge teams of economists working in the government to sort this data, to suggest tweaks to policy and amend it constantly. And so you do with this data, I think get a real push and sort of significant expansion of economists in the national state, in the government, and as regular advisors on what needs to be done rather than sort of one off, what do we do or not.
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B
Yeah, it's amazing to contrast it between where we are now versus where we were in the, in the 30s and 40s in terms of the layers of economists and data gatherers. And one of the things that I think comes out of this that you talk about is the importance of Keynesian theory, so greater governmental involvement. So part of this pursuit of growth, it seems like, is anytime those numbers shift, anytime the economy wavers, we've got to get in there and prop it up maybe at a level that we weren't before that.
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A
Yeah. And I think one thing that's really interesting and a confession I have to make about this book is as an environmental historian, as someone who cares about the natural world, I am not naturally inclined towards economists. That economists have a reputation that I have seen in person of being dismissive of other fields of study, convinced that they have the right answers no one else does, and of being sort of insensitive to questions of the natural world. And so part of when I started this book, I was sort of like, all right, this is going to be a real stick it to them book. There are some of these books like Democracy in Chains, these books that really attack economists. And the challenge and the responsibility of being a historian is you sometimes find things that surprise you. And in this case, it actually turns out most of the important growth thinkers have not been the sort of right wing Mont Pelerin society figures that many critical historians of economics love to focus on and push this on. There are people like Robert Solow who passed away the past year but worked in the Kennedy administration. There are people like William Nordhaus who I have intellectual disagreements with, but he was working in the Jimmy Carter administration. These are left of center thinkers who believe in government intervention, don't just believe in markets, think you need to shape things to achieve good outcomes. And so as I wrote the book, I had to rewrite the book many times to acknowledge that a lot of the arguments many of the figures were making were not the ones I had expected them to. In another world, had Milton Friedman been the founder of growth theory instead of monetarism, maybe the book would have looked a lot different. But the fact that the growth discourse came heavily from, from progressive thinkers rather than conservative thinkers shape the feel of this. And they certainly rarely if ever believed that free market solutions were simply the right answer to everything going on.
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B
Well, there's that post war boom where everybody thinks it's all moving so fast and everybody thinks that that's where you start to really get that idea from the economist that there's no limit. This can just go on. We're just going to keep producing and somehow the market is going to, we're going to keep finding, you know, new consumers. And I notice in book you talk about at the same time you start to get those ecologists, the environmentalists, who's, who sort of bring back that earlier era of maybe there's a limit here. So tell us a little bit about how that, how that dynamic worked.
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Yeah, so I mean there's sort of a few key stages in the book and we've talked about two of them already. So there's the beginning history of economics in which I try to articulate, articulate from the classical political economists, certainly through 1850 and maybe through 1950, although the 1850-1950 period's kind of not a lot happening on this front directly. That's the sort of first phase. In the second phase around World War II, call it 1930s to 1960s, you get the invention of growth theory and economist theorizing and it becomes one of the hottest subjects in economics. People are flooding to it. The best graduate student program students are going to MIT to work with Solow and others on this. And so you get this sort of period of the real rise of growth theory from call it the 40s through the late 60s and then in the 70s. Of course we know we have the environmental movement and we have a sort of really resurgent interest in concerns about the natural world and how this is going to play out. And it's highlighted by a few sort of extreme looks at growth with things like Paul Ehrlich's population bomb in 1968 and the limits to Growth report from the Club of Rome in 1972. And this forces a set of economists, including Solow, to say, okay, well what would the natural world look like in our growth theories and how do we address this? And it becomes a really important stage because as Solow says, when we were developing growth theory in the 50s and 60s, why think about the natural world at all? It was a period of flush production. Particularly what's really important in the 50s and the 60s is it's the decolonial era. And so you have all these countries in Africa and Asia suddenly opening up their markets that had been sort of controlled by their European colonial powers. You have the Middle east, oil coming online. So it just, we are flush in resources, the global economy is. And so it just doesn't seem like an important thing. And in fairness to them, right. The whole point of a model is to try to find the most important factors of what's going on. And so if you include everything in your model, it becomes too klutzy to use or provide insight. And so there's a sort of justification in excluding resources at that period. Obviously, that changes as we get to this third stage where the environmental movement comes in. So Solow and a number of his collaborators, in response to Limits to Growth, look at this, and they conclude strongly that this is no good. Solow calls the limits to growth ignorance masquerading as knowledge, calls it worthless as a guide to public policy, while acknowledging that, you know, there still may be things we need to do to the environment. But what he and some others do is start actually adding resources into their models to see what happens. And basically what they argue, in short, and there's of course more detail in the book, but our time is finite here, that it boils down to rounding error, that resources may slightly constrain growth, but actually, as long as there's substitutability between manufactured capital and natural capital, we can sort of do away with the need for natural resources. And Solow, even in a 1974 paper in a major economics journal, says, in theory, we can do without resources altogether. If these assumptions of substitutability are met, and you get people like John Hartwick, who developed the Hartwick rule, which is basically, if you take the rents from using non renewable resources and invest them in renewable resources, then you can have a sustainable economy. So what that sort of means in layman's terms is for every barrel of oil you use, set aside a little money to invest in solar panels. And as long as you turn that oil wealth into solar panels, then you're going to be fine. And so there is this moment in the 1970s where the economists really look at this and they say, nope, we're actually going to be okay. We don't have to worry about this. And things kind of fade away after that point a little bit.
