Understanding the necessity of economic growth: Philip Cross in the Financial Post

Susskind begins by explaining how new a phenomenon sustained economic growth is. For millennia before the Industrial Revolution, stagnation was the norm, with brief periods of higher living standards punctuated by setbacks due to supply constraints, population growth or pillage by thieves or invaders. In an image owing to economic historian Jonathan Levy, the result was economies that expanded and contracted like accordions, with no continuing progress overall.

Permanent stagnation resulted in all human cultural narratives assuming the economy was a zero-sum exercise in which the only way of improving incomes was at the expense of someone else. As sociologist Jack D. Douglas put it, “the zero-sum game is really the most ancient way of thinking, found in all primitive societies and highly exaggerated in peasant mentality.”