Henry C. Clark on Growth

Growth is essential to human life. Always has been, always will be. From the moment we are born, we grow, and we continue to throughout our lives, whether that is physically, mentally, or otherwise. Societies grow too.

But what is growth? Real growth is replicable, durable, and sustainable (and not in the sense that immediately comes to mind). Your seven-year-old doesn’t shrink back down after she grows an inch. It might happen when she’s ninety, but that’s gravity (and don’t you think she’s had a good run at this point? We should accept that it’s ok to have a growth recession every now and again). So how have intellectuals conceptualized the growth of societies, environments, and economies over time? And how should we think about growth? 

The wonderful Henry C. Clark joins us on the podcast today to answer these questions and more. He is the program director of the Political Economy Project at Dartmouth College and the author of several books including the newly released The Moral Economy We Have Lost: Life Before Mass Abundance. Go check it out!


Want to explore more?

• Henry Clark on the Enlightenments, a Great Antidote podcast.
• Pierre Desrochers, From Prometheus to Arcadia: Liberals, Conservatives, the Environment, and Cultural Cognition, at Econlib.
• Robert Pindyck on Averting and Adapting to Climate Change, an EconTalk podcast.
• Sandra Peart and David Levy, Happiness and the Vanity of the Philosopher: Part1, at Econlib.
• Deirdre McCloskey and Economists' Ideas About Ideas, a Liberty Matters forum at the Online Library of Liberty.

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Transcript

Juliette Sellgren 

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. Hi, I'm Juliette Sellgren, and this is my podcast, the Great Antidote- named for Adam Smith, brought to you by Liberty Fund. To learn more, visit www.AdamSmithWorks.org.

Welcome back on this podcast and coming from economists generally, you hear a lot of talk about growth. You hear economic growth, population growth, different sorts of things that are all related, but where did that conversation begin, and what does it actually mean, and what are the different components and how do they interact with each other? There are all these questions, we've never talked about it so explicitly and so isolated from everything else we talk about it in the context. So today on June 19th, 2024, I'm excited to welcome back Professor Henry C. Clark to the podcast. He's the program director of the Political Economy Project at Dartmouth College. And on July 1st on Amazon there will be releasing his new book, The Moral Economy. We have Lost Life Before Mass Abundance. I'll be checking this out and I think you should as well. It sounds like a phenomenal book and I'm really excited. I'm also really excited for our conversation today, so welcome back to the podcast.

Henry Clark

Thanks Juliette, very much for having me.

Juliette Sellgren 

So new first question, what is one piece of advice you would give to your younger self?

Henry Clark (1.47)

So many defects, so little time. It's a cliché, but I would say one would certainly be stop and smell the flowers. It's not something I did a whole lot of when I was younger. In fact, it's not something I did a whole lot of as recently as two or three years ago. But in just the last couple years or so, I think I have noticed a little bit more than usual the material surroundings that I have. I'm fortunate enough to live in a wonderful place up here in Northern New Hampshire. I know that you're familiar with it and there are things about it that just hadn't really hit me before. It hadn't really sunk in. I hadn't really noticed them in the way that I want to, and I have begun to actually make a more or less mindful and deliberate practice of appreciating, for instance, the arcade of trees that runs from my office down into what passes for downtown here in Hanover, New Hampshire. And I think that there are great sages and gurus throughout the centuries can attest there are benefits to that kind of mindfulness. I give it this fancy name mindfulness, all it really amounts to is stopping and smelling the flowers. But I recommended to people of all ages including impetuous and eager youth, which is certainly what it was when I was a college student.

Juliette Sellgren (3.33)

So in the example you gave, you're talking about actually looking at nature, but is it always roses we're smelling? What are the sorts of other things that you've become more mindful of appreciating?

Henry Clark (3.46)

Landscape, simply looking out on the horizon, looking across a green here at Dartmouth, we have a green that it's in fact the centerpiece, the public centerpiece, the publicly shared centerpiece of our campus. And it's the hub of the great wheel of intellectual commerce, so to speak, that churns every day around here. And most people encounter it one way or another. They walk by it, they walk across it, they settle on it, they see it from a distance, they see it from up close. So many different perspectives, including by the way the perspective that I'm most interested in as an historian, which is the perspective of the past. Because one of the things that I see when I look out on the landscape of our small, intimate little campus is the 18th century origins of this wonderful college. There are artists renderings of what the very first Dartmouth college of the time of Azar Wheelock, the founder of the school, created the college on a hill. And so all of those perspectives I think are humanizing. I think they all bring out our best, remind us of that we are stepping in a moving stream and are part of a history that is larger than ourselves. And I could go on and on, rhapsody about this subject actually.

