Last week, Thomas Piketty and 45 co-authors at the World Inequality Lab released what they call the Global Justice Report. Piketty summed up the main findings and demands in the plan on X.
It’s ironic that an organization called the “World Inequality Lab” is focused on addressing poverty because efforts to reduce one inevitably conflict with efforts to reduce the other.
Material poverty is, by definition, a shortage of material goods. The only way to reduce it is to produce goods and services. Yet production inevitably creates inequality because new wealth can’t be instantly replicated and distributed to everyone on the planet. Material inequality appeared the moment a human being invented the first tool - a stone hammer, perhaps. A new invention, business, or technology necessarily benefits a few before it benefits everyone.
The choice is between endless equal poverty and rising prosperity accompanied by unequal gains. Societies that tolerate some inequality become wealthier over time, while those that prioritize equality above all else remain impoverished.
The presence of material poverty is not only a function of material goods shortages but also of their distribution. Thus, material poverty can be reduced by changing the distribution of material goods, not only by producing more of them. Rational policies addressing material policy should address both increased supply as well as the improved distribution of that supply.
You’re assuming that government officials with limited knowledge, poor feedback, and no skin in the game can reallocate resources in a way that makes things better rather than worse. This assumption has a poor track record.
Markets, when left largely free, do a reasonably good job of allocating scarce resources to their best effect. Resources tend to flow to those who have used them to provide goods and services that most benefit other people - as evidenced by those people’s willingness to purchase the goods and services with their hard earned money. The result is a general increase in prosperity.
By contrast, when the government redistributes wealth, the result is, in net, a sort of “trickle-up” economics. The two biggest examples are Social Security and Medicare, which move resources from workers to the elderly - the nation's wealthiest demographic. Helping the poor doesn’t require sending checks to millionaires. Together, the two programs account for about a third of the federal budget - more if you include their share of the interest on the national debt.
Other trickle-up policies include:
- Corporate subsidies
- Corporate bailouts
- Sugar import quotas
- Farm subsidies
- Tariffs and import quotas
- Cabotage laws (e.g., the Jones Act)
- Occupational licensing
- Ethanol subsidies and mandates
- Zoning and land use restrictions
- Certificate-of-need laws
- Monopoly grants
- The mortgage interest deduction
- Subsidized flood insurance
- Student loan forgiveness
- “Green” energy incentives
When governments transfer wealth between groups, the rich and powerful are the best positioned to benefit. The result is a general decrease in prosperity.
No. You are wrong. Unlike you, I stated no assumptions about the competency of government. I am simply pointing out that poverty need not be due to scarcity alone. It may also be due to distribution. We might disagree on the tractability of distributional issues, but it would be wrong to ignore them -- as you did your comment.
Fair enough. Redistributing material goods can be done by government or through private institutions. You didn’t specify which, and I (mistakenly) assumed that you meant via government.
Investment follows opportunity. When it becomes possible to expect positive returns on investment in the Global South, investment will follow. Brazil has lots of promise.
Private investment may require opportunities for direct profit but public investment does not. It can and should be made for all countries and all people. But currently the level of investment in public good and services in the global north is at a different scale to the south. This kind of investment crowds in private funds and it’s this kind of investment that Piketty type redistribution could provide.
Moreover even private investment and credit is provided to the global north on wholly different terms to that of the south. Again something Piketty et al call to redress.
Furthermore furthermore, private investment follows consumer spending power. So even a simple redistribution of incomes can prompt sustained private investment. The welfare states of the north provide this key mechanism by smoothing out consumption spending through recessionary downturns. But this mechanism is often absent in the south.
Economic growth is essential. History shows that societies become healthier, better educated, and more prosperous as they grow. The question is not whether growth matters; it clearly does. The question is whether the rules governing that growth reward value creation or value extraction. A healthy society should maximize productive growth while minimizing structural mechanisms that allow economic power to compound through leverage, arbitrage, and privileged access to financial systems. The goal is not a smaller pie or a larger pie. The goal is a pie whose growth remains aligned with broad human flourishing.
I agree that, in general, a larger pie is desirable. Economic growth has lifted billions of people out of poverty.
My point is that growth is a means, not an end. We should judge an economy not only by how large the pie becomes, but by whether the incentives that grow it continue to reward value creation over extraction.
When growth increasingly comes from leverage, financial engineering, or other forms of extraction, GDP can continue rising while many measures of societal well-being move in the opposite direction.
