We don’t want economic growth https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2020/01/we-dont-want-economic-growth.html
I think there is a lot of truth in this blog post
– subject to achieving a reasonable minimum, people do seem to care more about relative position than absolute wealth
– the creative destruction associated with growth is good for the herd but the individuals who lose their jobs and can’t find a place in the new economic order are obviously not so keen on the process
– conventional economic policy advice government receives does not really engage with these questions
Relevant extract from the blog copied below
“There are, for my purposes, two things are going on here.
One is that what matters for well-being is not so much absolute income as our income relative (pdf) to our peers: if we are doing better than them, we’re happy and if we are doing worse, we’re miserable. Andrew Clark and Andrew Oswald have found that happiness depends more upon relative (pdf) income than absolute income, whilst Christopher Boyce and colleagues have found that it is a person’s position in the income ranking (pdf) that matters for their well-being, not their absolute income**.
If it is relative income we care about, then stagnation shouldn’t trouble us. We have as much chance of getting ahead of our peers when GDP is flatlining as we do when it is growing.
Also, though, economic growth is associated with some things many of us don’t like – with the creative destruction than runs down some industries and areas. As Banerjee and Duflo show in Good Economics for Hard Times, the economy is “sticky”: people do not or cannot adjust to such disruption. Hence Anand Menon’s heckler’s point: “that’s your bloody GDP. Not ours.” A stagnant economy in which zombie firms preserve jobs and in which we face less threat from foreign competition or new technology is perfectly tolerable for many – and better than the tumultuous, threatening growth of the 80s and 90s.”