Juliette Sellgren (5.45)

And it's been lovely to hear you talk about it this much. Maybe there's a whole podcast to be had about the historical ties of the landscapes around us, but unfortunately that's not quite the topic of today, but maybe we'll do another one. So onto the topic of growth and its critics, what is growth in this conception and what drew you to it? Why this interest?

Henry Clark (6.16)

Well, it's a great question, Juliette, and in your introduction of course you referred to the economists' approach to growth, and there certainly is that there's a whole literature over the last two, three generations of sometimes quite high level theorizing about growth, its nature, its origins, how to reproduce it in poorer countries in the world and so forth. But as an historian, I became interested in growth as a historical phenomenon. I would say a decade or so ago when I was teaching at another institution, I taught a course on the history of technology and society where I guess for the first time really in a serious way became introduced to the phenomenon and the actual reality of growth in its many dimensions, including resistance to growth, the importance of the Industrial Revolution, why it was so long and coming, why it was that there were so many great civilizations across Eurasia and beyond that had produced so many wonderful discoveries, so many wonderful inventions, but had not really produced what we today think of as growth by which we generally mean durable, replicable, sustainable growth over time.

So, my first introduction to the subject was as an historian, taking the big picture, ancient to modern of the subject, but I became more acutely interested in it and just in the last couple of years or so for a number of different reasons. I guess one is that a number of my students are keenly interested in the phenomenon of climate change and all of the problems and challenges that it entails. And you don't have to read very far into that literature in order to see the connection between a problem, a global problem, and the question of growth. Since the recent movements it began in France mostly but has passed on to other countries as well. It's known here as a degrowth movement was primarily in this iteration devised as a response to climate change. According to one survey by the student newspaper here, 30% of Dartmouth students rate climate change as the most important problem facing the world today.

The number two issue is at 11%. So it's a topic that weighs very, very heavily here. And so that got me interested in reading about the relationship between climate change and growth. But beyond that, in the course of doing that reading, I became more familiar with earlier episodes of both endorsements and criticisms of growth as a deliberate and conscious policy. And in fact, over 200 years really from [Thomas Robert] Malthus up to the present, it slowly occurred to me that there really have been at least four distinct and identifiable debates over growth, economic growth in its relationship to population in its relationship to resource depletion, notably but not exclusively energy resources, growth in its relationship to environmental stewardship. And of course most recently growth in connection with climate change. And so as I did that reading, it occurred to me that there are certain family resemblances in the debate that emerged starting with Malthus in the late 18th, early 19th century and continuing in a punctuated fashion, going up and down, fading in and fading out and roaring back in over the two centuries since then. And so it began to occur to me that it might be a very, very useful intellectual exercise for students today who are so preoccupied with the climate change relationship with growth to see that problem in its broader historical context as one among numerous other debates that have occurred for 200 years about economic growth.

And so I began to wonder what it might be like to put together a course that would serve exactly that purpose. And as very often happens with the faculty members who devise new courses, especially in the humanities and the liberal arts, I began to convince myself that no liberally educated person can possibly graduate without having taken [such] a course. Looking at this big picture, history of growth, growth as a phenomenon, where did it come from? Why was there so much resistance to it? What actual human consequences did growth have on the people who experienced it as well as from the conceptual point of view, the various debates about it, beginning with Malthus again and going straight through to the present day over the advisability, not only the possibility, but the desirability of embracing economic growth as a strategy for addressing various social problems. And so that was one sort of channel, one sort of avenue that brought me into this topic. As I was working my way into that avenue, I began to realize that there were parallels between the course design that I was coming up with and a course that I already had been teaching at Dartmouth about three or four years ago. Colleagues of mine recommended that I put together a course on let's say markets and their critics, the idea being to really take a big picture, look at markets, what are markets, where are they natural, are they artificial? Where did they come from?

Can they be looked upon as modes of social coordination? And if so, how do we conceive of them relative to other modes of social coordination? And I've taught that course now three years in a row, I think it's gone very well. And so at a certain point as I was thinking about this growth idea, it began to me that growth and its critics might be just a perfect complement for the course that I already offer on markets and their critics, big picture, historical framework, multiple different angles and approaches. I would of course assign the very best and the very strongest arguments for and against the topic in question, just as I assign the best authors for and against markets are the best critics of markets as well as the best proponents of markets, I would do the same thing for the course on growth. And so coming back to your original introduction, the course would at some point include the economist's way of thinking about growth, but only from my historian's point of view.

