Economist Kenneth Boulding once said that “anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” Despite this warning, the mantra that “growth is good” remains barely questioned today.
Christopher Jones’ book The Invention of Infinite Growth provides an insightful review of how delivering economic growth has become the most powerful imperative in politics over the past seventy-five years despite growing evidence that it is also the greatest single threat to human sustainability.
Jones reminds us that the discipline of economics did not even exist in the 18th Century. Rather there was “moral and natural philosophy”. Of the early philosophers it was Malthus in 1798 who warned that population growth would exceed food supply. Adam Smith in his 1776 Wealth of Nations formulated the idea of the invisible hand of the market guiding even selfish interests into social benefit. However even Smith recognized that “Land constitutes by far the greatest…wealth of every extensive nation”.
David Ricardo in his 1817 textbook argued that landowners were poised to absorb an increasing share of wealth over time because the amount of land was finite and subject to the law of diminishing returns. John Stuart Mill published his Principles of Political Economy in 1848 in which he made the case that a stationary state was inevitable but a good life would still be possible. Nowadays the ideas of Smith and his peers are known as ‘classical economics’.
Later in the 19th Century, the works of Jevons and others were synthesised by Marshall in his 1890 economics textbook which many consider to be the birth of ‘neoclassical economics’. This coincided with the pivot from the term “political economy” to “economics” and the introduction of mathematical concepts into the field.
While the classical thinkers studied three factors of production – Capital, Labor and Land – neoclassical thinkers in the 20th Century dropped Land as an independent category subsuming it within Capital.
By the turn into the 20th Century the concept of economics as a discipline started to take hold, originating in the USA. With the USA blessed with abundant resources perhaps it was understandable that limitations on land or resources did not factor into economic thinking.
In the ‘new’ discipline of economics, there was no great emphasis on the desirability of “economic growth”. In fact the experience of the Great Depression brought forward the idea that a stable and static economy that met people’s basic needs was a desirable state of affairs. And after the Second World War there were great fears that the sudden removal of defence spending in the USA would lead to depressed conditions.
Instead the USA went through a post-war boom with wealth being shared widely in society and a substantial middle class created. With this experience, the idea that “growth is good” arose in the 1950s. Around this time the development of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a single indicator of economic heath became ingrained in economic and political thinking. Jones covers the historical development of this key indicator in some detail.
American economists Paul Samuelson in the 1950s and his student Robert Solow from the 1960s on were influential in developing mathematical models of economic growth and promoting the desirability of growth.
With land captured within “Capital” and an implicit assumption that there would be no constraints or limits from the planet’s resources, the idea of earthly constraints was ignored. The prevailing idea was that market price signals would generate technological advancement and improved access to any required resources, or substitutes would be found. What’s more they could point to examples where this occurred.
The “growth is good” bus seemed unstoppable. But when Limits of Growth was published by the Club of Rome in 1972, it garnered worldwide media attention. Here was an MIT team using newfangled computer modelling to demonstrate that negative feedback loops undermined natural systems necessary for human survival. A continuation of current exponential trends, they said, would end in a collapse scenario.
The report was condemned by the world’s most influential economists. Solow considered it was “worthless as science and as a guide to public policy”. The Limits of Growth report, and a small cohort of economists warning of the constraints of the natural world, turned out to be barely a speed bump on the road to economic growth.
The “growth is good” view therefore pervaded economic thinking and influenced the new generation of economists mentored by Samuelson and others.
Fast forward to today. There is a greater recognition of the constraints posed by the natural world. More economists are questioning neoclassical theory. Some of these economists such as Herman Daly are profiled in the book. There is also more questioning of the marginal benefits of increasing wealth on well-being, as demonstrated in the accompanying chart. Nevertheless, the most influential economists of today remain the neo-classicists who continue to train the latest generation of economists.
Author Christopher Jones has chosen to focus on economists instead of business executives and lobby groups because economists pioneered the idea of infinite growth and retain a privileged position to pronounce on its possibilities. They have provided the intellectual legitimacy for vested interests opposed to environmental sustainability.
The Invention of Infinite Growth achieves its goal to rethink growth in the context of the present realities of climate change, stagnant (or declining) well-being in developed countries, rampant inequality and a planet under duress. It is essential reading for understanding how our thinking has become paralysed and blinkered by lived memory. Christopher Jones has given us a well-researched, informative and timely wake up call.

This book covers a topic that I have always found interesting but never fully understood. I am not an economics expert by any means, but I always thought it strange how corporations & investors expected constant growth as it just didn’t seem sustainable. This book explains how we got to expect infinite growth despite it not being a common idea for most of economic history. It’s a complex deep dive into the history that covers a ton of ground in general economic concepts and also specific people who are credited with modern economic ideas. There were moments that I found I had to reread to fully understand (not the author’s fault), but overall the book is laid out in a way that is clear and doesn’t require an economics degree to grasp. I do wish it had gone into more critique of the idea of infinite growth, but that is probably just because I am critical of the idea. After all, the book is literally called “The Invention of Infinite Growth”, not “The Critique”. I highly recommend this for anyone who is even mildly interested in economics. I will definitely be adding this to my physical library upon release!

Thank you for the digital copy.