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B
So is that the point at MIT where you've got Solow and then you talk about some others? You talk about Rosenstein, Rodin and Rostow and the modernization theory. It seems like they're all coming at it from slightly, from, from different angles with their own individual models.
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A
Yeah. So MIT becomes very important to this. Just I don't think consciously, but they have three of the most important growth thinkers who come there. But it is interesting, they don't actually talk to one another very much at all. And so Paul Rosenstein Rodin is considered one of the founders of development economics. And so there's a few different approaches to growth. You have Walt Rostow, who's famous for his stages of growth, which today we might call an institutionalist approach to growth. You have Rosenstein Rodin doing development economics and Robert Solow doing neoclassical growth economics. And these are imagined as applying to slightly different areas. And part of it is a sort of are you studying the global norms north or the global South? And most of the thinkers at this time generally argue if you're studying the global north, you use neoclassical principles because you can count roughly on good markets, existing, good property rights, capital flows and all of this. But people who are studying the global south are noticing you don't actually have true labor mobility, you don't have free flow of capital, you don't have secure property rights. And so in that case, a neoclassical theory of what it would mean for sort of newly decolonized nation in Africa, for example, to develop, it just doesn't seem to make sense to apply neoclassical theory to that. And so there's a whole separate field of development economics that arises that's supposed to look at this. And they're quite critical of Solow's growth theory and neoclassical approaches as applying to the developing world. But one of the things that I found really interesting is if you were to expect any field of study about growth to pay attention to the natural world, you'd have to think that you would start with development economics. Right. You're talking about countries where plantations, natural resources and agriculture are the dominant thing. And one of the surprises of the book is that the development economists really don't look at the natural world much at all, hardly more than Solow in any way. And they do this for a couple reasons. One is they actually think agriculture is the problem. So the thing holding back the developing world is that people work in non capital accumulating family farms that don't allow a sort of cumulative takeoff. And so the real goal, and this is what Paul Rosenstein Rodan says. He starts this study in not fully the developing world, but eastern and Southern Europe, which in the 1940s felt to many Europeans like a backwater. And his claim is the problem is you have 20 million too many peasants and you get them off the farm and into the factories. Because only if they're doing that will you get patterns of capital accumulation and technological development that will break the sort of low level trap. So the development economists know most of their people are working in the natural world, but they want them to stop. And then they do also. And I think that this is an important argument. They note that there are countries rich in natural resources that remain poor. And there are countries poor in natural resources that get rich. Like Netherlands is a sort of classic example of this that was very successful even before North Sea oil was sort of part of their economy. So I find it really interesting that sort of, wherever you go, even if they're not using neoclassical approaches, even if they're not paying attention to the global north and they're looking at areas where people work with the natural world regularly, they still downplay the natural world and don't think it should be a central part of their analysis.
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B
Is part of that, that they think that, and I've heard this before, this idea of sort of like you just kind of pull the global south into the global north using this, that somehow we can bring prosperity or our version of it to, you know, to the global south and sort of like speed up the process in some way.