And for me, what's most striking about the economists' approach to growth is the paradox of how difficult it has been for economists to arrive at anything close to really a consensus on what growth is in Redox. Because of course, in one obvious sense, you of course have decided to call your lovely podcast The Great Antidote, which is a quotation from Adam Smith's writings. And from one point of view, of course Adam Smith already has been there and done that indeed at the very beginning of the Wealth of Nations. He makes it clear that the purpose of studying the subject at all is to help rescue people from what he assumed was the pain and the suffering of shared communal poverty and give people a chance at a respectable and dignified life filled with conveniences and amenities and enjoyments not available to the very poor. So there's a larger, we might even say existential purpose in mind in and even thinking about a political economy, and that is to figure out a way to foster and promote growth in whatever society it that is having that particular debate.

And when we ask ourselves, well, okay, so that's the purpose that Smith had in mind. Did he ever actually develop a theory of growth? Did he solve the problem of where growth comes from? I mean, you might assume that the founder of modern economics would have more or less settled the issue. Obviously it comes from the cooperation that's channeled through markets by way of the division of labor and the division of labor has all of these productivity enhancing benefits, and that's the end of the story. But in fact, the actual history of what economists themselves have said about the nature and sources of growth is itself a fascinating story and it will play a small part. I'm not an economist. This course will almost certainly not be granted economics credit, and so I won't pretend to have the economists' technical mastery of the high level of theorizing on growth.

But nonetheless, I think introducing students to this paradox of just how difficult it has been for economists themselves from Smith on forward to arrive at an understanding, at a shared understanding, a consensus understanding as to what growth is, including the question rather fundamental question from our point of view of whether growth itself is sustainable, whether it is something that we can contemplate taking place in perpetuity as far as the eye can see. So I will bring in some of the theory that emerged in the aftermath of the devising in the 1930s of measures, macroeconomic measures of national economy by Condorcet and others who are working on this question of how do you measure the actual wealth 1930s and then growing out of that preoccupation is when really what I suspect most economists would call the true history of growth theory actually begins in the forties and fifties and right on up to our own time.

That will only be a part of the course, and it's a way really of doing what our program is always attempts to do. The political economy project here at Dartmouth, we always attempt to be as interdisciplinary as we can. So we want to put the perspectives of economists alongside those of public policy people and people who want to influence public policy, many of whom have been very valuable on the growth issue, whether it be through the population question, the resource depletion or energy depletion question, the environmental stewardship question or the climate change question. So it's a course that will combine politics, public policy theory, political theory from Malthus through [Friedrich] Engels and [Karl] Marx and others as well as a current public debate over the possibility and desirability of sustainable growth in an age such as our own. So that's in very rough outline. That's what I would say is the background to the course.

And because it fits in, and I should say before going forward, the course hasn't been approved yet. There's no guarantee I'm going to be able to teach it. In fact, it hasn't even been proposed yet. I'm still kind of tidying up the details on the syllabus a little bit and soliciting some feedback from some of my colleagues who might have ideas on what I should include, what I shouldn't include. I've been reading as widely and deeply as I can on this topic on and off now for a good while, a good year and a half, two years I would say. And so I think I have a pretty good general idea of what the course is designed to do, but still miles to go before I sleep, what I'm looking for here is an undergraduate course. I've had a number of students tell me that the markets and their critics course that I've taught has really sort of changed the way that they look at markets just as an everyday phenomenon.

I mean, we all deal in markets every single day. We all know at some level what markets all are. We have experience with them, we have our own views of what our market experience has been like, whether as consumers, as producers, as traders. And yet it turns out that when you really think about it, markets are fairly mysterious and a fairly eye-opening kind of a topic. And what I'm trying to do in designing this course is to offer students exactly the same kind of experience with the phenomenon of growth, which is at least as routine and mundane and daily and experience that everyone has as the experience of markets is you can't read a daily newspaper without seeing some hand wring newspaper articles about how the projection for the next rest of the year is for a growth of 1.4% instead of an earlier projection of 2.3% and the wailing and gnashing of teeth that accompanies announcements of that kind.

So we all have at least this vague idea, wow, growth is an important metric for our own collective success as a people and maybe even as a global civilization. But what I want to do is I want to step back and give people, give my students a more sort of an more visceral and existential feel, a for how utterly unprecedented the last couple of centuries, the centuries that we normally associate with the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath actually was, and B, about how difficult it has been for 200 years for people, even people who study it for a living to actually get their minds around what is really going on in this unprecedented growth oriented civilization of ours. In broad outline, that's what I would say I'm about in this course proposal and I can't wait to move forward with it, see what happens.

