Economic Growth Is Good, Actually
Apparently the “degrowth” left and the “common good” right both need a refresher.
RECENTLY, A THREAD THAT CALLED FOR a return to communal kitchens and handwashing laundry went viral on X, prompting a high-pitched conversation about the concept of “degrowth.” Mainstream liberals and conservatives both got in some entertaining dunks on the idea, but the episode also gave rise to some worthwhile discussions on the nature of economic growth. The ideology of degrowth as it’s most often articulated is stupid, and I won’t rehash the many good arguments against it here. What’s harder to explain is exactly why we value growth as opposed to other possible core values.
Conservative commentator Tanner Greer expressed this idea well in a long post on X:
The key argument between the neoliberals and their enemies is over this question: is material progress the right metric? It is very important to the neoliberal side that eudaimonia be understood in terms of GDP per capita, the number of households with washing machines, or the cost of LCD screens. Many movements reject this notion wholesale, but none so crudely as the degrowthers. . . .
But the degrowthers are also convenient enemies. What they say is easy to parry; their ideas are extreme and their style is gauche. Far easier to attack them than to deal squarely with the real weak points of the neoliberal narrative: apathy and loneliness, rising suicides and falling births, the grayness of a world where everything is measured by the dollar.
The neoliberals have a much harder time with these sort of issues. They cannot tell you why you are unhappy; they do not like to speak of justice, courage, or purpose. For the most part that is outside of their purview.
Many thinkers across the “New Right,” including Patrick Deneen, Yoram Hazony, and Bronze Age Pervert, attack neoliberalism on the apparent weak point that Greer identifies. JD Vance has remarked that “A million cheap knockoff toasters aren’t worth the price of a single American manufacturing job.” It’s a common refrain for the vanguards of the new “revolutionary conservative” thought: The technocratic neoliberal elite cares more about a line on a graph going up than they care about real, unquantifiable values like community, family, and tradition.
Let me take up the case for the technocrats and the neoliberals. Economic growth matters, and when we quantify it, we are not dealing with abstract numbers. Trends in things like GDP per capita point to real material progress, and almost every argument against pursuing GDP growth is wrong.
FIRST, WE SHOULD ACKNOWLEDGE that the most popular charge against the neoliberal mainstream—that neoliberalism is incapable of caring about essential goods that are difficult to straightforwardly quantify, so neoliberals ignore them—is false. Everywhere you look, you’ll find mainstream wonks and technocratic policy makers fretting about low birth rates, hollowing out towns, deaths of despair, child poverty, inequality, and so forth. The New Right is not stumbling upon things neoliberals wish no one would notice or think about. These problems are constantly discussed and analyzed at nearly every level of academia and politics.
Even so, neoliberal economists and technocrats do tend to spend a lot of time worrying about GDP growth specifically. That’s because GDP is highly correlated with nearly every other value you might care about. Do you care about life satisfaction? It’s strongly correlated with GDP. Measures as varied as infant mortality rates, day-to-day happiness, academic achievement, and human freedom are all correlated strongly with GDP. People in richer countries are safer from violence, have more leisure time, produce more beautiful art, and live longer, healthier lives than those in poorer countries. Recent data suggests the highest fertility rates in the United States are among very high-income families. GDP isn’t just a matter of having a better toaster or a larger TV. When GDP increases, so does nearly everything else we care about.
Despite that, GDP isn’t a perfect metric. It’s going to miss things sometimes, and it can’t capture every human value that matters. For example, it correlates negatively with total fertility rates: Wealthier societies are ones where parents in general tend to have fewer children. But the people who spend their time complaining about these other values rarely have any concrete plans to fix what they think ails us. Low birth rates are a good example: For all the conservative talk about this issue, it’s Republican lawmakers who most consistently vote against more generous and supportive policies on child care, parental leave, and the child tax credit—all things that could make it easier for people to have more children.
Another example: Conservatives are concerned about the erosion of small-town America. Immigration is one of the few viable paths to revitalizing small towns: Haitians have revitalized Springfield, Ohio, and Somali immigration reversed the decline of Lewiston, Maine. But the conservative movement is more opposed to immigration than it has been in decades, and it offers no alternative vision of how to save towns like Lewiston.
