Growth is good --- it’s the glue between freedom and technological innovation.

This has been a negative case for economic growth. We should not pursue degrowth because to do so would cost too much in the coin of basic human freedoms. But material economic growth also directly expands human capabilities. Greater wealth, greater productive capacity, and the institutional machinery of innovation multiply the effective options individuals have to pursue their respective projects and ends. Growth makes freedom possible; freedom makes growth possible. They are inseparable.

It’s trivial to think of inventions that have radically improved human capabilities. A personal favorite is the birth control pill, which has perhaps done more to liberate women into public life and to undermine patriarchy than the entire edifice of feminist thought. But this required a base level of economic capabilities to achieve and to produce to scale. Hormone therapy for trans people might not have been developed had we started degrowth in J.S. Mill’s time. Covid would have hit differently without remote capabilities to continue work (which would be necessary to some extent even in a degrowth regime) and the readily deployed industrial capacity to churn out millions of doses of made-to-order mRNA vaccines. The Green Revolution enabled industrial agriculture to feed billions and genetic engineering promises to continue that tradition. Cutting edge technologies like CRISPR promise revolutionary health advances and as a kind of health platform technology it will likely roll out a whole new industry.

In all these ways, growth fosters freedom. Yet promoting freedom will also lead to economic growth, even if that is not the explicit policy objective. Philosopher Brian Kogelmann has argued that the standard academic accounts of the causes of economic growth all correspond to policies and institutions we ought to support for the independent reasons of freedom, rights, and good governance.

On one account, economic growth arises from “inclusive” political and economic institutions, where ordinary people are empowered to make more decisions about their lives. Growth tends to be hindered where “extractive” institutions prevail, where wide swathes of the people are expropriated or coerced to labor for the privileged few. Extractive institutions stick around because they benefit already powerful classes, but they’re condemned in the abstract by everyone from degrowth advocates to normie liberals. But we’re likely to see economic growth persist as inclusive institutions proliferate, especially in low income countries.

In a similar vein, social justice conduces to growth. Heather McGhee has compellingly argued that racism has poisoned our political capacity to provide public goods and invest in public services. We fight racism because it is the right thing to do, but doing so also promotes prosperity. The extraction of disproportionate and unremunerated domestic and care labor from women should be opposed because of its transparent injustice. Yet sharing that necessary labor more equitably and developing a care infrastructure can also strengthen the liberal market order.

On another account economic growth owes primarily to the increasing stock of human knowledge, and thus the freedom of inquiry and resources required to extend scientific and technical frontiers. This particular inheritance of the Enlightenment is invaluable on basic humanistic grounds, even within a degrowth paradigm, and yet well-equipped free minds working on scientific problems are bound to produce innovations which go on to provide the foundation for further technical developments and increased production—or growth.

Degrowth may remain hostile to other suggested roots of economic growth, such as the greater esteem bestowed upon the commercial classes, but modern growth most plausibly obtains from a combination of factors, many of which degrowth would wish to foster for the sake of humanitarian or Enlightenment values. Thus, even someone partial to degrowth should consider an openness to the possibility of growth, or at least embrace the liberal growth agnosticism of J.S. Mill and Julie Rose.

We do not and cannot know what technologies are just around the corner that could be just as important to us as birth control or mobile telephony. We can acknowledge that material economic growth has these attractive features without thereby committing ourselves to maximizing GDP at all costs. As we have seen, GDP alone can mask inequality, precarity, and languishing. We can and should supplement GDP with other objective metrics for public health outcomes, natural resource wealth, environmental quality, and the like. With such measures, it will remain that case that, all else being equal, growth in productive and innovative capabilities represents a positive good that policymakers have every reason to cultivate as custodians of the general welfare.