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.