If the New Right cares about abstract values that GDP can’t measure—things like courage and justice and authentic traditional small-town living and other nonmaterial aspects of human flourishing—how exactly do they intend to prioritize them? The 2024 Republican party platform’s signature economic policies are income tax cuts for the wealthy and massive tax increases via tariffs for the rest of us. Are tax cuts going to bring about more courage and justice? Are they going to lead to a resurgence of the middle class? Will tariffs cure an epidemic of loneliness? Be serious.
Any honest accounting of what’s crunching the middle class these days would include the cost of housing and the cost of healthcare. Yet JD Vance’s key healthcare idea is to kick people with pre-existing conditions off their current plans, and Trump has aligned himself with NIMBYs and vows to protect the suburbs from new housing being built. The new right spends a lot of time talking about these alternative values, but boring technocratic neoliberals are somehow always the ones with actual plans to fix things.
OF COURSE, ALL THIS TALK OF POLICY misses an important point. There are countries in the world right now whose societies are organized around different goods than the encompassing pursuit of GDP growth. Some may be poorer than their Western counterparts as a result, but they are richer in other ways—they respect tradition, perhaps, and have larger families and a more religious population, and their lifestyles are more communitarian. And yet there’s virtually no out-migration from America or Europe to live in those places. Instead, many citizens of those poorer countries feel called to leave their homes and emigrate to the richer countries. Revealed preference shows that when people are given a choice of where to live, they choose to go to the high-GDP countries with all their associated benefits.
Perhaps calling out the poor-to-rich-country immigration pipeline isn’t a fair comparison, but focusing on middle income and rich countries paints the same picture. South Korea’s current president was elected on an explicitly anti-feminist platform, but that fact has done nothing to budge the country’s lowest-in-the-world fertility rate. Viktor Orbán’s Hungary is the prime example of a country choosing an alternative value system that emphasizes tradition and rejects the individualistic precepts of Western neoliberalism, if Orbán’s American boosters on the New Right are to be believed. But Hungary still spent decades in steep population decline and economic malaise, a trend that was only recently reversed—and then, not through Orban’s pronatalist policies, but via an influx of Ukrainian refugees. Hungarian youth are fleeing for countries where—you guessed it—economic opportunities are better. Hungary would still have more of its young people if they had spent the last decade focusing on economic growth instead of abstract anti-neoliberal values.
It’s easy to criticize GDP growth and list a variety of high-minded ideals that society should pursue instead. For thinkers on the New Right, the society-orienting formula usually offered as an alternative to GDP is the ‘Common Good’; they often refer to themselves as common good conservatives. But despite their love letters to community, courage, justice, tradition, families, small-town life, and middle-class values, they have no coherent plans to achieve any of their goals. It’s often not even clear what the goals are. What would more justice and courage and community look like in practice?
The reason there’s so little policy detail is that when you peel back the abstractions to look at the practical realities, what the New Right wants to achieve is almost universally unpopular. They want to return to a world where women have less autonomy and fewer reproductive rights. They believe people should stay where they’re born, and that America should close itself off from the world. They want to reverse decades of progress in the civil rights of black and LGBT folks. In general, they seem to pine for an imagined 1950s utopia that never actually existed. Some imagine that society went off the rails in the post-war era, while some seem to think the problem started around the fourteenth century. But they’re united in a belief that the old ways were better.
They know that if they list out the specific outcomes they want, their ideas will be rejected. The wild unpopularity of Project 2025 is evidence enough of that. So instead, the New Right traffics in the abstract and the vague, sniping at specific neoliberal solutions while offering nothing of substance themselves. Don’t fall for the game they’re playing. Economic growth isn’t a perfect metric, but it’s the best way we have to chart a society’s material progress. If you insist on ignoring it in favor of some other set of values—community! tradition!—you’ll succeed in stagnating your economy while doing nothing to actually improve your community or your traditions.
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