Juliette Sellgren (26.36)

Yeah, that sounds awesome. Something that I think is so brilliant about this course outline, and you kind pointed to it yourself, is that it's not a standard economics course. It is not an economics course at all, really. It includes economics, but really it's grappling with ideas that are not technical in the way that a lot of economics today is, but they're necessary. They're the assumptions and the guiding ideas that you need before you can do anything more technical and minute. And so if I were just speaking to Dartmouth students, especially economics majors, I would really recommend that they take your class because it sounds like exactly the sort of thing we need in economics today. Could you take…

Henry Clark 

Oh, go ahead.

Juliette Sellgren (27.31)

I was just going to ask if you could take us through, obviously a lot of history and time passed before Malthus, but I think when thinking about growth, he's kind of the beginning of these tensions and a lot of what can be learned about it, and obviously you're the expert on this subject can be learned beginning from Malthus. So is that true and can you enlighten us on this subject? What was the question and the tension, and I guess maybe it didn't get resolved, but what was the conclusion at the time and how do we still see it today?

Henry Clark (28.16)

Yes. Well, you've got a couple of good questions and points there, Juliette. First on your first point about how the course that I'm putting together is not by any means a standard economics course, and of course that's for the very excellent reason that I'm not in any way, shape or form an economist. But I certainly would recommend to your listeners the book by Paul Rubin, The Paradox of Capitalism, which makes the case that (he is an economist) and he makes the case that the economics profession has not always sold itself optimally to the general public. It has not always done the best job that it possibly could to explain to a general public what's really important about economic thinking, economic reasoning. Obviously careers are made in the economics profession in the same way that they are in every other academic profession by doing frontier level research, new research, highly specialized research more times than not on highly specific topics adding to the stock of knowledge in principle, and that's all to the good.

But I strongly agree with Rubin that economics as a way of thinking regardless of what school one belongs to or what kind of angle one takes to the subject is a broader importance. It's a product of modern life, the economic way of thinking is a product of modern life. And understanding the kinds of societies that we virtually all live in today, I is something that economics not only can help us to do, it's indispensable in many ways to help us to do. And so I see myself as sort of a minor ambassador as it were from the world of economics to the world of the non-specialist student classroom. You may detect there an echo of David Hume's comment in the essays about how he attempted to be an ambassador between the world of learning and the world of society and ought to play this role because amidst all of the debates and all of the fine-grained analytical arguments that economists have amongst each other, and if you get five economists together, in my experience, you get seven different accounts of what should be done at any given moment.

But nonetheless, there are certain things that certain ways, certain tempers, certain ways of thinking about the world that are a product of the emergence of politically economy in the 18th century, and that ought to be embraced by us all if we want to function effectively in a modern society. So I did want to respond to that aspect of your question. Now the other question you raised is what about Malthus? There we have, Malthus is a fascinating figure. I mean, he was a classical political economist, there's no question about that. He had read his Adam Smith very carefully, but he corresponded with and debated with David Ricardo, another one of the early 19th century classical economist. And so he knew the economic toolkit backwards and forwards, but he became upset apparently at a certain point during the French Revolution when he saw arguments being made by authors that he regarded as dangerously utopian, particularly William Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet who thought that humans were infinitely and that one could imagine a future that would more or less do away with the age old problems that humankind faced. That was his understanding of them anyway. And so he wrote what is certainly one of the handful of most influential works by a classical economist in his 1798 work, An Essay on the Principle of Population. It has a tangled textual history. He came out just a few years later with a fairly significantly revised edition of it, and he revised it several more times before his death in 1834.

But for my purposes, for the purpose of looking at the debate over growth, what I find significant about Malthus is that to he did not think that economic growth of a kind that had certainly happened and he was aware that it had happened and it was probably going to continue. And partly just because of the reasons that Adam Smith and the other economists of his time were writing about that economic growth was going to be capable of solving one basic human problem in particular that he thought that Godwin and Condorcet had overlooked. And the problem is that human population, according to Malthus, increases geometrically, whereas economic growth, no matter how impressive it might be, can only improve mathematically. And that disjuncture between the geometrical increase in humans and in the number of mouths to feed versus the merely arithmetical increase in let's say food or other necessities of a human life, that was the sort of magic bullet that moist lighted upon in order to refute the utopianism that had been produced by the French Revolution.

