3347700346f86fe80ebbfc05_pa77c.jpg Paul Lachine

Rethinking the Growth Imperative

Modern macroeconomics often seems to treat rapid and stable economic growth as the be-all and end-all of policy. But, while that is the message from graduate classrooms to central-bank boardrooms to newspapers’ front pages, is it true?

CAMBRIDGE – Modern macroeconomics often seems to treat rapid and stable economic growth as the be-all and end-all of policy. That message is echoed in political debates, central-bank boardrooms, and front-page headlines. But does it really make sense to take growth as the main social objective in perpetuity, as economics textbooks implicitly assume?

Certainly, many critiques of standard economic statistics have argued for broader measures of national welfare, such as life expectancy at birth, literacy, etc. Such appraisals include the United Nations Human Development Report, and, more recently, the French-sponsored Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, led by the economists Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi.

But there might be a problem even deeper than statistical narrowness: the failure of modern growth theory to emphasize adequately that people are fundamentally social creatures. They evaluate their welfare based on what they see around them, not just on some absolute standard.

https://prosyn.org/cNKjvsn