Growth: A History and a Reckoning

One of Barack Obama’s 10 Favorite Books of the Year
One of the New Yorker’s Best Books of the Year
Finalist for the Financial Times Best Book of the Year

A vivid account of the past, present, and future of economic growth, showing how and why we must continue to pursue it while responding to the challenges it creates.

Over the past two centuries, economic growth has freed billions from the struggle for subsistence. Yet prosperity has come at a price: environmental destruction, desolation of local cultures, the emergence of vast inequalities. Many respond that now is the time to shrink our economic footprint. But Daniel Susskind argues that such “degrowth” would be folly. Instead, we must keep growth but redirect it, making it better reflect our values.

Growth: A History and a Reckoning shows how policymaking in the second half of the twentieth century came to revolve around a single—minded quest for greater GDP. The growth obsession has been met with the assertion that “we cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet.” Susskind shows, though, that growth is a product not of resource exploitation but of new ideas. In that sense, growth really can be infinite.

Still, he says, critics are right to insist that we can no longer focus on upsides alone. We must confront tradeoffs: societies will have to deliberately pursue less growth for the sake of other goals. These will be moral decisions, not simply economic ones, demanding the engagement not just of politicians and experts but of all citizens.