And there's a lot more going on in Malthus's work than that. I'll just mention one other thing partly because it probably will come up later on in the course because other authors will bring it up whether or not they're aware that they're echoing Malthus in doing so, and that is that Malthus addressed in a really forceful way, one of the most Europe, and that is the poor law in England. England had been the first country to produce a nationwide system of poor relief. It was administered through the parish at the parish level, but it was a genuine nationwide attempt at what we would call a welfare policy. And it was old. It had evolved over a number of stages throughout the course of the 16th century during the Tudor period of English history, and it had never really found its comfortable equilibrium. There were always debates about how to make it better and how to solve this externality or that externality, and nobody ever seems to have been entirely satisfied with it.

Malthus’ move in effect that economic growth itself was making the poor law have far worse and more far reaching effects on the prospects for future social living then was the case before modern economic growth had actually occurred. And the reason for that is entices. It incentivizes, we might say, the people to have children, and I mean, it's hard to have to have children when you're dying of famine. So growth incentivizes people to have children, and the poor law as it was administered in England, encouraged and incentivized even the poorest and least well endowed, least well-resourced people in the entire society to have children as well, knowing as they did that the society would take care of them if they were not able to do so themselves.

So this is an argument that one finds over and over again in the debates over especially population in the late 19th, beginning in the late 19th century with the trial, the Knowlton trial over the Comstock laws in the United States, and then with the emergence of eugenics and other overtly and explicitly by name Malthusian societies. The Malthusian League is a particular example in England. Over and over again, the people fretted about this relationship, about the fact people who might otherwise not have found it so easy to stay alive. What they were doing was they were basically contravening one of nature's normal methods of culling and pruning and maintaining a balance between man and nature, between humans and natural resources. Malthus was really the first to thematize that it was one of the points that Engels and Marx lighted upon, to subject Malthus's work to a withering attack, although just between you and me, their larger argument concerned the possibility of real economic growth and improvement in living standards itself, and Engels in particular was withering on Malthus's claim that agriculture was simply not able to furnish more than an arithmetic improvement in food resources and that human population was destined to grow geometrically.

Malthus used economics in order to make his argument. He used classical economics and one of the key ideas that he used, and this too would come back over and over again and has continued to be resorted to right on up to very recent times the law of diminishing returns. It's something if you've taken econ one or econ 101, I'm 100% certain that you had the law of diminishing returns drummed into your head, absolutely. If not, then shame on your instructor.

But Malthus’s use of that particular idea created an unusually bleak and baleful view over the economy as a whole. And it was partly for that reason that economics came to be known as the dismal science. The idea being that, well, if you think that you're going to be saved, if you think that growth is going to solve your social problems, consider that the best land is already being used and that the next portion of land that's going to be used is almost certainly the next best or maybe even the next best and so on down the line. And so whereas there's no limit to the number of people that humans can bring into the world, they can breed like rabbits head or they can breed like Norwegian rats or they can breed like feet flies. These are among the various images and metaphors that have been used throughout the last 200 years in the course of this great debate over the relationship between economic growth and population growth.

So Malthus, in other words, he's important certainly as a user of classical economic ideas. He's also important as someone who intervened on social problems in ways that are and social policy in ways that are still resonant for many, many, many readers even today. So I think that many, if not most of the debates we associate with economic growth, especially the four that I mentioned, population resource depletion, environmental stewardship and climate, in one way or another, they trace their lineage back to Malthus's overarching picture of a world of limits. And that was his ultimate message is that there are fundamental material irreducible limits to what humans are capable of. And if nature is not going to be allowed to maintain those limits and to maintain the balance that's necessary to respect and observe those limits, namely by the usual methods, the checks, the usual checks that nature resorts to war, disease, famine, then the only alternative is the not so aptly named the positive checks of moral restraint as sexual repression and inhibition.

And so you might say that that too is reason enough to call economics the dismal science, and it too is a reason to start any consideration of this whole issue of growth with Malthus. But what I mostly would really like to do in this course is to look at the echoes of the great Malthus debate in that period where you had, I think the most intense, the most high level, the most high stakes debate over growth and human flourishing. And that's a decade of the 1970s. And I could go on that at some length, but I think that that's the debate in the 1970s over population resource depletion, environmental devastation is I think the most recent and the most relevant point of comparison with the current debate over climate change, partly because some of the people who participated in that debate are still with us. And it's a very illuminating experience to look at how that debate unfolded in the 1970s and into the eighties, and to ask ourselves what is new and what is not new about the current debate over reducing growth as a way of addressing the problem of climate change. But all of them go back ultimately to office.

