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The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (Rough Cut) - Hardcover

Friedman, Benjamin M.

 
9780679448914: The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (Rough Cut)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0679448918 ISBN 13: 9780679448914
Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

Describes the benefits of widely distributed economic growth, including the creation and enhancement of democratic institutions, political stability, and the promotion of opportunity, exploring the role of economic growth in determining which nations will extend the broadest freedoms to their citizenry and arguing that we must aggressively promote global economic growth. 25,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Benjamin M. Friedman is the William Joseph Maier Professor of Political Economy and former chairman of the Department of Economics at Harvard University, where he has taught for more than three decades. His book Day of Reckoning: The Consequences of American Economic Policy Under Reagan and After received the George S. Eccles Prize, awarded annually for excellence in writing about economics. He has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Review of Books. Most recently he was the 2005 recipient of the John R. Commons Award, presented in recognition of achievements in economics and service to the economics profession. He and his wife, Barbara, and their two sons live in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Benjamin M. Friedman is the William Joseph Maier Professor of Political Economy and former chairman of the Department of Economics at Harvard University.

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Chapter 1

What Growth Is, What Growth Does

Economic growth has become the secular religion of advancing industrial societies.

—DANIEL BELL The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

Are we right to care so much about economic growth as we clearly do?

For citizens of all too many of the world's countries, where poverty is still the norm, the answer is immediate and obvious. But the tangible improvements in the basics of life that make economic growth so important whenever living standards are low--greater life expectancy, fewer diseases, less infant mortality and malnutrition--have mostly played out long before a country's per capita income reaches the levels enjoyed in today's advanced industrialized economies. Americans are no healthier than Koreans or Portuguese, for example, and we live no longer, despite an average income more than twice what they have. Yet whether our standard of living will continue to improve, and how fast, remain matters of acute concern for us nonetheless.

At the same time, perhaps because we are never clear about just why we attach so much importance to economic growth in the first place, we are often at cross-purposes--at times we seem to be almost embarrassed--about what we want. We not only acknowledge other values; as a matter of principle we place them on a higher plane than our material well-being. Even in parts of the world where the need to improve nutrition and literacy and human life expectancy is urgent, there is often a grudging aspect to the recognition that achieving superior growth is a top priority. As a result, especially when faster growth would require sacrifice from entrenched constituencies with well-established interests, the political process often fails to muster the determination to press forward. The all too frequent outcome, in low- and high-income countries alike, is economic disappointment, and in some cases outright stagnation.

The root of the problem, I believe, is that our conventional thinking about economic growth fails to reflect the breadth of what growth, or its absence, means for a society. We recognize, of course, the advantages of a higher material standard of living, and we appreciate them. But moral thinking, in practically every known culture, enjoins us not to place undue emphasis on our material concerns. We are also increasingly aware that economic development--industrialization in particular, and more recently globalization--often brings undesirable side effects, like damage to the environment or the homogenization of what used to be distinctive cultures, and we have come to regard these matters too in moral terms. On both counts, we therefore think of economic growth in terms of material considerations versus moral ones: Do we have the right to burden future generations, or even other species, for our own material advantage? Will the emphasis we place on growth, or the actions we take to achieve it, compromise our moral integrity? We weigh material positives against moral negatives.

I believe this thinking is seriously, in some circumstances dangerously, incomplete. The value of a rising standard of living lies not just in the concrete improvements it brings to how individuals live but in how it shapes the social, political, and ultimately the moral character of a people.

Economic growth--meaning a rising standard of living for the clear majority of citizens--more often than not fosters greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness, and dedication to democracy. Ever since the Enlightenment, Western thinking has regarded each of these tendencies positively, and in explicitly moral terms.

Even societies that have already made great advances in these very dimensions, for example most of today's Western democracies, are more likely to make still further progress when their living standards rise. But when living standards stagnate or decline, most societies make little if any progress toward any of these goals, and in all too many instances they plainly retrogress. As we shall see, many countries with highly developed economies, including America, have experienced alternating eras of economic growth and stagnation in which their democratic values have strengthened or weakened accordingly.

How the citizens of any country think about economic growth, and what actions they take in consequence, is therefore a matter of far broader importance than we conventionally assume. In many countries today, even the most basic qualities of any society--democracy or dictatorship, tolerance or ethnic hatred and violence, widespread opportunity or economic oligarchy--remain in flux. In some countries where there is now a democracy, it is still new and therefore fragile. Because of the link between rising or falling living standards and just these aspects of social and political development, the absence of growth in so many of what we usually call "developing economies," even though many of them are not actually developing, threatens their prospects in ways that standard measures of national income do not even suggest. But the same concern applies, albeit in a more subtle way, to mature democracies as well.

Even in America, I believe, the quality of our democracy--more fundamentally, the moral character of American society--is similarly at risk. The central economic question for the United States at the outset of the twenty-first century is whether the nation in the generation ahead will again achieve increasing prosperity, as in the decades immediately following World War II, or lapse back into the stagnation of living standards for the majority of our citizens that persisted from the early 1970s until the early 1990s. And the more important question that then follows is how these different economic paths would affect our democratic political institutions and the broader character of our society. As the economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron once observed, "even a long democratic history does not necessarily immunize a country from becoming a ‘democracy without democrats.' "And as we shall see from our own experience as well as that of other countries, merely being rich is no bar to a society's retreat into rigidity and intolerance once enough of its citizens lose the sense that they are getting ahead.

The familiar balancing of material positives against moral negatives when we discuss economic growth is therefore a false choice, and the parallel assumption, that how we value material versus moral concerns neatly maps into whether we should eagerly embrace economic growth or temper our enthusiasm for it, is wrong as well. Economic growth bears moral benefits as well, and when we debate the often hard decisions that inevitably arise--in choosing economic policies that either encourage growth or retard it, and even in our reactions to the growth that takes place apart from the push or pull of public policy--it is important that we take these moral positives into account.

Especially in a work focused on the positive link between economic growth and social and political progress, it may seem strange to think that America, now so preeminent across the world in economic terms, faces any significant threat in this regard. One country after another--including even China and Singapore, which thus far have hesitated to liberalize politically--has adopted American approaches to the management of its economy, based on free enterprise, private initiative, and mobile capital. Why would ongoing economic growth not therefore herald an era of further social and political progress that would reinforce the openness of American society and otherwise strengthen and broaden American democracy?

One concern is simply that the robust growth of the latter half of the 1990s may prove to have been only a temporary interlude, a...

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Verlag
Alfred a Knopf Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2005
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0679448918
ISBN 13 
9780679448914
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
570
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Knopf
https://knopfdoubleday.com

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