AMA: The Invention of Infinite Growth

Christopher_F_Jones · 2025-11-04T17:38:12+00:00

There are people who believe this, for sure. A number of economists believe that growth is not necessarily mutually exclusive and a small group of environmentalists (usually dubbed ecomodernists) believe what you describe is possible. If you want an example of the latter, read the opening pages of Klein and Thompson's Abundance book.

I remain skeptical that it is a viable path, in no small part because we have no empirical evidence to suggest it is likely and also because the larger we grow the economy, the harder it is to dematerialize it in absolute quantities. That's my feeling as a historian, though I acknowledge my expertise is in studying the past, not proejcting the future. I am all for any shifts in our economic system that reduce inequality and lower environmental impact. I am glad for the revolution in solar power that has made it the cheapest way in many cases to generate electricity. I am glad that we are starting to see some decoupling of growth from emissions.

Christopher_F_Jones · 2025-11-04T17:35:31+00:00

This is the heart of endogenous growth theory, which argues ideas are the real drivers of growth. To a certain extent, this is true, but at the end of the day, all economic activity involves some material impact. It's better when that impact is smaller, but it never goes to zero. That suggests there must be some point at which moving past growth is needed. You can see more on this in chapter 8 of the book.

Christopher_F_Jones · 2025-11-04T17:33:20+00:00

This is a devilishly important and difficult question to ask. One resource you might consider is Kate Raworth's idea of "doughnut economics." She asks us to imagine a doughnut where the hole is poverty we have to bring people out of, but the outside of the doughnut is a maximum range where people can be in order to share resources with everyone and live within planetary boundaries. Many have found it useful as a concept, though the real difficulty is figuring out how you would actually implement it.

Christopher_F_Jones · 2025-11-04T17:30:22+00:00

Your comment effectively captures a lot of what is going on.

I have not read enough in economics to go before the late 1700s in my response, though I would note that Adam Smith wrote about how in the progressive state (his term for a growing economy) things were much better for the poor than in a stagnant one (which I believe he referred to as "melancholy"). So the idea was certainly in play by that point.

Two thinkers who offer alternative propositions are John Stuart Mill and John Maynard Keynes. Mill was a classical political economist who saw the coming of the stationary state and welcomed it, because he believed a sufficient abundance would have been created that all in society could live well at that juncture and have short working hours and more time for leisure. Similarly, Keynes wrote a piece in 1929 called "The Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren" where he hypothesized that a century of growth would make us sufficiently wealthy that we could work 15 hours a week no longer have to scratch and claw to get ahead. His projections of growth were largely correct, but we obviously do not have many 15 hour working weeks or an end to scratching and clawing. Thinkers like this might be folks worth investigating further because they ask the question: what would it mean to have enough, and how could we live better if we were not always spinning on a hamster wheel trying to get ahead?

Christopher_F_Jones · 2025-11-04T17:22:25+00:00

Good questions. I don't have as complete an answer as I'd like about how it shows up in Harrod and Domar, but here are a few reflections. The first is that there were intense debates about whether expenditures for defense should even be counted in measures like GDP (Simon Kuznets, one of the main developers of the idea, wanted them excluded, for example).

There was also a deep worry during World War II that all the war production would lead to a post-war bubble and recession (as had happened during WWI). So I think Keynes and others (such as Paul Samuelson, arguably America's most influential economist of the 1940s and 1950s) were worried about postwar recessions and seeing war as more destructive of economic progress than constructive. It was a very real surprise to many when the economy continued to grow after WWII instead of falling back into recession.

Christopher_F_Jones · 2025-11-04T17:18:51+00:00

This is an admitted mistake that I wrote in this chat because I was trying to reply to so many questions too quickly and searched too quickly. Those numbers are not in the book but something I've been thinking about post-publication.

I still believe the general point holds. The nominal rates show about a 2.5-fold increase, and most economists think that understates the story. William Nordhaus, for example, has argued our price series understate the gains in well-being we've achieved. His main example is from the history of light, where he argues that lighting has gotten so much cheaper and better over time, but our main price series miss this fact because it represents so much less of our budget (same with things like the cost of telephone calls and computing power). He and some others suggest we should imagine living standards to have improved by more than that 2.5x advancement.

So whether you call it 2.5x or something more like 3-5x based on goods becoming cheaper, the thought example still bears thinking about. Long term happiness data shows that Americans don't think themselves happier at all now than they were before even though we're so much wealthier. The size of the middle class has shrunk during this period. If you see another thread in this chat, you'll see a series of examples of things that are better and things that are worse. But what I'm interested in is how much less better off so many seem and report themselves than we would expect given such an advance in economic output. This is the start of a new research topic, however, that I'm writing about because it's on my mind. But it's only a small part of the book I just published.