Juliette Sellgren (49.23)

What's funny to me now is that obviously we have a degrowth movement and people that believe that reproducing is inherently bad for climate change purposes. So that is obviously very directly related to Malthus, but there's also a strong contingent of more conservative folk who are really worried about population decline, especially [?] conservatives. If you look at Europe, thinking about Italy where they're now extending what they consider to be citizenship and they're offering money to get people to move there because their population is declining. So it's not that correlation-causation, I'm not going to make a claim on that front, but we've had more growth since Malthus. And if anything, population has not been a problem in that sense, it's at least not a resolved issue. But I guess that goes to say that it is a tension and a paradox. Even the Malthus population question is not resolved. So what are some of the common themes between, I guess I want to say very broadly views on humanity, but values and characteristics and assumptions. I think about exploring this in people who believe in growth and the critics of growth because especially since you can track this intellectual lineage, it seems as though if the tension recurs and the conflict is not resolved, that there's maybe a difference at that level that can be observed.

Henry Clark (51.14)

Well, it's a great question, Juliette, and your first observation, by the way was very shrewd that today there is almost as much, maybe even more discussion about the dangers of population decline than about the dangers of population increase. And therein lies a tale, and it too is a huge question of interpretation. How do we make sense of this? One possible way would be to say nothing could more vividly illustrate the result of the debate in the 1970s over the dangers of a population explosion. Then that reversal because in the 1970s, some of the strongest, most articulate authors of the period, I'm thinking of people like Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb. I'm thinking of people like Dennis Meadows and his co-authors who authored The Limits to Growth, whose subtitle was modestly called a Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind.

And for both Erlich and the Meadows, the predicament that they were referring to was that our growth manic, that's Erlich's term, our growth manic public policy, is going to be woefully inadequate to address A, in Erlich’s case, especially the rampant explosion in population, and B, in the Meadows case, the absolutely inevitable depletion of resources, energy, resources, and others, some of which were projected to run out within 30 years or so. And nothing could illustrate more vividly, I think the reversal in how we think about these things. Then the indices that you just mentioned, and it's not just in Italy, it's in a great many industrial societies. South Korea has perhaps the lowest fertility rate in the world, and its government is trying a multiplicity of different measures as have the Japanese government, the Chinese government, which of course for decades had the one child policy has now reversed itself in recent years and is officially worried about the decline in its own population.

Obviously this isn't a universal trend. There are still parts of the world where population is increasing, but we now have something like 8 billion people in the world. And some of these authors in the 1970s were of the belief that an optimal number of humans on the planet would be approximately 0.5 or 0.6 billion, and that it was already absolutely guaranteed that millions of people were going to starve in places like India. So something fundamental has changed. And the one name that I haven't mentioned so far, and this addresses your second question because you asked what kinds of human values, what kinds of clash of human values is on display in this great debate overgrowth…

Juliette Sellgren 

You put it much more concisely and eloquently than I did.

Henry Clark (55.31)

Well, I think that thought that's what you had in mind. And the name that I haven't mentioned is Julian Simon, he's a very interesting person. He began in marketing, he became a business economist in the 1960s. He shared the views of many of the people in his own time that the global population was out of control, that it was having and very likely to continue to have a really damaging effects on human wellbeing. But at a certain point, he read the work of some other economists, Richard Easterlin, I believe, and a others who convinced him that actually there's relatively little evidence that that was the case. And he pursued that line with the fervor of a convert, and he made it his life's work. And for 25 years or so, he was the most dogged, the most tenacious, and the most articulate spokesperson for the view that Homo Sapiens is as the title of his, perhaps his most ambitious, maybe his best book puts it, The Ultimate Resource.

And so at a certain point, when you read the works of some of the 1970s anti-growth authors, some of the people highly concerned with controlling human population, global population, you come across loose metaphors with alarming frequency actually about how humans are like a cancer on the cancer on the earth and such. And Simon made it his business to take up exactly the opposite of view, that humans are the ultimate resource, that in fact, humans and their ingenuity and their resourcefulness, not only well-educated and well-fed western humans, but even the very poor people, the teaming masses that so put off Paul Ehrlich when he went to Delhi in India and many other 1950s and 1960s travelers, especially to India. India was a particular site of contestation over population control policies.

