Degrowth fails --- changing growth rates dooms both the impoverished and the wealthy.

George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen explains in a Foreign Affairs article that, “In the medium to long term, even small changes in growth rates have significant consequences for living standards. An economy that grows at one percent doubles its average income approximately every 70 years, whereas an economy that grows at three percent doubles its average income about every 23 years—which, over time, makes a big difference in people’s lives.”

To concretize this point, Cowen proposes a thought experiment in his book Stubborn Attachments: “Redo U.S. history, but assume the country’s economy had grown one percentage point less each year between 1870 and 1990. In that scenario, the United States of 1990 would be no richer than the Mexico of 1990.”

It is not just wealthy Americans that would be worse off in such a scenario—the lower and middle classes of Mexico are much worse off than the lower and middle classes of the United States, and this is largely a function of the general success of each country’s economy.

In political and economic discourse today, there are two major strategies being proposed to alleviate poverty. One strategy is to redistribute wealth from those who have a lot, the most economically powerful members of society, to those who don’t, the most economically weak members of society. This zero-sum strategy is virtually destined to fail because it requires making enemies of the most economically powerful members of society, who are definitionally both incentivized and empowered to prevent the redistribution. This is largely why every major socialist experiment in history has resulted in some elite class taking control and enriching themselves to the enormous detriment of the lower classes.

The other strategy is to increase the abundance of wealth so much that an ever-expanding portion of the population can afford to meet their needs. This positive-sum strategy is built on economic growth. Just like increasing the supply of apples causes their price to come down, increasing the supply of wealth reduces the barriers to earning enough resources to get your needs met in a market economy.

As others become wealthier, they will be willing and able to pay more for your labor. And as the economy grows, more technological and scientific progress can be funded, which eventually increases the capabilities of the vast majority of humanity. Instead of making enemies out of the economic elite, this strategy makes allies out of them, which means it is far more likely to succeed in practice. And as we have seen, unlike any other strategy ever attempted, this has already proven effective at a global scale for reducing poverty and improving the human condition in other ways through technological and scientific progress.

In the fullness of time, even a small change in the economic growth rate means the difference between starvation and survival for millions or billions of people, not to mention the difference between humanity’s extinction and its ability to fund enough technological progress to eventually become sustainably multiplanetary.

The critics of growth are wrong about its environmental dangers, but they’re also wrong to downplay its role in the fight against poverty. If winning that fight is indeed their goal, policymakers should put reversing America’s dismal growth trend near the top of their priority list.