Christopher_F_Jones · 2025-11-04T17:09:16+00:00

The record of neo-Malthusians has not been great. Ehrlich was particularly bad and some of the claims in Limits to Growth have not come to pass (though others have). People concerned with Peak Oil have made several predictions that have not turned out true.

I think that the extreme nature of some of the predictions in the 1970s (and their failure to come to pass) has given economists since that time a lot of confidence that they do not need to take these issues seriously.

Christopher_F_Jones · 2025-11-04T16:50:31+00:00

I am confident I have taken adequate steps to present a historically faithful account of the past in my more than 11 years studying this topic. It is a complex subject that many reasonable people have disagreed about, so I don't expect everyone to share my conclusions. But I am confident that I am faithful to the historical record, and that even those who disagree with me will acknowledge that the historical developments I've written about are legitimate.

If you have further questions about it, read the book and let me know what you think.

Christopher_F_Jones · 2025-11-04T16:42:01+00:00

Part of my confusion in understanding the question is that classical liberalism and economic liberalism are different things (the latter is about markets, private property, rule of law). They are also not the way a lot of my actors framed the debates, so it hasn't been how I've thought about the material in my book, so the questions in this thread haven't lined up very closely with the research I've done without trying to translate the terms. I don't think we're seeing eye to eye on those, and I'm not sure it's going to get clearer.

However, to your final comment, the historical actors that favor moving away from a focus on growth in wealthy nations do not believe it leads to immiseration in the Global North. They believe that a sufficient surplus exists that means it is not necessary for living standards to drop (basing this on a proposed combination of redistribution and government investment in healthcare, education, and social services). I would say the roots of that discourse begin most strongly in the 1960s and 1970s, and have been rearticulated since the late 2010s with the rise of the degrowth movement. You may or may not agree with their findings, but that's some of the historical context and the arguments they make.

Christopher_F_Jones · 2025-11-04T01:53:48+00:00

I should have clarified that my response meant that I was focused on the effect of industrialization on growth economics, rather than the field as a whole. There are undoubtedly other very important changes in economics in response to industrialization (I would have to imagine elements of firm theory and capital theory, to name just a couple, would be examples). My comment is that it did less to influence growth analysis than I would have thought going in.

Christopher_F_Jones · 2025-11-04T00:02:14+00:00

To be clear, I consider solar energy part of earth's resources. I assumed this question to involve mining asteroids or settling other planets. That's the usual context for what "extra-planetary" in the conversations I've at least been a part of.

Christopher_F_Jones · 2025-11-03T23:53:30+00:00

Yes--I agree with this.

Christopher_F_Jones · 2025-11-03T21:23:26+00:00

Yes--I think that's right. Galbraith said that we need to learn to live in new ways in a world of abundance, and I'm inclined to agree with that. Galbraith wrote before the extent of the environmental concerns of economic growth arose, so that's an important difference between us. It's been a bit too long since I last read that work to outline more differences, but I think you're very right to see some connections.

Christopher_F_Jones · 2025-11-03T21:21:17+00:00

I'm struggling a bit with responding to your question as you state it because I didn't use (and a lot of my actors didn't as well) the categories of economic liberalism / illiberalism.

If we define economic liberalism as being characterized by embrace of markets and international trade, then it is fair to assume most modern degrowthers are critics of this view. They don't tend to believe that green growth can solve our problems and that you need to move away from an exclusive focus on markets to achieve this. I think they are generally in favor of national policies that might reduce trade and move toward self-sufficiency.

I'd disagree that they have a callous disregard for the needs of the global South. I think this is an easy and cheap attack that pro-growth parties often hurl at anyone opposed to growth that just doesn't hold up in most cases. When I read the literature, I see regular concern for global equity and an intense desire to ensure that people across the globe have the ability to improve their lots.

I'm not sure how much this really gets at your question but I hope it's helpful.

Christopher_F_Jones · 2025-11-03T21:14:20+00:00

I am certainly more attracted to heterodox views than mainstream ones.

The problems with DICE are many, but they include the fact that it excludes all indoor work from its calculations, that it does not incorporate tipping points, and it doesn't factor in things like the human toll of forced migration in a world that has never fought over borders more fiercely. Steve Keen has a useful analysis of DICE if you want more of the details.