So I'd slightly amend my statement: the goal is the largest pie possible consistent with incentives that promote broad human flourishing over the long term.
But as de Rugy cites, there is a near perfect correlation between GDP and human well being, at least for those billions in the world not already near western GDPs per capita.
So there’s nothing wrong with your amended statement, but it’s pretty much not necessary, if one cares about the well being of the poorest.
I don't disagree for developing economies. If your GDP per capita is low, sustained growth is one of the most effective ways to improve nutrition, health, education, and life expectancy. The historical evidence is compelling.
Where I think the conversation becomes more interesting is after that.
GDP tells us how much the economy is producing. It tells us very little about why it is growing or whether the incentives driving that growth remain healthy over the long term.
If two economies grow at the same rate, but one grows primarily through innovation, entrepreneurship, and productive investment while the other increasingly grows through leverage, financial engineering, and rent extraction, they may have similar GDP statistics today but very different long-term trajectories.
My interest isn't in replacing growth as the objective. It's in asking what kinds of incentives produce the most durable and broadly shared growth.
I am not an economist and don't even play one in Substack. I had no idea that "growth is not sufficient to improve human wellbeing" was even a topic of discussion, and just assumed "degrowth" was the usual hyperbole of disgruntled parasites who had run out of other people's money.
Where do these idiots think other people's money came from? I used to joke that collectivism only works in a static society, where people never get sick or die or are born, where weather and natural disasters never affect anyone, where no one ever thinks of new ways to do things or new things to do. Stasis, the only circumstances where collectivism can possibly work.
I'm glad, I suppose, that Pritchett et al want to debunk Piketty et al, but it shouldn't be necessary. We didn't get to where we are today, with all this other people's money lying around for the parasites to redistribute (I'll believe Piketty is serious when he redistributes his own pay and wealth), without all the previous growth. How have Piketty et al decided that the level of growth right now (or a year ago when they wrote their paper, or 30-40 years ago when they first got their ideas, or 20 years from now when they retire?) is the exact right amount of growth and all further growth is not just unnecessary but detrimental?
It's just lunacy. "All past growth is great. All future growth is terrible."
Weird article. The whole point of questioning growth is the idea that the poorer you are the more you need it, Pritchett and piketty seem to agree. Piketty needs to show how his model is possible democratically, Pritchett how the growth is environmentally sustainable.
The article seems like a bad faith set of straw man arguments
I don't know if youve heard of this thing called planetary boundaries? I would love to see scenarios and policies that would bring us within them. More productivity will be a good thing, but it will also is not alone much of a solution, as it mostly enable us to use even more resources.
I don’t know if you heard of this thing called the Erlich-Simon bet that Erlich lost badly? Maybe go look it up.
Just because it is true that at SOME point in the future we will be resource constrained does not mean it will be any time soon (as in the next several decades at barest minimum).
In fact all of the evidence points to the idea that we are nowhere near them.
If you want to yourself live “lightly off the land”, feel free to go ahead.
But depriving the world’s poorest billions the opportunity to do the same as we well-off folks in the rich west - in particular the opportunity of low cost, highly available highly reliable energy that fossil fuels deliver - is imo profoundly immoral.
It is indeed a terrific paper; I wrote basically the same - Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde holds the same opinion. My caveat is that targeted programs - RCTs - can actually be detrimental to development. First, they ignore human agency and endogenous institutional change. Second, they make it "less costly" for governments to have bad institutions, thus enabling bad governments to stay longer in power.
Income inequality in America has not been this high since 1928, just before the Great Depression. During both the late 1920s and the modern era (from the 1980s onward), the highest concentration of wealth and income became heavily skewed toward the top 1% to 0.1% of earners. Hoover won 40 states in 1928, and six in 1932. Then the income inequality correction began. Here we are again.
Pritchett's and Lewis' article is described as studying the effect of GDP on the meeting of basic needs. Presumably this is within each society/country. Piketty et. all are said to have recommended limiting per capital GDP growth in rich countries to allow room for poor countries to become less poor. To face these two publications off against each other is nonsense, in my opinion.
Great commentary! The world needs politicians who can successfully present/demonstrate that inequality is a feature not a bug. There are limits of course (and signs of drift, I think) but the free, developed world is generally a shinning example of growing pies.
Can’t solve a problem if you don’t have the right problem. He’ll spend a lifetime and plenty of the rich progressive’s wealth chasing the climate bogeyman. SMH
Growth doesn't require more stuff, it requires more knowledge.
