Growth is Morally Good

Many people place a low value on further economic growth. I think this is largely a result of status-qou bias and a failure of imagination. While material things are not everything, there are so many things that we could have.

This is an attempt to list a few

• Energy too cheap to meter
• A 10 hour working-week
• 500 story high buildings and a 200sq m apartment for an average lower quartile person on earth
• Commercialization of space. Industry in zero g. The possibility to fly to other planets as a regular person.
• Cryonics as standard. Drastically longer lives.
• 100 Billion people
• Mass uplifting of animals, humans

There are a few problems with trying to imagine a world where we are 10x richer.

• I just imagine the lives of those 10x richer than me in today’s world. That picture isn’t accurate. I have less wealth but a far better life today than a medieval king had because society and the market thrives on mass-production. When the median person is 10x wealthier, the possible space of products greatly increases. I made this point already in [[Diminishing marginal utility of money for individuals != Diminishing marginal utility of money for societies]]
• I think it’s easy to understate even how much progress today in rich countries has made things better during my life time. A recent works in progress article makes this point fairly well.
• It’s hard to realize that you would want a thing you don’t have. Ask a peasant in the middle ages what they wanted and they may say a very fertile cow or an eternal fireplace. Their depictions of heaven actually showed animals that cleaned their own poop and less work. Very few would say central heating, an indoors toilet. antibiotics or access to the worlds knowledge and a thousand libraries in the palm of their hand.

That being said, I don’t think the biggest issue when thinking about growth is recognizing it’s good. It’s recognizing the compounding nature of it. E.g: I think this is a quote from Stubborn Attachments by [[Tyler Cowen]] but “had America grown one percentage point less per year, between 1870 and 1990, the America of 1990 would be no richer than the Mexico of 1990”. Even a small increase in growth per year compounds into a massive increase in growth over a century, let alone a Millenium.

I guess this is also one of the core reasons I don’t really tend to care about the distribution of wealth/income in a society that much. Setting aside randian/libertarian arguments, I guess I just do believe in some degree of trickle down (a bus driver in London makes many times more than one in India, despite having an easier job) and as long as that is true then the overwhelming determinant of long term utility, even for the bottom 10%, is how rich society overall is.

(Obviously there are probably policies that help the poor today and also improve growth. Those are fine. It’s just not redistribution alone that I care that much about and esp redistribution at the expense of growth).