My thanks to NetGalley, the author and editor for giving me the chance to read and review the ARC of The Invention of Infinite Growth. The title piqued my interest because GNP/GDP haunts our political news constantly and often unexplainably - even if for years we've heard of how inadequate it is as a measure of how well people are living - and recently the idea of focusing on growth measurement is being challenged, not only for not making sense in and of itself, but also because it is incentivizing us as we destroy our own world.
The author proposes an exploration of the history of the idea of growth as an infinite purpose and with it explaining its relationship to the attitude of taking the natural world for granted that it inherent to political ideas that focus essentially on increasing GDP. In his introduction, he gives the reader an overview of what the book then explores in some more detail: why infinite growth is dangerous, how the western world became obsessed with it, how the idea of growth is fetichized, how economists are embroiled in the idea and its consequences and imagining the future of growth.
The book starts by giving a good historical basis of the development of economics and especially the idea of measuring economies and their growth, from Malthus, Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill to the development of neoclassical economics and some particularly important moments that carried the discipline away from considering land as a limiting factor and into focusing on modelling and growth.
The author then details the discovery of growth, the GNP, referring some of the most important people involved and some that opposed the direction economics was being turned to. It makes clear a relationship between neoclassical methods, abstract models distanced from the concrete reality of each work or product, and the spreading of the GDP as a measurement and of the infinity as an influential idea, to a point where different pathways became sidelined and even ridiculed.
That people defending that natural resources aren't a limiting factor because we will always find different materials or processes to replace the waning ones were seen as more rational than those who stated that it may not always be the case says a lot.
This being established, Jones goes into the exploration of the opposition, detailing some stories of economists that were critical of the focus in growth, of the insistence in the GDP and of the belief in infinite growth. It becomes obvious that economics came to this not for lack of proper criticism or alternative thinking. Infinite growth was, however, easier "to sell" and to spread into other areas of thought and behaviour - anyone who hears current entrepreneurial, self-made, individualistic discourse will have no problems in tracing its origins. If at some moments this future seemed less predetermined - usually correlated with more preoccupation with the environment - one feels that the hegemony was never really in question. Even some people recognized as working on environmental economics came to defend that giving up on growth would be worse for the climate crisis than investing fully in growing infinitely and trusting the technology, usually associated with the problem of mixing growth in the richer countries with the needed growth in the developing countries that were and still are exploited and left behind.
As our environmental crisis became more and more inescapable, the initial reactions were turning to the optimization of resource exploration, including considerations on the natural world as footnotes, excusing the exclusion of nature on the need for rational models and evaluations and the risk of economics becoming useless to policy making when trying to take to much into account.
Again, that we humans managed to transform a problem as big as the climate crisis into optimism and doubling down to infinite growth says a lot.
In the last part the author discusses current discussion in opposition to the infinite growth religion, not only relating to its environmental blindness, but also considering once more how growth measurement is not only inadequate to measure wellbeing but actually pernicious and influencing politics and policy in such a way that actually worsens people's lives. There's a part on green growth (that it is called "Green Growth and its discontents" is enough of a review) and a short thread through the case of degrowth.

Christopher Jones' book is both interesting and unsatisfying. Interesting because the detailed history of economics, GDP and infinite growth is informative and useful when considering our current politics and general views on economy, progress and success. Unsatisfying because the exploration of opposing views is short and more superficial and also because the author seems to want to stop short of turning his criticism of the (glaring) faults of infinite growth economics into proper proposals. One supposes some attempt to keep this work a more technical, objective and of widespread interest in economics had him soften what one comes to expect as obvious conclusions of this exploration: what could we be doing differently and where can we go now?
However, reading this book confirms how drinking the kool-aid neoclassical economics is not only damaging to how we measure economy, it has disturbed our thoughts on personal and social success, it has limited our ability to use policy to improve lives and is still weighing us down when tackling the XXI century's challenges. Whether one wants to read on stagnation, on degrowth, on green economies, on wellbeing alternatives to GDP or others, look elsewhere in you want depth and hope.

This is one of those books about something that everyone treats as old, but which is new. In this case, that thing is economic growth, most usually in the form of Gross Domestic (née National) Product (GDP). Classical economics was uninterested in growth, or considered it a bounded affair. Neoclassical economics dropped the limitations, but did not focus on growth. It was only in the middle of the 20th Century that it became a meter-stick at all, and then The Measurement of an economy.

The book is more history than discussion of the subject, and as a history particularly interested in biography. This makes it highly readable, but also in a way that I had to adjust my expectations. It is less an exploration of the idea and more a description of how we got here. Of particular interest here is the soft counterfactuals. In the abstract, no one, to a certain definition of "no one," in investigating growth intended to center it in the way that it is, and usually was more interested in an academic or intentionally-restricted observational sense.

It is scarquotes "no one" in that there are individuals and institutions who do have more direct policy goals. Those goals become intertwined with policy, to arrive where we are now where growth is policy, rather than a correlated measurement. The book avoids being a hit piece towards them; perhaps too much so.

There is also a B-plot to this story of the change in economic thought from math to data. It exemplifies the way in which that the map changes the territory, and the way in which what you choose to measure and how affects the perceived utility of the measurement.

The book avoids outright criticism in the interest of pointing out flaws in the idea of growth. A particular point of interest is the sort of violation that a fixation on growth represents in terms of the natural world (again, something that the earliest economists seemed to want to grapple with). It ends with two visions of growth going forward, one of a ‘greenwashed’ variant that looks to transpose the fixation on growth into more sustainable ideas, and the other around an anti-growth ideology and what something like ‘secular stagnation’ as a desirable goal would look like.

The focus on biography and history sacrifices depth for clarity. The number of times that a concept came up where I was hoping for a deeper exploration that did not happen is significant. This was usually around the criticisms of growth, which leads to something of the Boyd Paradox here: for an idea that is so orthodox as to be one of those invisible architecture ideas (e.g. parking), there sure does seem to be an extensive history of critics to the idea over the years.

My thanks to the author, Christopher F. Jones, for writing the book, and to the publisher, University of Chicago Press, for making the ARC available to me.