“Infinite growth on a finite planet IS possible”
Last night I attended a conversations between Daniel Susskind and Prof. Shqipnja Telhaj on the subject of DS’s book, Growth.
I’m reporting what I heard, while I process and try to understand this.
Growth is a very recent idea. It started about 200 years ago, and no-one was talking about growth until the 1950s.
Growth is associated with almost all forms of “human flourishing”, but has negatives. Inequality being a one.
Yes, infinite growth is possible because it’s about ideas not stuff. The metaphor is: think of a kitchen with a hundred ingredients and the vast number of ways you can put them together. You’re not using more resources to do that.
More growth comes from:
- Discovering more ideas.
- Investing in R&D (not high-speed rail projects).
- Getting more people into the ideas business (inequality is not only a moral issue, it’s inefficient: people with ideas aren’t able to contribute—reducing inequality helps growth.)
- Technology.
There were good questions from the audience:
Q: Fine, but given the time pressures of the climate emergency don’t we have to put growth aside? A: Covid-19 showed us we can do remarkable things quickly (stop homelessness, find vaccines quickly, switch to working from home). It’s about political will.
Q: We’ve heard it all before, but capitalism and automation didn’t solve our problems. A: Capitalism is a remarkable force, but economic value and social value are not the same. We need to balance that, and decide where we want growth, what is important to us, and that’s a moral question for politics. We need more participatory politics. Citizens assemblies-style, not Brexit (which regardless of outcome was just a bad way to make decisions).
Q: How does AI fit into this? It turbo-charges ideas but the carbon impact is bad. A: The promise of new ideas is huge, and the technology challenge is designing these systems to reduce environmental impact. Also: the inequality from low-wage data labelling needs to be tackled. These are the general problems he is tackling in the book.
I was hoping attending the talk would save me from adding another book to my reading pile. That’s not worked out.
Links related to ideas mentioned:
- The productive career of Robert Solow:“[…] a growing population and increased capital investment will not sustain economic growth. Instead, it is technological progress that will power such growth over time.” (MIT Technology Review, 2019)
- Economic Growth: “Human history teaches us, however, that economic growth springs from better recipes, not just from more cooking.” (Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, accessed 6 June 2024).
- Video of a lecture from University of Oxford covering the same ground: Past, present, and future of economic growth: how we should rethink it, with Daniel Susskind.