Your argument arises from the core error of Marxism. The Labor Theory of Value is fundamentally flawed in that it ignores the impact of knowledge.
If you want to increase output by 10%, it's sufficient to increase input by 10% and labor by 10%. If you want to increase output by 10X, or 100X, you need to add knowledge. Not just knowledge that makes production a few percent more efficient (though that's good, and can enable you to produce more with less labor and less material input) but knowledge that enables you to replace entire categories of products more effective ones.
Convergence is one way this happens. Consider the smartphone. How many different product categories does it replace? And how many things does it do that people who didn't have smartphones didn't even know they needed?
Increased reliability and durability is another way. Look at modern automobiles and compare them to the cars of 50 years ago. Yes, they're more intricate and more expensive, but they also last far longer, use gasoline more sparingly (and my primary car doesn't use any fossil fuel at all; it's powered by the sun), and are more comfortable and safer. Self-driving technology is poised to make them one or two orders of magnitude safer yet (which will also reduce waste caused by collisions) and is also very likely to increase utilization by an order of magnitude and reduce the number of cars by some amount.
Replacement of inputs is another way. Consider the replacement of telecommunications infrastructure. We strung and buried millions of tons of copper to communicate with one another since the invention of the telegraph and telephone. We're now replacing that expensive and relatively hard to obtain copper wiring with fiber optics which not only enable vastly greater information transfer but are made of *sand*. Increasingly we're moving to completely wireless infrastructure. While a hundred thousand telecommunications satellites will take quite a bit of raw materials to build and launch into orbit, their total resource consumption will be noise compared to the infrastructure they replace.
And speaking of space-based technology, of course, space ultimately offers us a way out of any practical limits on resources, or room, opening up the resources of the entire solar system.
Note that I'm not saying that technology *necessarily* reduces material consumption: There are many, many counterexamples to that fallacious claim. What knowledge does is to provide flexibility, to give us options that enable us to reduce or repurpose inputs to make them more effective.
Until we reach the limit of knowledge, we will not have reached the limit of growth. And I see no indication that there is any limit on the growth of knowledge.
We don’t need literally infinite growth to pull the world’s poorest billions first out of poverty, then to the standard of living of the lower middle class in the rich west.
You wanna talk about less growth after that, we can at least have a conversation.
But imo it’s truly immoral to deny greater material well being to the world’s poorest.
I understand that argument and sympathise with it. Why should the poorest be denied what we have?
My question is, will that be possible? I come back to the problem; there just isn’t enough left in the ground to give the still rising global population our standard of living.
I omit the unfortunate fact that in all too many countries, fraud, tribalism and incompetence keep many much poorer than they need to be.
Here in Australia we’ve had around 4 years of (slight) degrowth with shrinking per capita incomes resulting largely from our collective “shitting of the bed” through 2020 and 2021.
As a result, we have a new right populist political movement combined with a growing (albeit more slowly) far left party. In the next election; perhaps 40% of Australians will vote for a party on either side that wants to tear everything down and start again. This, in one of the most stable affluent countries on earth.
Degrowth equals social and political turmoil,though i suspect Piketty and others know this.
What is sad is that this isn’t painfully obvious already to everyone.
For a trained economist to give up on that is a claim based on faith. Nothing more. Everything they write after that is working backward from the conclusion.
What are some examples of pro-growth development aid/ philanthropic giving opportunities?
I imagine most donors think of education related grants as being pro-growth. Are they? If not what is? Give directly cash assistance has been shown to have positive economic impacts. Does that count as pro-growth?
Asking as a philanthropist earnestly interested in investing in the space.
Granted that reducing poverty correlates strongly with other good effects, but does it cause those effects? Or does how a society reduces its poverty matter? Does handing out money to poor people (welfare) make them better off, or trap them in dependency? Does culture matter at all?
I’d think those would be the most important questions to ask.
It’s ironic that an organization called the “World Inequality Lab” is focused on addressing poverty because efforts to reduce one inevitably conflict with efforts to reduce the other.
Material poverty is, by definition, a shortage of material goods. The only way to reduce it is to produce goods and services. Yet production inevitably creates inequality because new wealth can’t be instantly replicated and distributed to everyone on the planet. Material inequality appeared the moment a human being invented the first tool - a stone hammer, perhaps. A new invention, business, or technology necessarily benefits a few before it benefits everyone.
The choice is between endless equal poverty and rising prosperity accompanied by unequal gains. Societies that tolerate some inequality become wealthier over time, while those that prioritize equality above all else remain impoverished.
