Was It All Worth It?

Epistemic confidence: Very low, I’m just throwing an idea out into the ether here. The chance of there being some obvious objection to some of the stuff I say in the post that refutes it entirely is high, proceed with caution.

Advocates of ‘degrowth’ say that legislators and economists are too focused on GDP Growth, and in fact societies ought to focus on maximising well-being, which would probably mean that GDP decreased rather than increased. I think the arguments against degrowth are good - Tom Chivers has written a post here, Noah Smith has one here, and you can probably find a bunch more that are well argued and well written. But I do think there’s an interesting question raised by the Degrowth movement - suppose that we could go back in time and prevent the explosion in economic growth after the industrial revolution (which can be seen in England's GDP per capita figures in the chart above), would it be a good idea?

Intuitively, the answer is a resounding ‘No!’. Economic growth h…