- [25:01]
A
Yeah. And so really what they're, what they care about is capital, right? This is the capital accumulation so that you can invest in other things. And their maybe most central debate is about a big push or balanced growth. And so part of the question is do you try, say, you know, say you had $100. Right. Economists love to say, say you had $100 because it's easy to think about to invest in a country to bring it up. Are you better putting $100 in one industry that will have sort of feed down effects that would bring everyone up. This is sort of the big push. So like auto manufacturer so that then hopefully you get steel making and part making and stuff below this. Or do you take that do and give 10 to 10 different sectors and try to grow the whole economy at a sort of regular level where every, I mean they call it balanced growth, where several industries are coming up at once. So this is a huge debate for them, it's never, of course, perfectly resolved what would actually be successful, but that's the type of thing that they are, that they're looking at. And so figuring out the capital is, is what matters.
- [26:25]
B
And I think there's also, with environmental concerns, it's, it's because, I mean, if, if some, if a country in the global south went the same way we did, there would be a lot more, a lot more pollution if they took the same path and went to, you know, coal first before solar. So you have that we have that global push to bring things down, but that may also squelch development.
- [26:49]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think people have generally assumed by the time people are really caring about pollution, by the 1970s, there's still a sense that we would have what people call the environmental Kuznets curve. So Simon Kuznets, who is really important to this story and the development of income statistics that become GDP and help us sort of imagine growth, he had this theory about equality and basically argued that as countries start to industrialize, you get massive inequality and then it eases over time. And he's looking at the American model, right, where if you go to America in the 1850s, lots of farmers, of course you have wealth inequality, but the level of wealth inequality in society is so much less than when you fast forward to the Gilded Age where you have Rockefeller and Carnegie and Vanderbilt and you just have this sort of brute, blatantly obvious people who are so wealthy while their workers are working 12 hours a day in brutal conditions and living in tenements. And the sort of contrast between those is pretty stark and obvious. We're then looking at how by the 1960s, America has become comparatively more egalitarian. And so this is the Kuznets curve around inequality, which is the idea that as you industrialize, it will get worse, but then it will get caught up. People hypothesize an environmental Kuznets curve, which basically says as you start to industrialize, you're gonna get a huge amount of pollution. But then as you get to a certain level of wealth, people will be willing to pay for environmental remediation. They'll be willing to pay for better smokestacks, more efficient processes, and that lead to a better environmental outcome down the road. So essentially they both suck it up for a little while and trust it will be okay later positions that have both had some empirical evidence that they're true and that it's false.
- [28:56]
B
Well, that is the interesting thing about that. It is absolutely both false and true at the same time. And in the book you talk about that. So we talked about the 70s, the 80s, the 80s or the 80s. We sort of, we sort of don't worry about those things for a little while. But you get that back in the 90s and you show in the book there's economists who believe, well, we can, like you said, grow our way out of it. And there are others that are modeling in this idea that climate change is contributing to income losses. And you've mentioned Nordhaus earlier. Talk a little bit about him and what it means when he wins the Nobel for economics and what it means in terms of those theories.
