Growth A Reckoning is a 2024 book written by Daniel Susskind. It is a review of the history, present and future of growth.

I think the strongest part of the book is the historical review of growth. The timeline mostly refers from 1800 to the present, with Malthus and Keynes as the two most pivotal figures and GDP as the key concept that dominates the last 50 years of politics.

In these earlier parts of the book I already noticed that the narrative was slightly off. According to the book, humans have been “surviving” mostly until the 1800s, and then something changed and prosperity started.

In my understanding of the book account, these changes come from the enlightenment period, the byproduct of thoughts of many people that managed to unlock growth. I thought that the role of both industrial revolution was severely understated.

The author’s perspective is that growth is a consequence of invention, of efficiency, an outcome of the human mind. It is a choice to embrace or not, and there are very few limits to it. In his view, the drawbacks of growth are:

  • Inequality
  • Pollution or climate change
  • Politics

And the space of solutions are either changing GDP (gdp minimalism) or some form of degrowth. The author proposal is not too different to Kate Raworth’s doughnut economic framework of “growth agnostic progress”. With some elements of “free lunch” efficiency progress through human ingenuity and technology:

  • Intelectual property reform
  • More people
  • More R&D

Lastly the book cites pareto improvements, which sound like arguments that our intellect will unlock further free growth and ignore the limits. The idea of accepting tradeoffs was relegated to politics and similar to Raworth’s work, unclear.

The drift

Almost from the beginning of the book I found myself disagreeing with the narrative presented. The information was factually correct, with some missing pieces and very different judgements to the ones I have reached over time.

This is expected as growth is one of these systems thinking style of problems in which there is no true understanding of its causes beyond physics.

The main cause of the drift is that I see energy as one of the key ingredients for growth. Without energy there is no power for human inventions that then produce further growth. Human ingenuity is a necessary ingredient too, and that one does accumulate.

Steve Keen has some work explaining how relevant is energy to produce stuff compared to capital or labour.

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In a way I see degrowth as the only think that we humans can really choose We can’t choose how much we grow because we have no full control over our inventions nor how much energy is available.

But we can choose not to grow, although I agree with the author that it really isn’t a great choice. In that sense Kate Raworth’s angle seems like a better version of degrowth where prosperity is selective and decoupled from traditional growth (unclear how though).

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There is another reason the book ideas felt drifting away: resource constraints as described by the limits to growth. Water, sand and oil require more and more energy over time, and reduce the amount of growth available. See Charlie S Hall work in terms of EROI.

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These two omissions made really hard to follow the rest of the book. The appeal to better intellectual property laws, or more R&D, or more people seem like a choice that we can make for our own betterment.

But if your line of thinking is closer to the idea that we have no choice, all of these suggestions seem like fantasy.

I also found myself disagreeing with the framing of globalism as a choice in a similar way to energy. It is a choice to decide how global are policies when there is enough energy and technology to enforce them.

Global capital would not be an option if the energy used by civilisation goes below certain threshold. On some hot takes on what the world would look like, see [[2025-01-04-20250104125645-peter-zeihan-the-end-of-the-world-is-just-the-beginning]]. Also a similar EROI framing of what’s possible see [[]] Jessica Lambert

Summary

I enjoyed the initial growth and GDP history, and got progressively more annoyed as I perceived the opinions and judgement were more detached from my own perspective. I did not see a compelling argument, just omissions and arbitrariness. Which is the same criticism against the book “limits to growth” that the book echoes.

*#book#review