Martin Wolf asks in the FT this morning wheteher there are limits to growth.
He's right to do so. But maybe a little behind the times. I read this book when I was a sixth former in the mid 70s:
If anything made me green, it did. And my copy looks just as battered as that one now.
OK, there was also Small is Beautiful, but it wasn't as good as Mishan. As Wikipedia notes of Mishan:
In 1965, while at the LSE, he wrote his seminal work The Costs of Economic Growth, but was unable to find a publisher until 1967. In this work he expanded on his original 1960 thesis which stated that the “precondition of sustained growth is sustained discontent”, warning developing nations that “the thorny path to industrialisation leads, after all, only to the waste land of Subtopia”. The Costs of Economic Growth presaged many of the concerns of the Green movement that followed.
Very true.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
There are links to this blog's glossary in the above post that explain technical terms used in it. Follow them for more explanations.
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Buy me a coffee!
Delighted to see this, a fine tribute to a good man with ideas of his own. He was one of my tutors in the 1950’s at a time when he had become critical of current economic theories.
Thanks for that Richard. As someone uneducated in the field, that has long been my question. Why do so few seem to ask it, let alone respond? Growth seems to have become the unquestioned be all and end all.