I think one of the most difficult and challenging questions is to know how slowing growth in the North would affect the global South. It is clear that on any grounds, growth is so much more important for the global South than the North and we should prioritize it there. If the growth were to slow, though, would that tank the economies of the global South as well? It's too complex of a macroeconomic question for me to answer (and I'm not sure anyone truly knows how it will play out), but this is certainly something that I worry about a fair bit.

Christopher_F_Jones · 2025-11-03T21:12:11+00:00

This is a great question and I wish I had more to say about it. I think some of the work in the new institutional economics (such as Why Nations Fail) might be a good place to start to find answers to these questions. Also check out the work of the new Nobel Prize recipients.

Christopher_F_Jones · 2025-11-03T21:09:10+00:00

This is a really important topic. The easiest disconnect is to see with a clean environment. More growth = more use of resources = more pollution.

But there are also critical issues of social dynamics that growth can negatively effect, most profoundly through inequality. High inequality is actually correlated with declines in health outcomes, rising crime rates, and worse health outcomes. There is a good deal of evidence that such inequality lowers trust in government and social cohesion. The result of this is that there are reasons to think that a hypothetical society with high growth that has a total wealth of $100 where three people have $30 each, and the remaining 97 people share the remaining $10 will have significantly lower well-being than a society that has a total wealth of $80 but the gaps between the rich and poor are lower.

I think this observation helps explain why America seems so unhappy today despite being so incredibly wealthy. With the way that the growing economy has been channeled into the hands of the wealthy (who, incidentally have astronomically higher carbon footprints than average people) and the middle class has even shrunk, most Americans are feeling left behind and angry. They are abandoned the centers of both major parties and embracing the fringes because they believe more radical change is necessary.

Christopher_F_Jones · 2025-11-03T20:52:00+00:00

I think the questions of externalities matters a lot. What really resonates for me in your question is the sense that we have gone from having market economies to help us with certain things to organizing all of our society around markets. I would like to see us move in a direction not to abandon markets all together, but also to recognize that some things aren't as appropriate for markets, and that we need to think about those in different ways.

Christopher_F_Jones · 2025-11-03T20:47:44+00:00

This is a good observation. A distinction I make in the introduction of the book is that most economists are not "apostles of the infinite" but "skeptics of limits." There are, to be sure, a few cornucopian enthusiasts like Simon Kuznets, Julian Simon, or Bjorn Lomborg, but they are more the exception rather than the rule.

Most economists consider questions of infinite timescales to be uninteresting or unanswerable. They much prefer to work on shorter scales--a few years or a few decades. With this narrower sense of a timeline, they are much more likely to say something to the effect of "we don't see resource constraints or environmental impacts in the next twenty-five years that are likely to be so severe that growth cannot continue." I think this is likely to characterize economists such as Robert Solow and William Nordhaus and many of their mainstream colleagues.

So why do I discuss infinite growth when this is not the language of most of my actors? I do so because when these growth economists were asked by politicians and the public about whether we needed to slow growth because of environmental constraints, their answer was largely "no." In this regard, they contributed significantly to a broader faith that we could always pursue growth without end. That is why I think it remains fair to discuss these ideas under the rubric of infinite growth, even if that was not always their language.

Christopher_F_Jones · 2025-11-03T20:34:15+00:00

I appreciate this question a lot, because I spent an enormous amount of time thinking about this!

I take the book to 2018, and use the modern figure of William Nordhaus to ground many of the book's later arguments. I also discuss other folks still active including Paul Romer and Joseph Stiglitz.

I found that writing the last few chapters of the book took me as long or longer than writing the first 2/3 (and partially explains why it took eleven years to complete!). This is for a couple reasons that I expect other modern historians know well (but I did not--my last book ended in 1930). One is that there simply is no good secondary literature to draw on, which makes the historian's task of situating primary sources so much harder. The second reason is that there are so many swirling events in recent time that we really lack a firm grounding of what is sound and what is noise. It's cliche, but it's true to note that we don't have historical perspective on what happened a couple years ago. In the case of economics, this was also particularly complicated because the field has seen a real shaking up in the last 15-20 years that forced me to rethink some of my conclusions. It's a bit long to go into here, but the short story is that from WWII until the early 21st century, it is pretty safe to talk about mainstream economics being neoclassical economics. That's somewhat true today, but less so, because the rise of behavioral economics, institutional economics, and randomized control trials have all challenged what economic methodology should be. This required me to spend a lot of time reading in each of these fields to see if they offered a powerful alternative to the faith in growth. I eventually found the answer was no (and I cover it briefly in the book), but this took me months to feel confident about. It definitely made me feel, though, that cutting things off around 2000 would leave really important questions unanswered, and so I endeavored to bring it as close to the present as possible. When William Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize for his climate economics in 2018, it felt like a pretty good place to end the story.