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A
Yeah, I think the book kind of a lot of this comes to a head in 2018. William Nordhaus wins the Nobel Prize for his work on climate change. And there's a couple really interesting things about his awarding, getting awarded the prize and his co winner. And so he had long been on the short list for the Nobel Prize. And William Nordhaus has been by all measures an incredibly brilliant thinker. In the 1960s he went to MIT to work with Solow. He was the sort of star in a set of stars. Paul Samuelson was the biggest economist at mit. He includes Nordhaus as the co author on his new textbook. This is an unbelievable honor to be sort of helping take over the most common textbook used in America. He's a very young person who's head of Jimmy Carter's council of Economic Advisors. He's on the make from the very, very beginning and has a long distinguished career. And it was known that he was gonna win the Nobel Prize for his work on climate change and economics. Most people thought that he might co win it with his fellow graduate student from mit, Marty Weitzman, who was also an environmental economist and looked at climate change, but was less optimistic than Nordhaus. He thought we needed to be much more worried about the small possibilities that things are terrible than the sort of bigger probability that hopefully it will be okay. And he urged much more caution. And his work was very well regarded. Many people thought the two of them would share the award as sort of their balanced approach. But the Nobel Prize committee didn't do this. Instead they had Nordhaus share the award with Paul Romer, who was famous for endogenous growth theory. And this was the sort of second stage of growth theory after Solow's growth theory. And basically the gist of Romer's approach was knowledge is the key to growth. And since knowledge is our brains, there's no inherent limit to knowledge. We can grow forever and in fact we can expect Growth to even increase as we get more knowledge, more brains going on, more growth. And he's utterly unconcerned with the natural world and how this comes out. And so it's really notable that not only does Nordhaus win the prize, but he wins it with someone whose environmental assumptions are sort of incredibly optimistic rather than someone who was more cautious. All right, so back to Nordhaus. As one sort of environmentalist put it, after Nordhaus got the prize, it was a, quote, nobel Prize for climate catastrophe. And Nordhaus is a sort of deeply frustrating figure for most environmentalists because at one level, his tone is moderate and his rhetoric suggests climate change is really important. But it's important to remember he got his start in growth theory. He studied it, and he, like most economists, and I think this is where we are at the state of the world today, or the state of economic thought on this, still considered growth to be so much more important than environmental protection that ultimately the benefits of growth are so high that to give it up to save the environment is too much to do. And so he goes to the stage in Stockholm to accept his award, puts up some of his graphs on what is the economically optimal path of climate abatement. And the economically optimal path, in his view, goes all the way up to 3.8 degrees warming by 2140. And if you ask anyone on the IPCC or a climate scientist what they think will happen if we hit nearly 4 degrees Celsius, they see a world of great challenges to humans living on it sustainably and millions of people displaced, all kinds of issues. Yet Nordhaus calmly presents this as the economically optimal outcome. And his work has consistently said doing nothing on climate change is bad, but to follow the policies of scientists to try to limit it to 2 degrees or something like that would do far more damage to people than letting climate change continue. And so his conclusion that's sort of generally shared by most economists is that while environmental costs and climate change aren't great, it is much better to be wealthier in a more volatile climate than it is to be poorer in a stable one. And again to our theme of what's real and what's false, there's real and false things in here. You know, they invoke when they're making these arguments, often people in developing nations, and they basically argue, look, if you're a poor person living in some part of sub Saharan Africa and you are subject to the cost of climate change, but you're also subject to the cost of a medical emergency or a political crisis where you might have to operate. If you have more money, you are sort of more resilient to all of those troubles. And so that it's better to be rich because wealthier because you could do that. And again, there's some truth that this is the case. On the other hand, the fiction of this is of course we've had a few hundred years of strong economic growth and we know how much of that has reached sub Sahara Africa. What has been the patterns of growth for the last 50 years? It has been to make Elon Musk and others super wealthy, while we've seen an actual decline in the American middle class and very little net growth for working class people. So there's both something very important about economic growth for better lives. And there's also been several decades of utter failure of that growth to really make as much impact for average people as it might have.
- [35:48]
B
When I was reading this book, I was thinking a lot about where we sit right now and how that connects to these theories. Because we're putting all of this energy behind AI, but it's energy and it comes from somewhere. And we're building these massive data centers, we're draining power and water from cities, and it's all in the theory that what we gain is somehow going to make up for that. That maybe we'll somehow be figuring out some way that, that it'll eventually become, you know, more, you know, more energy efficient. But first we have to go through this period where we're just devouring all the resources in, in order to, to build artificial intelligence. So it's this, the theories you talk about really connect to what we're experiencing right now.