It wasn't that at all. Even those kinds of people, according to Julian Simon, have a kind of resourcefulness. It's not always visible to casual observers. It doesn't always lead to smashingly brilliant innovations. But on balance, Simon ended up convincing himself that the more people you have in the world or in any particular community, the more likely you were to be able to A, find the resources that you need in order to produce a flourishing society, and B, to solve whatever problems you may be encountering at any given point in time. The most recent robust statement of the Julian Simon point of view is Marian Tupy and Gail Pooley. They came out with a book, a Cato Institute book, actually a year and a half or two years ago entitled Superabundance, which is just about as blatant a reversal of the mindset that prevailed in the early 1970s in so many quarters, as you will find. And so my hope in this course is to lay it all out there, give students an exposure to all of these important and see if it helps them to see this phenomenon of growth, of economic growth, this precious acquisition, this unprecedented human achievement over the past five or six generations, and see if they can make sense of where we are with it and where we might like to go.

Juliette Sellgren (1.00.43)

So this is what I've been thinking about as you've been talking. You mentioned to me before we started talking, and then I mentioned it in your bio that you're coming out with a book, The Moral Economy We Have Lost: Life Before Mass Abundance. I'm reading it again just to make sure I don't mess it up. How does that relate? I don't want to get too ahead of myself because I really would like to read it and then interview you on that by itself, but I can't help but think that that's related. So how does the moral economy we've lost relate to growth? Is that a criticism of growth? Is it something to be grappled with? I don't know. Does it still net out to be positive? If so, is it even related? Am I wrong?

Henry Clark (1.01.42)

I think I understand your question, Juliette, and if so, it's a very good question and very a natural question. And without going too deeply into a book that is after all 264 pages long, I would say that the title is ironic as is [?] on the part of not just some historians, but many people influenced by some historians to contrast the economy of a market society, often called capitalism with a moral economy that preceded the advent of capitalism. And what I want to suggest in this book is that if we look closely at the way in which people attach moral significance to their economic conduct before the Industrial Revolution, we are less likely to feel a kind of unreasoning nostalgia for the sorts of direct face-to-face, village level, town level solidarity and reciprocity that has been touted as the essence of that pre-industrial moral economy.

Humans are complicated creatures and they have not on balance. I tended to, well, let me back up a little bit and say, put it this way, human moral communities are marvelous things, and they are real achievements in all parts of the world, at all levels of development, including all of the great civilizations and not so great civilizations of the period before the Industrial Revolution. They deserve our sympathy. They deserve our admiration, they deserve our respect, but they did not feature the kind of moral engagements and moral commitments that any ordinary person living in the 21st century and any part of the world would want to return to voluntarily for its own sake. And it's a point that is often lost by critics of capitalism who think that capitalism has had a uniquely eroding, a uniquely damaging effect on moral life and on social ties. But it is, I think, consistent with the historical record, and that's the record that I try and summarize in this book. I think if you just remind yourself as I think you'll see pretty quickly that the title is ironic, I think that will help you to avoid misunderstanding, at least. I hope so.

Juliette Sellgren (1.05.26)

Yeah. Could you give us a quick example maybe of, because I think it's so often said that there are moral wrongs of capitalism, so on and so forth, that it's hard to bring to mind explicit examples of how the world today is more moral in a lot of senses, and how we can be more engaged than the world passed. So could you give us an example or two maybe?

Henry Clark (1.05.59)

Well, the first thing that I would do is to refer any reader who doubts that moral life today is richer in many, many ways than moral life. Before the Industrial Revolution was, I would certainly refer any such reader to the work of Deirdre McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues. What Deridre does is she takes basically the classical virtues that Cicero channeling. Plato and especially Aristotle and Stoics, had written about a prudence, justice fortitude or courage and temperance, and added the Thomas Aquinas and medieval Christianity, faith, hope, and charity of various caritas love of various kinds, all of which of course had a rich intellectual and moral history in the ancient world and in the medieval world. And basically what Deirdre does to my satisfaction at least, is to remind people of what I think most ordinary people already know, which is that it's actually easier to develop and practice and cultivate, but most if not all of those virtues in the 21st century than it was in the 13th century or in the fifth century BC.

And that's simply a function of the way that we live our lives day to day in the office, on the factory floor at the water cooler, wherever it is that we work with our coworkers. We are held to a very high moral standard, and most of us make a real effort to be the kind of a person that our coworker would want to work with since most of us do work not in a solitary environment, but in complex networks and webs and firms and organizations and corporations and economic entities that are vastly more interconnected and interdependent than most of the economic entities of the ancient or medieval world. Were One example that well I think stand in for many is the role of the role of the handshake and the trusting business person and the deep desire to be understood to be a trustworthy business person in modern, modern economic life.