The presence of material poverty is not only a function of material goods shortages but also of their distribution. Thus, material poverty can be reduced by changing the distribution of material goods, not only by producing more of them. Rational policies addressing material policy should address both increased supply as well as the improved distribution of that supply.
You’re assuming that government officials with limited knowledge, poor feedback, and no skin in the game can reallocate resources in a way that makes things better rather than worse. This assumption has a poor track record.
Markets, when left largely free, do a reasonably good job of allocating scarce resources to their best effect. Resources tend to flow to those who have used them to provide goods and services that most benefit other people - as evidenced by those people’s willingness to purchase the goods and services with their hard earned money. The result is a general increase in prosperity.
By contrast, when the government redistributes wealth, the result is, in net, a sort of “trickle-up” economics. The two biggest examples are Social Security and Medicare, which move resources from workers to the elderly - the nation's wealthiest demographic. Helping the poor doesn’t require sending checks to millionaires. Together, the two programs account for about a third of the federal budget - more if you include their share of the interest on the national debt.
Other trickle-up policies include:
- Corporate subsidies
- Corporate bailouts
- Sugar import quotas
- Farm subsidies
- Tariffs and import quotas
- Cabotage laws (e.g., the Jones Act)
- Occupational licensing
- Ethanol subsidies and mandates
- Zoning and land use restrictions
- Certificate-of-need laws
- Monopoly grants
- The mortgage interest deduction
- Subsidized flood insurance
- Student loan forgiveness
- “Green” energy incentives
When governments transfer wealth between groups, the rich and powerful are the best positioned to benefit. The result is a general decrease in prosperity.
No. You are wrong. Unlike you, I stated no assumptions about the competency of government. I am simply pointing out that poverty need not be due to scarcity alone. It may also be due to distribution. We might disagree on the tractability of distributional issues, but it would be wrong to ignore them -- as you did your comment.
Fair enough. Redistributing material goods can be done by government or through private institutions. You didn’t specify which, and I (mistakenly) assumed that you meant via government.
Paul Krugman famously stated, “Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run, it is almost everything.”
So he's probably wrong - it's everything.
Equatorial Guinea is the "almost" part.
I agree but guess what productivity growth requires - money. Guess where all the money is - in the global north.
Investment follows opportunity. When it becomes possible to expect positive returns on investment in the Global South, investment will follow. Brazil has lots of promise.
Private investment may require opportunities for direct profit but public investment does not. It can and should be made for all countries and all people. But currently the level of investment in public good and services in the global north is at a different scale to the south. This kind of investment crowds in private funds and it’s this kind of investment that Piketty type redistribution could provide.
Moreover even private investment and credit is provided to the global north on wholly different terms to that of the south. Again something Piketty et al call to redress.
Furthermore furthermore, private investment follows consumer spending power. So even a simple redistribution of incomes can prompt sustained private investment. The welfare states of the north provide this key mechanism by smoothing out consumption spending through recessionary downturns. But this mechanism is often absent in the south.
Economic growth is essential. History shows that societies become healthier, better educated, and more prosperous as they grow. The question is not whether growth matters; it clearly does. The question is whether the rules governing that growth reward value creation or value extraction. A healthy society should maximize productive growth while minimizing structural mechanisms that allow economic power to compound through leverage, arbitrage, and privileged access to financial systems. The goal is not a smaller pie or a larger pie. The goal is a pie whose growth remains aligned with broad human flourishing.
“The goal is not a smaller pie or a larger pie. The goal is a pie whose growth remains aligned with broad human flourishing.”
Respectfully, the goal *is* a larger pie.
Modulo only cronyism and literal kleptocracy.
Because a larger pie is aligned with more human flourishing.
I agree that, in general, a larger pie is desirable. Economic growth has lifted billions of people out of poverty.
My point is that growth is a means, not an end. We should judge an economy not only by how large the pie becomes, but by whether the incentives that grow it continue to reward value creation over extraction.
When growth increasingly comes from leverage, financial engineering, or other forms of extraction, GDP can continue rising while many measures of societal well-being move in the opposite direction.
So I'd slightly amend my statement: the goal is the largest pie possible consistent with incentives that promote broad human flourishing over the long term.
All well and good.
But as de Rugy cites, there is a near perfect correlation between GDP and human well being, at least for those billions in the world not already near western GDPs per capita.
