Money Makes the World Go Round

For the past two centuries, economic growth has been treated as an unqualified good. GDP has been used as the primary metric of national success; governments have been measured by their ability to increase it. Admittedly, growth has lifted billions from poverty and funded the hospitals, schools and infrastructure that sustain modern life. There is considerable merit in the view that, for developing nations, continued growth remains an existential necessity.

Notwithstanding these achievements, it is now increasingly argued that infinite growth on a finite planet is a logical — and ecological — impossibility. The carbon emissions generated by economic expansion are destabilising the climate upon which all economic activity depends. This argument, while superficially radical, rests on straightforward physics: you cannot extract more from a system than it can regenerate. Not only has GDP growth failed to reduce inequality within nations, but it has frequently deepened it.

On balance, the most defensible position is neither blind faith in perpetual growth nor its wholesale rejection, but a fundamental rethinking of what economic success means. Were GDP to be supplemented by metrics of wellbeing, ecological health and social cohesion, policy priorities would be transformed. The most pressing question of the twenty-first century is not how to grow the economy, but how to make it work — for people and for the planet.