“Any use of the natural resources for the satisfaction of non-vital needs means a smaller quantity of life in the future”
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and the Limits to Growth
During the postwar decades, all the major economic systems—Western capitalism, Soviet and Chinese Communism, and the hybrid model of stateled industrialization that many former colonies pursued—prioritized a high rate of economic growth and judged themselves by how effectively they achieved it. Any signs of faltering GDP growth were regarded as cause for alarm. “We have not in recent years maintained the 4 to 4½ percent growth rate which characterized the early postwar period,” the White House Council of Economic Advisers lamented in the aforementioned 1962 Economic Report of the President. “We should not settle for less than the achievement of a long-term growth rate matching the early postwar record.”1
The economists who wrote these words were Keynesians of the Harvard/MIT school, but the goal of maximizing GDP growth was shared by socialist planners, nationalist postcolonialists, and free market conservatives. The economic advisers at the Kremlin and the Lok Kalyan Marg in New Delhi believed just as fervently in eternal economic expansion as the Keynesians in the White House; so did the members of the University of Chicago’s economics department. “Economic growth is the grand objective,” the English economist Roy Harrod wrote in 1965. “It is the aim of economic policy as a whole.”2 Economists from many different schools shared a belief that the easiest and most effective way to increase human welfare and raise the poor out of poverty was to grow the economic pie. Socialists and liberals believed in sharing it out more equally; conservatives and supporters of the free market tended to be less concerned about distributive shares. Few economic policymakers anywhere queried the need to expand the size of the pie.
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