- [36:38]
A
Yeah, and I think that, I think AI is a great case both on the environmental fronts, but also on the question that just doesn't get asked enough, which is that what is growth for? Because what's the other part of what's AI going to do? It's hard to imagine that AI isn't linked to massive unemployment. And so we may grow the economy, but again, how much of that is going to go into the hands of the few and how many lives are actually going to be diminished by not having access to types of employment? And I think that this is perhaps the biggest thing is that economists have not really grappled sufficiently with that. It's not enough to grow the pie. You have to think about who's getting pieces and where things go. And there's been a long history in economics of saying we are a positive, objective science, not a normative moral one. Our job is to grow the pie. And if society is wise enough to distribute it, well, that's great. But that's a question for kings, philosophers or Democratic voters, not for us. But I think also, as I look at this historically as well, I think one of the things that's really interesting, it goes back to the difference between the 50s to the 70s and what we've seen since is that growth theory was not just a big deal in the 1950s and 1960s because it was intellectually exciting. The period, the 30 years after World War II are by a huge number of measures, the most objectively good economy this nation has ever had. When you look at some people call it the great leveling or the great compression, but you get enormous growth during these 30 years and you get it distributed across all income quintiles as evenly as it ever has been before. And so the bottom 20% are gaining proportional same as the top 20%. This happens for a number of reasons. It happens because manufacturing is booming as the world has to rebuild itself after World War II. It happens because unions are particularly strong at this period. It happens because government policies like the GI Bill are giving working class people access to education and home loans in ways that they never have before. And it's happening because you have high progressive tax rates on the wealthy to pay for this. And the good that this does in the world is a lot, right? And the people like Solo. He talks about it, he grew up in working class Brooklyn. Times are really tough during the Depression. And you get to this post war period and the American middle class goes from 30% of the population to 60% of the population. And you see this, people are better fed, they're better housed, they can get more schooling, they have more leisure time. Lifespans increase like leisure time increases. There are, you know, look, obviously we know you have the civil rights movement, you have the women's rights movement. There's a lot of tumult and not everything is perfect in this time. But from an economic perspective, it was the most egalitarian period of growth we've ever had. And I think it matters that growth theory was founded at this time and its principles were founded at this time. And the obvious goods of it could be seen in the world and didn't need to be justified, particularly because it was just so obvious how much better life was for so many Americans because of that growth. And I think probably the biggest failure I see in economics and my biggest critique of it is that since the mid-1970s, we've just had such a worse economy for the vast majority of Americans, for anyone out of that total, the top 10 to 15%, the middle class has shrunk over the last 50 years. There's been so much stagnation for everyone below the 80th percentile. And it's linked to changes in policies, it's linked to neoliberalism, tax cuts for the wealthy, it's linked to the decline of manufacturing and its replacement with tech and finance as the drivers of the economy. But at this juncture, you can't really be a student of the modern economy and not look, at least in some ways, at the last 50 years and have to say, that's all we got for all that growth. And I think that too much of this remaining thinking about what growth is comes out of these debates of the 60s and the 70s, which economists feel resolve themselves that climate change and environmental limits are not that important, that growth benefits are so high that even if there's environmental problems, it's worth the cost. And I think that the sort of measuring of the costs of that economic growth and what it's meant have been underappreciated. And I think everything we see about the decline of American society and politics and the anger and the discord and the loss of any sort of interest in the centrist wings of both parties is largely a product of how few people feel like they've really participated in the last 50 years of the American economy.
- [42:00]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And that shift from being a manufacturing economy to being a service economy and tech and finance economy has also contributed to that wealth inequality. I always get hung up lately on the fact that 50 or 60% of consumer consumption is driven by 10% percent of people in this country. It's just not. It's not sustainable. And it feels like we're slowly waking up to that. And so this idea of infinite growth you've got, you're kind of, you can't really slow down the 80 mile an hour car quickly. We know how that goes. So tell us a little bit about degrowth and what that looks like. Is there a way to sort of understand where we may fit in a global economy when we're not the leader?
