Daniel Susskind’s Growth: A History and a Reckoning tells the story of modern economic growth as both humanity’s greatest achievement and one of its most dangerous obsessions. The book is structured around a central tension: growth has delivered extraordinary improvements in human well-being, yet it now threatens many of the things we value most—including our environment, community, and democracy. Susskind’s aim is to first celebrate growth and explain where it came from and then force us to confront the fact that it has come at a rather heavy price. The first half of the book is mostly historical, while the second half has more of a contemporary focus on public policy.

One gets the sense reading the first half of the book that Susskind has mostly read economists, not historians. These sections offer a “hockey stick” history of the past, the graph-inspired term that has often been used by economist historians to detail the flat, zero-GDP “Malthusian Trap” humanity was stuck in for millennia until rather suddenly, around the turn of the nineteenth century, a sharp and sustained rise in economic growth allowed mankind to “escape” such destitution. Disappointingly, the explanations given for this epochal shift amount mostly to a highly engaging yet rather tired “Whig History” that revolves around the works of Joel Mokyr and Paul Romer and their respective emphasis on the “industrial enlightenment” and the fact that ideas are “non-rival” (once discovered, they can be reused at little cost and suffer no diminishing returns). Like the many economists Susskind has clearly read, one gets the sense from these chapters that growth came exclusively from “good” developments and traits—creative ideas, enlightened entrepreneurs, cooperative thinkers. Despite a lengthy discussion on why growth took off in Great Britain of all places, the words “slavery” or “violence” do not appear in the book even once, nor does the notion that perhaps European growth also had something to do with the conquering of the New World, elite confiscation of land, colonial extraction, warring nations, or ruthless labor discipline. It seems odd that a book purporting to show us a balanced and even-handed account of growth offers up absolutely no historical narrative regarding the “darker” causes behind its emergence.

The following chapters examine the rise of monetized GDP metrics and the infatuation of policymakers and politicians with growth in the twentieth century. Susskind frames this development as a “lucky accident,” and thus never really examines the structural reasons why commodity growth became the ultimate goal of human society. Sure, growth correlated with rising standards of living (at least until the neoliberal era), but might the rise of capitalism—a social system in which profitable returns on capital became a necessary condition for economic investment and thus productivity improvements—have played a central role here? Unfortunately, questions of class power or capitalist profit play a very small role in this section, where seemingly apolitical politicians accidentally stumble upon GDP metrics because it made the world a better place and allowed them to avoid tough decisions.

The second half of the book, on the social costs of growth and how to move forward in the future, is much stronger. In one chapter on “GDP minimalism,” Susskind convincingly demonstrates how mere technocratic tinkering with statistical measurement techniques (happiness indices or Green GDP) is not going to get us out of the “Growth Dilemma.” In another chapter, Susskind explains why the “degrowth” movement might not be the answer either and human societies should not try to solve the Growth Dilemma by having people produce or consume less goods and services. In the final section of the book, Susskind offers up a compelling array of ideas and insights on how we can unleash a “better” kind of growth that minimizes its negative consequences. Moving away from the conservative history he had told earlier, Susskind suggests that strong property rights can actually hurt human society and that protections and patents for intellectual property (he calls it “IP imperialism”) have gotten out of hand as “large companies” with “deep pockets” and “lobbying power” have leveraged IP in order to block innovation. Later, Susskind challenges the deep-seated notion amongst mainstream neoclassical economists that there exists a natural “trade-off” between inequality and growth and that, in fact, reducing inequality will be economically efficient. In these sections, we also get interesting moments in which it becomes clear that Susskind has lost faith in the free market. “The flaw with market fundamentalism,” he notes, “is that there is no reason to think that our current direction of economic travel, dictated by the free market, is the ‘right’ one.” Challenging neoliberal assumptions, Susskind argues that since market prices (and thus GDP figures) do not reflect all the values of society, the government must intervene and not allow the price mechanism alone to allocate resources or set priorities. Susskind is not dismissing the use of markets but rather arguing that policymakers must “use the market in a radical way, making prices a better reflection of what we collectively value.”

Susskind is a gifted writer and is very good at taking complicated concepts (the Solow–Swan growth model, for instance) and distilling them into easy-to-understand nuggets. While historians might find the first half of the book somewhat superficial, there is much to glean from the second half. Nevertheless, even this part lacks a serious analysis of social, economic, and business power. The book often feels a bit naïve, as if the only thing stopping humanity from a better future is convincing well-meaning people of better ideas. Rarely does Susskind mention that for a small group of monopoly corporations and wealthy individuals, there is no dilemma in the Growth Dilemma—since they are usually on the winning side of the ledger. Saving democracy and the planet might, therefore, require a somewhat more forceful political and economic strategy.