The Invention of Infinite Growth: How Economists Came to Believe a Dangerous Delusion
By Christopher F. Jones
University of Chicago Press, 376 pages $32.50
Two days after announcing his candidacy for the US presidency in 1968, Robert F. Kennedy criticized gross domestic product (GDP) as a measure of human welfare. Even as tobacco advertising and napalm production are factored into GDP, he said, the figure does not capture “the beauty of our poetry, the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate, or the integrity of our public officials.” GDP, Kennedy concluded, “measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”
Kennedy’s speech, as the napalm reference intimates, was delivered at a volatile and fiscally costly moment in US history. The national projects of the time—the Vietnam War and the Great Society—made strong GDP growth a national imperative. The tension between properly valuing the things that make “life worthwhile” and the practical necessity of maintaining comfortable lives and financing the federal government persists today in the much discussed disconnect between the US economy’s strong numbers and a widespread feeling of malaise.
In The Invention of Economic Growth, the historian Christopher F. Jones argues that economists have not only failed to heed Kennedy’s warning, but have also convinced themselves of the feasibility of infinite growth in a finite world. Jones’s book is partly a critique of the methodology of modern (“neoclassical”) economics, partly a narrative history of mid-twentieth century American politics, economics, and environmentalism, and partly an exhortation to give up on the idea of reconciling economic growth with the preservation of the natural world.