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Economic growth — and the hope of better things to come — is the religion of the modern world. Yet its prospects have become bleak. In the United States, eighty percent of the population has seen no increase in purchasing power over the last thirty years and the situation is not much better elsewhere.
So argues Daniel Cohen in “The Infinite Desire for Growth,” a whirlwind tour of the history of economic growth, from the early days of civilization to modern times. Drawing on economics, anthropology, and psychology, and thinkers ranging from Rousseau to Keynes and Easterlin, Cohen examines how a future less dependent on material gain might be considered and how, in a culture of competition, individual desires might be better attuned to the greater needs of society. He joined me on the show to discuss his argument.
Daniel Cohen is the director of the Economics Department at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, a founding member of the Paris School of Economics, and a former adviser to the World Bank.
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