Two new books allow us to stage, in a usefully stylized way, the confrontation between the advocates of continued economic growth, on the one hand, and the advocates of an opposite—and so far imaginary—phenomenon called degrowth, on the other. In Growth: A History and a Reckoning, the Oxford economist Daniel Susskind consults the balance sheet of a capitalist society dedicated to economic growth and concludes that in the 21st century, the singular ambition of growth may need to be modified but shouldn’t be abandoned. In Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, by the Japanese Marxist scholar Kōhei Saitō, economic growth appears, by contrast, as a disastrous fetish to be immediately discarded by a world that can satisfy the joint criteria of sustainability and equality only by way of what Saitō calls “degrowth communism.”
The stakes of the debate could hardly be higher: They include your life and mine, and the lives of any children we are optimistic enough to conceive. But true appreciation of these 21st-century stakes can arrive only after a quick glance across long centuries that look very different from our own, in which growth either barely took place at all or—as in the long-ago 20th century—sounded to many ears like a byword for happiness, peace, and progress.
Growth as we know it—that is, year-over-year increases in the gross domestic product—acquired conceptual definition among economists only in the early decades of the 20th century. But this hardly means that standards of living didn’t improve or decline, or that overall levels of productive activity didn’t rise or fall, before the advent of motion pictures. As the nearly omniscient historian Fernand Braudel wrote in his History of Civilizations,
For a long time, people were humanity’s only implement or form of energy—the sole resource for building a civilization by sheer brawn or brain. In principle and in fact, therefore, increase in the population always helped the growth of civilization…. Just as regularly, however, when the population grows faster than the economy, what was once an advantage becomes a drawback…. The results in the past were famines, a fall in real earnings, popular uprisings, and grim periods of slump: until epidemics and starvation together brutally thinned out the too-serried ranks of human beings.
“Economic life,” Braudel went on, “never ceases to fluctuate, at intervals sometimes long and sometimes short.”