- [42:48]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think that. So degrowth has been a movement that sort of has emerged over the last couple decades and has basically argued we have to deliberately slow the economy. The title of it is sort of negative. And people debate whether this is a good word because it sort of doesn't seem appealing on it. And I think some of the more interesting recent work talks about what if we move towards a well being economy, what if we are sort of neutral about growth but just ask what people need? One of the things that's obvious, if you just halted growth, you would have a massive recession. We know that layoffs, unemployment are very bad for the social order. They lead to depression rates, domestic violence, alcoholism. All kinds of bad things happen when lots of people are out of jobs, which frankly could happen with an AI fueled economy anyways. So it's not like we're in the clear on being able to ignore that. But I think the message of degrowth that I think is really important for lots of people to pay attention to and consider is to say if it does, if we do want to, oh, it's not even a car. If we want to take this ocean liner and redirect it a little, it's not going to happen immediately. Our whole, whole society is predicated around growth. Our corporate systems of course, but even our social safety nets are right. I mean Social Security is based on having more people pay in over time to do this. And so we would need to develop a more sustainable economy. We would need to think about long term processes that allow us to reconfigure these. I think one of the most important and useful things to sort of start on that is to simply start asking and doing more assessments of when growth is actually linked to measures of well being or not. And economists are not particularly helpful in this. Their measure of well being is economic welfare. And that basically is how many dollars do you have in your bank account? And economists will like to say, hey, the consumer is sovereign. Whether they want to spend a dollar on organic milk or heroin is their choice. We shouldn't decide on that. Our goal is just to make sure they have the resources to decide whatever they want to do. And I think the absurdity of that is sort of fairly apparent from the outside. But we have what I at least think when I look at our economy, we clearly have enormous amounts of economic activity that have very poor links to human well being into making people's lives better. And that actually a lot of what makes life worth living, and we know this, right, the old adage says that money can't buy happiness and money matters, but to a certain extent, and I think that there are a lot of ways we could think about how do we make sure people have good lives that aren't fundamentally premised on always give them more money and that our lives don't get infinitely better with more choice in the sense that we are not 10 times happier watching TV with 10 times more pixels in our screen. We're not 100 times happier watching TV when we have 10,000 channels as opposed to 100 to look at. We one of my sort of favorite things, and I experienced this myself, people are not happier going into a store and seeing 57 kinds of jelly to choose from. They're actually confused and overwhelmed about what jelly am I trying to pick out here? And so I think we need to get away from the idea that we can always infinitely make life better by adding more choices and options and think about what is it that it means for good human lives. And we're not all going to have the same opinion about that. And that's fine. But if we were to think about directing our economy to making it possible for people to live their lives well in ways that weren't just predicated on having evermore, I think we could actually achieve high levels of well being without anywhere near the same obsession with infinite growth that we have today.
- [47:18]
B
Do you think that's a new discipline within economics or does it have to be a discipline, sort of a different discipline unto itself that brings together sort of that like public health markers and other. Other inputs?
- [47:33]
A
Yeah, I don't see economists being that excited about jumping into this space. There are a few, of course, and you know, of course it's a huge field with variety of opinions. To say economists think is of course too much of a generalization on it. There is an interdisciplinary forming field of well being studies that exists and it's a challenge because economists have been right that there's something lovely about economic welfare there. It's an objective measure. You don't have to discuss values. You can model it, you can track it in ways that you can't do it the same with happiness or life contentedness or social capital or sort of number of community events participated in per month or quality of relationship with family or neighbors. It's hard and I don't think it's as amenable to the tools of economics as it's developed. And so I think that there's reason to think that economists would not be the ones to pioneer that. Although there certainly are some doing good and important work in this who do think it's there to engage with. But I do think all of these questions are too important to leave to any one field. I think one of my lines in the book is that economic growth is too important to leave to the economists. And while I'm a big advocate, of course for history and what it can add, I don't want to put a historian king in charge to do this as well. I think we need the real meeting of minds and multiple perspectives to make sense of this. Undoubtedly it is hard, it is harder, it is easier to just say just focus on growth than it is to do this other work. But on the other hand, look around at our world and is this like easy choices don't always produce really good human outcomes. And I think it's hard to look at this world and say it's as good as we could have made it or that a different approach might not do something better.
- [49:41]
B
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So last question for you. Your past book was on natural resources. You've now gone through economics and infinite Growth.
- [49:51]
A
Growth.
- [49:52]
B
What are you working on now?
- [49:53]
A
Yeah, what I'm going to dive into really is actually this well being studies that we're doing and really look at the connections between growth and well being over the last 50 years, how that distinguishes, how that's distinguished from what came before and sort of use that as a way to try to really draw into more broad attention the idea that growth by, by itself isn't going to produce better lives, but it's what type of growth in what ways and how might we get far more bang for our buck such that we could live better with a little less and sort of assess this more generally. So I'm going to be looking at economic theories of growth again through the present, but also theories of well being link it some with the natural world, but that's not going to be as much focus and a lot more on the political economy of what it means to think about well being instead of growth and how we might approach that to create a world that nurtures more of the population better than it has under our current models.
- [50:59]
B
I look forward to reading that. And for now people can read the Invention of Infinite Growth. Thank you so much for your time.
- [51:05]
A
Thank you so much. This is so much fun.