Unfettered economic growth will destroy us: we need an alternative

Economic growth is supposed to save Britain, but sadly it’s more likely to destroy us.Growth as the central concern of economics is, points out Geoff Mann in the London Review of Books, a relatively recent phenomenon.1 Adam Smith never mentioned it, and one of the main Bibles of growth, Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto by Walt Rostow, was published in 1960. Growth was the answer to the Great Depression, the Cold War, domestic instability, and decolonisation. It was also an antidote to redistribution of wealth: instead of dividing the cake between rich and poor the cake would be bigger, the rich could keep their cake, and everybody would have more cake.The cake is Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the monetary value of a country’s annual output. But as Robert Kennedy famously said, “it measures everything…except that which makes life worthwhile.” It certainly doesn’t measure health. As Mann reminds us,…
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