But there are many, many other examples as well. But I think that the value of Deidre McCloskey is virtue ethics analysis is that we can all come home at the end of the day, and just at the office today, what did I see? What did Jerry do? What did Mary say? What happened on the factory floor down at the mill, wherever it might happen to be? And if we're honest with ourselves, what we will perceive, I believe, is that the life of the virtues is very much on display. It's a very rich and very negated life, and there's simply no comparison between the general tenor of moral existence in the preindustrial period.

Juliette Sellgren (1.10.31)

That's great. So growth and its critics. I know you implore students and us to look at the evidence and to figure out for ourselves where we fall and what we think. But on net growth, good or bad, what do you think?

Henry Clark (1.10.51)

Well, yeah, that's a tough one because obviously I am trying to put together a course that will be of interest to students who span a whole spectrum of opinions about climate change and other current problems. I have, one of my best students here at Dartmouth is a climate change activist, and she has been to conferences around the world. And so I would certainly wouldn't want to say anything to dissuade her from taking this course if she's still around when the courses or if the course is offered. But generally speaking, I don't think it's very controversial that, well, let me put it this way. One of the modules, if you will, one of the kind of clusters or sections of the course, two class periods, three class periods, I haven't quite decided yet what to propose is one that I'm going to call growth as problem solving, and in it of the transformations in people's lives that occurred during the Industrial Revolution.

And we will get down to ground level and ask ourselves, is this a type of economic innovation and change and growth that actually contributes to human wellbeing? If on the other hand, you look at some of the changes that were taking place in the 1870s and 1880s around the piping of water directly into people's homes, and eventually a generation or so later, the capability of removing wastewater through a separate track from the track, that's a form of economic change that had a huge, huge effect. A case can be made and has been made that the internal combustion engine and the use of the automobile when it emerged in the 1880s and beyond was also a solution to a real problem caused largely by the reliance upon the horse, both in the city and in the countryside, both from not just a transportation point of view, but also from a health point of view because the horse produced all kinds of medical or hygienic issues that people grappled with for generations.

So my answer to it's an evasive, it's a deliberately evasive answer, students to subject any change, any innovation that we might encounter over the last two centuries of unceasing economic growth to a very simple test. What was the problem that it was designed to solve, and did it solve that problem in an effective way without creating new problems that were worse? And if you add up all of the innovations and all of the inventions and discoveries and technological breakthroughs from Malthus's time right on up to the present and tally up a kind of overarching balance sheet, what do you find? Do you find that growth has been generally a good thing and that it has actually addressed and solved real human problems, or do you find that it generally has caused worse problems, bigger problems than the ones that it was designed to address? And since we began this discussion with climate change, I guess I should close by noting that the book is not closed, that the story has not come to an end. We haven't reached any kind of final resolution on this question of the overall balance sheet of growth, but that's the standard that I would use.

Juliette Sellgren (1.16.24)

That's great. It's a commitment to almost a method instead of necessarily an outcome. Thank you so much for taking all the time to come on the podcast to speak to me and all of our guests and for all of your insights and wisdom. I have one last question for you, and that is, what is one thing you are currently working on to improve yourself?

Henry Clark 

My back?

Juliette Sellgren 

Yeah. 

Henry Clark (1.16.52)

Have been someone who has identified as guy with back problems for over 40 years. Ever since I was writing my dissertation, I reached down to dry myself off after taking a shower one day four decades or so ago and just crumpled to the floor. And it was from the stress built up from writing my dissertation. And ever since that time, that's just been part of who I have been. Not that I've been living in misery by any stretch of the imagination. I was able to find ways of managing my back problems over the years, but in the last year or two, they were getting worse. And so I did a little thinking outside the box. I looked around the web a little bit and I found a practitioner of something that I had not so much as suspected exists. And that is osteopathic.

I highly recommend it for anyone who has back problems. I started about five and a half, six months ago. I took exactly four appointments, spread out over a four or five week period, and then I stopped. And ever since then, my back has been as good as new. It's been utterly amazing, but only because I have to keep at it. It gave me way back in December and January, and I've been pretty diligent about it, but the payoff has been I no longer identify as guy with back problem, and so that is a trade off that I can definitely take a strong stand on. I'm all for it.

Juliette Sellgren

Once again, I'd like to thank my guests for their time and insight. I'd also like to thank you for listening to the Great Antidote Podcast. It means a lot. The Great Antidote is sound engineered by Rich Goyette. If you have any questions, any guests or topic recommendations, please feel free to reach out to me at Great antidote@libertyfund.org. Thank you.