Among well-fed, comfortable “progressives” in the Western world, it has become fashionable to sniff that economic growth is just a foolish fetish. They long for (or at least think they long for) a stable, sustainable economy that won’t run out of resources.
In his latest Bastiat’s Window post, Bob Graboyes pushes back against such thinking. Economic growth is what has delivered much of humanity from grinding poverty.
Here’s a slice:
Nobel economist Robert Fogel explored the rapid increase in life span and health. In a short, highly readable 1996 presentation, ”New Findings about Trends in Life Expectation and Chronic Diseases,” he described a virtuous circle of events: economic growth led to better nutrition, which led to longer lives and better health, which led to still more economic growth, and so on. In Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World, economist Deirdre McCloskey explained how respect for commerce brought all of this about. Among her comments:
Two centuries later the world supports more than six-and-half time more souls, [yet] the average person now earns and consumes almost ten times more goods and services than in 1800.
Economic growth doesn’t occur because we obsess over GDP. It occurs because individuals desire to improve their circumstances by innovating to produce more and better things. The “sustainable” no-growth economy that some leftist intellectuals envision would entail an omnipotent government with vast numbers of officials employed to monitor people and firms so that they don’t produce “too much.” That would divert otherwise productive resources toward the “work” of deterring production. It’s a way to guarantee the steady impoverishment of any country that blunders into this sort of thinking.