Growth

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 disorientating.

‘The end justifies the means,’ wrote the author Ursula K. Le Guin. ‘But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.’ That line neatly captures our political life for the last seventy years: economic growth, which really 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.

‘It is, after all, worth while exploring a blind alley,’ wrote T. S. Eliot, ‘if only to discover that it is blind.’

The problem with relying on correlations alone is intuitive. The data, for instance, suggests that the number of people who have drowned by falling into swimming pools over time is correlated with the number of films in which Nicolas Cage has starred; and the number of people who have died by becoming tangled in their bedsheets is correlated with per capita cheese consumption.

Mokyr, ‘the Industrial Revolution did not mark the beginning of invention, but it marked the beginning of “the method of invention” – turning it from an occasional event to a regular and routine part of the economy.’

CO2 levels are now over 400 ppm; the air we breathe today has almost 50 per cent more carbon dioxide in it than when the Industrial Revolution began.

Today, global GDP per person is already about $11,000 – enough not only to take everyone out of extreme poverty, defined as $2.15 a day, but to provide them with an income of around $30 a day, near the standard poverty threshold in rich, developed countries.

(between 1950 and 2000, availability of computational power increased roughly by a factor of 10 billion),

Programmers are left to perform tasks that can be as consequential as those that fall to politicians and judges. They are asked to write rules that regulate our lives in equally intrusive and restrictive ways. Yet they do so without the meaningful consent of their users:

Marry your house cleaner and the country’s GDP will fall, for example, but send your parents to a care home and GDP will rise.

Economic growth is not driven by using more and more finite resources, as many tend to assume, but ‘by discovering better and better ways to use the finite resources available to us’.28 And the universe of those intangible ideas is unimaginably vast – for all practical purposes, as good as infinite.

Yet at the same time, there is no escaping the fact that the unfettered price signal is limited in what it can achieve. However effective it may be in its various roles, it will only ever reflect what people care about when they act as consumers in a market. It does not reflect what those people are concerned by when they act as citizens in a society. And this matters because it is the latter, not the former, that ought to determine which particular technologies get built and what economic course we take.