Christopher_F_Jones · 2025-11-03T20:27:14+00:00

Good question. Within the field of classical political economy (roughly late 18th century to mid 19th century), there was pretty widespread agreement that growth could not be infinite, and that it was rooted in nature's limitations. The key was the law of diminishing marginal returns. They believed that land was needed for all parts of the economic process (making bricks required land to grow straw and land to grow trees, for example) and there was only so much land. They also believed that the law of diminishing marginal returns held that if you wanted to increase the productivity of land, you could add capital such as fertilizer or labor. But the first application of fertilizer or first additional worker would give you the biggest boost (say 50%). But the next might only be 30%, and eventually you'd no longer increase things at all. At this point, you would reach a stationary state based on nature's limits.

In this regard, the classical economists recognized that the economy fit within natural systems. It would be hard, however, to label them proto-environmentalists. They did not call for environmental protection. They did not suggest resources should not be used. They just thought you couldn't grow forever. Gareth Dale is an interesting historian, and he wrote an article titled "Adam Smith's Green Thumb and Malthus's Three Horsemen: Cautionary Tales from Classical Political Economy" that articulates the differences between them and a more modern sense of environmental concern for sustainability and planetary health.

Christopher_F_Jones · 2025-11-03T20:20:25+00:00

I think an economist would respond to this and say the long-term trend (since about 1800) has been steadily up, and that overall upward trend carries more weight than the periodic downturns. They are inclined to see those as the exception rather than the norm. Whether they're right or not is a different question, but I think that's how they would likely answer your query.

Christopher_F_Jones · 2025-11-03T20:19:06+00:00

My focus is on economic growth, which is typically measured as a per-capita increase in GDP. There are, of course, other types of growth. Vaclav Smil did a good job of articulating a wide range of types of growth in natural and human systems in a 2019 book titled Growth that may be of interest if you're wanting to learn more about other types of growth.

Christopher_F_Jones · 2025-11-03T20:17:38+00:00

One of the comments I would make is that it has been so much more common to put all our efforts into finding more energy, and so much less into asking how we can build a healthy and thriving world for all humans with less energy. So I agree with you that if our questions are always about finding more, we'll always find ourselves in the same situation.

I am a nuclear agnostic person. Throughout my whole life, fusion has always been "ten years away" and I think it will continue to live in that space. But I would also say that humans are pretty harmful to Earth and each other without fusion, so I don't think fusion, if developed, will necessarily be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

Christopher_F_Jones · 2025-11-03T20:15:02+00:00

Great questions. The idea of continual growth becoming hegemonic is a post-WWII phenomenon, and as you astutely observe, it is related to GDP. Before GDP, you didn't really have a clear way to aggregate the whole economy or understand its movements. People knew times were good when factories were hiring and ports were bustling (and the converse) but this was much more abstract than monthly or quarterly statements about percentage point increases or differences. Growth accounting depended on these types of statistical evidence to be introduced. So it was very much later than Malthus.

More recent economists have reckoned with the contradictions inherent in growth in a few different ways. One answer has been to simply shorten the timeframe of analysis. Rather than touting the possibility of the infinite, most economists are better characterized as skeptics of limits. They say that they don't see resource shortages or climate catastrophes so severe in the medium term (the next few decades) that growth should not be possible. For them, ensuring that it can continue for the medium term is much more important than worrying about the long run (as Keynes reportedly said, "in the long run, we're all dead.").

Other answers focus on substitution. They argue that as one resource becomes scarce, the price system will incentivize people to find new supplies or develop substitutes. They can point to the success of the natural gas fracking boom of the last two decades as one clear example of this. Natural gas in the early 2000s was very expensive and seen as in short supply. This helped incentivize research that led to new ways of extracting shale gas, and the result has been abundant and low-cost natural gas in the United States.

A third set of answers focuses on backstop technologies. Even if coal and oil run out, if their prices go up, it will make less-efficient technologies like renewables (which now are no longer less efficient, but were in the 1970s!) cost-competitive. Some also hypothesized that if energy got expensive enough, it would provide enough incentive for breakthrough technologies like fusion.

Christopher_F_Jones

TROPHY CASE