The complex matrix of growth, economics and society is mapped forcibly by Daniel Susskind, Maja Göpel and Fareed Zakaria
Shipping containers at Hamburg port: If all politics is local, maybe all economic growth should be personal? Photograph: Sean Gallup/GettyGeorge Osborne was speaking at a campaign event to warn of the economic harm of Brexit. Britain’s then chancello of the exchequer referred to the impact on gross domestic product, warning of a big risk.
Olivia Laing: ‘People find it hard to grasp things like racism, or misogyny, because they genuinely can’t see they exist’opens with a reminder that advances in our economies are a recent phenomenon. Humanity has experienced, for most of its history, the Long Stagnation. During this period, life did not change much, living standards were poor and miserable subsistence was all that could be achieved.
These “prices” are assessed, but the conclusion is still positive, that economic growth is “responsible for many of our greatest triumphs”. This is the growth dilemma: the tension between the price and promise of economic development. Susskind is critical of degrowthers who duck the hard issues of how a reduction in growth could increase poverty and reduce living standards. He writes Degrowth, he writes, “would be an intellectual disaster, drawing our collective attention away from understanding the only process that can help us improve conditions for all humankind”.
The author argues that the best way of managing this dilemma is through a more holistic assessment of how economies and societies function. A “systems” approach is advocated. This recognises that economy and society are interconnected through structures and behaviours so deeply embedded that we can easily miss their power.
Reactions to a contemporary state of “permacrisis” are analysed. The “control loop” describes our attempts to dominate events. This sees “the world as a collection of objects that we quickly attempt to standardise and categorise”. Attempts at such a level of control mostly founder. Zakaria asks: what are the defining features of a revolutionary era? How do these periods of disruption begin and how might they end?
A common theme is that economic growth and innovation accelerates the transformation of political identity. The repeal of the Corn Law in Britain in 1846 diminished the power of land and inheritance. Allegiance to empire and religion took their place.We are now, Zakaria argues, in the midst of a contemporary political revolution. A new populism “has destabilised the old left-right coalitions, redefining how we understand politics itself”.
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