Growth: A reckoning By DanielSusskind. Allen Lane. 2024. pp. 368. £25.00 (hbk). ISBN: 978‐0241542309. £10.99 (pbk). ISBN: 978‐0141998718. £13.99 (ebk). ISBN: 978‐0141998725

I was a bit disappointed with this book. Daniel Susskind, Research Professor in Economics at King's College London, is an intelligent man, and I thought the book he and his father Richard wrote about The Future of the Professions (Oxford University Press, 2015) was an innovative, stimulating and disruptive take on the stranglehold of the ‘experts’ who rule our lives. This latest book takes on a big topic, albeit one that a fair number of authors have had a bash at recently. Although Susskind has much to say about the pursuit of economic growth that is insightful and interesting, I find his final position unconvincing. But more of that later. As Susskind points out, economists' focus on growth is of relatively recent origin. Prior to World War II there was only a limited understanding of the size of the economy, or indeed of what should be counted and what should not. Pioneering work by Colin Clark in the UK and Simon Kuznets in the USA fashioned crude estimates of national income, and in the post-war period governments and international bodies began to publish more and more detailed figures for Gross Domestic Product and other macroeconomic aggregates. Monthly or quarterly figures are eagerly scrutinised by commentators and politicians to see whether the economy has grown in the latest period, though the data are so patchy and so frequently revised that such scrutiny is more of a politicised game than serious analysis. Meanwhile economic historians look backwards, trying to trace when and how traditional economies first began to take off into sustained growth. When we do look back, it is apparent that for most of human history there was very little economic growth. An arresting chart on page 7 of Susskind's book shows a reverse L-shape, with global GDP per head flatlining for centuries, and then rising almost vertically from around 1800 to the present day. Of course, this process began earlier in some countries than others. Recent research suggests that Britain's agricultural and industrial revolutions, if that's what they were, began earlier and more slowly than has been thought. Well, maybe. But certainly few if any people at the time understood what was happening. Early economists such as Smith, Malthus and Ricardo didn't have any conception of open-ended economic growth of the kind we envisage today. While they recognised that living standards could grow for a time, it was thought that economies were ultimately heading for a ‘stationary state’ – or in Malthus's dismal prognosis, a sort of cycle where living standards rose, meaning more children, meaning more competition for resources, meaning falling living standards and back to Square One. Susskind discusses this in a chapter called ‘The Trap’, but follows it with ‘The Escape’, where he marvels at the explosion of economic growth as we move into modern times. What caused it? In this chapter the author takes us through a very rapid tour of growth theory, from Harrod–Domar, to Solow–Swan, to Lucas and Romer. It's not very satisfactory. As is often the case in books of this kind, you're never quite sure who is being addressed. A few brief paragraphs on each approach to growth theory are of little use by themselves. The specialist wants to see these economists evaluated in some depth, while the non-specialist is simply bemused. The next chapter, entitled ‘The Promise’, presents the optimistic view of economic growth which sees it as the solution to most of society's problems. Angela Merkel is quoted (p. 75): “We need three things above all. First, growth. Second: growth. And third: growth. Growth isn't everything, that's true. But without growth everything is nothing.” The claim in this chapter is that because it “appears to be correlated with a dazzling range of measures of wellbeing and progress … the pursuit of growth has become one of the defining activities of our common life” (p. 75). We then go on, in the chapter headed ‘The Price’, to a recitation of all the evils which are said to attach to growth – destruction of the natural environment, climate change, inequality, out-of-control technical progress. This is why we need ‘The Reckoning’ of Susskind's title. A chapter considers – but sensibly debunks – the arguments for using different metrics in place of GDP. There is then a chapter which examines the case for ‘degrowth’. This is the idea that we could somehow plan to achieve a smaller economy which would be more sustainable and in which we would all be happy and contented with a more modest lifestyle. As Susskind points out, the practicalities of bringing this about seem insurmountable. And politically it seems a non-starter, with most people in most countries unwilling to forgo the luxuries of modern life for hair shirts and lentils. Nevertheless, Susskind is sympathetic to degrowthers' criticisms of conventional economics. He believes that “when economists write about growth, they focus on its benefits and ignore the costs” (p. 168). But is this really the case? I'm not so sure. And I'm certainly not convinced that politicians, for all their windy rhetoric, really elevate growth over all other objectives. On the contrary: sluggish or non-existent growth in Europe in recent years is the consequence of the disincentive effect of ever-increasing taxation and metastasising regulation in favour of this or that special interest which rejects the need for this new motorway or that new housing estate. We must … confront the tradeoffs directly, and accept the fact that we have to pay a price in terms of growth to protect other things that we care about … How much should we care about these other ends? And how much should we care about the future? In my view … the answer to both must surely be far more. But what does this mean? Who is this ‘we’? Susskind suggests some sort of citizen assemblies or ‘mini-publics’ (p. 266) to give advice to governments – one of the demands the UK activist group Extinction Rebellion makes, incidentally – but how these assemblies would be selected, and how they would avoid domination by extremists, is barely considered. And how would this differ from what we have at the moment, where growth is held back by endless rules, planning permissions, judicial reviews as pressure groups argue for protecting special interests and obscure concerns? This book raises some interesting questions, but it is ultimately rather unsatisfactory.