So there’s nothing wrong with your amended statement, but it’s pretty much not necessary, if one cares about the well being of the poorest.
I don't disagree for developing economies. If your GDP per capita is low, sustained growth is one of the most effective ways to improve nutrition, health, education, and life expectancy. The historical evidence is compelling.
Where I think the conversation becomes more interesting is after that.
GDP tells us how much the economy is producing. It tells us very little about why it is growing or whether the incentives driving that growth remain healthy over the long term.
If two economies grow at the same rate, but one grows primarily through innovation, entrepreneurship, and productive investment while the other increasingly grows through leverage, financial engineering, and rent extraction, they may have similar GDP statistics today but very different long-term trajectories.
My interest isn't in replacing growth as the objective. It's in asking what kinds of incentives produce the most durable and broadly shared growth.
I am not an economist and don't even play one in Substack. I had no idea that "growth is not sufficient to improve human wellbeing" was even a topic of discussion, and just assumed "degrowth" was the usual hyperbole of disgruntled parasites who had run out of other people's money.
Where do these idiots think other people's money came from? I used to joke that collectivism only works in a static society, where people never get sick or die or are born, where weather and natural disasters never affect anyone, where no one ever thinks of new ways to do things or new things to do. Stasis, the only circumstances where collectivism can possibly work.
I'm glad, I suppose, that Pritchett et al want to debunk Piketty et al, but it shouldn't be necessary. We didn't get to where we are today, with all this other people's money lying around for the parasites to redistribute (I'll believe Piketty is serious when he redistributes his own pay and wealth), without all the previous growth. How have Piketty et al decided that the level of growth right now (or a year ago when they wrote their paper, or 30-40 years ago when they first got their ideas, or 20 years from now when they retire?) is the exact right amount of growth and all further growth is not just unnecessary but detrimental?
It's just lunacy. "All past growth is great. All future growth is terrible."
I don't hate collectivists enough.
Weird article. The whole point of questioning growth is the idea that the poorer you are the more you need it, Pritchett and piketty seem to agree. Piketty needs to show how his model is possible democratically, Pritchett how the growth is environmentally sustainable.
The article seems like a bad faith set of straw man arguments
“…Pritchett how the growth is environmentally sustainable.”
No, he really doesn’t.
Yours is a false equivalence.
Richer countries are in fact better for the environment.
More productivity in the whole world is better for the human flourishing of the least fortunate globally.
All the evidence has shown this.
I don't know if youve heard of this thing called planetary boundaries? I would love to see scenarios and policies that would bring us within them. More productivity will be a good thing, but it will also is not alone much of a solution, as it mostly enable us to use even more resources.
I don’t know if you heard of this thing called the Erlich-Simon bet that Erlich lost badly? Maybe go look it up.
Just because it is true that at SOME point in the future we will be resource constrained does not mean it will be any time soon (as in the next several decades at barest minimum).
In fact all of the evidence points to the idea that we are nowhere near them.
If you want to yourself live “lightly off the land”, feel free to go ahead.
But depriving the world’s poorest billions the opportunity to do the same as we well-off folks in the rich west - in particular the opportunity of low cost, highly available highly reliable energy that fossil fuels deliver - is imo profoundly immoral.
It is indeed a terrific paper; I wrote basically the same - Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde holds the same opinion. My caveat is that targeted programs - RCTs - can actually be detrimental to development. First, they ignore human agency and endogenous institutional change. Second, they make it "less costly" for governments to have bad institutions, thus enabling bad governments to stay longer in power.
My understanding is that Printchell would agree with you. Check his substack posts.
Income inequality in America has not been this high since 1928, just before the Great Depression. During both the late 1920s and the modern era (from the 1980s onward), the highest concentration of wealth and income became heavily skewed toward the top 1% to 0.1% of earners. Hoover won 40 states in 1928, and six in 1932. Then the income inequality correction began. Here we are again.
Pritchett's and Lewis' article is described as studying the effect of GDP on the meeting of basic needs. Presumably this is within each society/country. Piketty et. all are said to have recommended limiting per capital GDP growth in rich countries to allow room for poor countries to become less poor. To face these two publications off against each other is nonsense, in my opinion.
Great commentary! The world needs politicians who can successfully present/demonstrate that inequality is a feature not a bug. There are limits of course (and signs of drift, I think) but the free, developed world is generally a shinning example of growing pies.
Can’t solve a problem if you don’t have the right problem. He’ll spend a lifetime and plenty of the rich progressive’s wealth chasing the climate bogeyman. SMH
The only quibble I have with this is; how is infinite growth possible on a finite planet?
Everything we extract from the ground will eventually run out. What then?
Technological improvements. The Stone Age didn’t end because they ran out of stone.
Growth doesn't require more stuff, it requires more knowledge.
Your argument arises from the core error of Marxism. The Labor Theory of Value is fundamentally flawed in that it ignores the impact of knowledge.
If you want to increase output by 10%, it's sufficient to increase input by 10% and labor by 10%. If you want to increase output by 10X, or 100X, you need to add knowledge. Not just knowledge that makes production a few percent more efficient (though that's good, and can enable you to produce more with less labor and less material input) but knowledge that enables you to replace entire categories of products more effective ones.
Convergence is one way this happens. Consider the smartphone. How many different product categories does it replace? And how many things does it do that people who didn't have smartphones didn't even know they needed?
Increased reliability and durability is another way. Look at modern automobiles and compare them to the cars of 50 years ago. Yes, they're more intricate and more expensive, but they also last far longer, use gasoline more sparingly (and my primary car doesn't use any fossil fuel at all; it's powered by the sun), and are more comfortable and safer. Self-driving technology is poised to make them one or two orders of magnitude safer yet (which will also reduce waste caused by collisions) and is also very likely to increase utilization by an order of magnitude and reduce the number of cars by some amount.
Replacement of inputs is another way. Consider the replacement of telecommunications infrastructure. We strung and buried millions of tons of copper to communicate with one another since the invention of the telegraph and telephone. We're now replacing that expensive and relatively hard to obtain copper wiring with fiber optics which not only enable vastly greater information transfer but are made of *sand*. Increasingly we're moving to completely wireless infrastructure. While a hundred thousand telecommunications satellites will take quite a bit of raw materials to build and launch into orbit, their total resource consumption will be noise compared to the infrastructure they replace.
And speaking of space-based technology, of course, space ultimately offers us a way out of any practical limits on resources, or room, opening up the resources of the entire solar system.
Note that I'm not saying that technology *necessarily* reduces material consumption: There are many, many counterexamples to that fallacious claim. What knowledge does is to provide flexibility, to give us options that enable us to reduce or repurpose inputs to make them more effective.
Until we reach the limit of knowledge, we will not have reached the limit of growth. And I see no indication that there is any limit on the growth of knowledge.
We don’t need literally infinite growth to pull the world’s poorest billions first out of poverty, then to the standard of living of the lower middle class in the rich west.
You wanna talk about less growth after that, we can at least have a conversation.
But imo it’s truly immoral to deny greater material well being to the world’s poorest.
Andy,
I understand that argument and sympathise with it. Why should the poorest be denied what we have?
My question is, will that be possible? I come back to the problem; there just isn’t enough left in the ground to give the still rising global population our standard of living.
I omit the unfortunate fact that in all too many countries, fraud, tribalism and incompetence keep many much poorer than they need to be.
As Shawn describes pretty well in his separate response, you’re just not correct that “just isn’t enough left in the ground” is a problem.
Now, re: corruption, fraud and incompetence as major problems, there I agree with you very much.
Degrowth is insane.
Here in Australia we’ve had around 4 years of (slight) degrowth with shrinking per capita incomes resulting largely from our collective “shitting of the bed” through 2020 and 2021.
As a result, we have a new right populist political movement combined with a growing (albeit more slowly) far left party. In the next election; perhaps 40% of Australians will vote for a party on either side that wants to tear everything down and start again. This, in one of the most stable affluent countries on earth.
Degrowth equals social and political turmoil,though i suspect Piketty and others know this.
What is sad is that this isn’t painfully obvious already to everyone.
For a trained economist to give up on that is a claim based on faith. Nothing more. Everything they write after that is working backward from the conclusion.
Great last paragraph
On the contrary, the last phrase seems a non sequitur
What are some examples of pro-growth development aid/ philanthropic giving opportunities?
I imagine most donors think of education related grants as being pro-growth. Are they? If not what is? Give directly cash assistance has been shown to have positive economic impacts. Does that count as pro-growth?
Asking as a philanthropist earnestly interested in investing in the space.
Granted that reducing poverty correlates strongly with other good effects, but does it cause those effects? Or does how a society reduces its poverty matter? Does handing out money to poor people (welfare) make them better off, or trap them in dependency? Does culture matter at all?
I’d think those would be the most important questions to ask.