Abstract
Relying on GDP growth alone to measure a society’s success is like a doctor checking only a patient’s weight and declaring them healthy. Imagine a physician who ignores blood pressure, skips cholesterol tests, and overlooks mental health or mobility. Weight is one data point, but it cannot capture the complexity of well-being. Any professional who reduced medicine to that single indicator would be accused of malpractice. Yet, in economics and politics, GDP growth is still treated as the sole measure of national health, a kind of policy malpractice.
The consequences of this reliance are serious. GDP has well-known technical flaws: It fails to account for unpaid work, changes in product and service quality, and the value of free digital services. More troublingly, it ignores the costs of climate change, biodiversity loss, and widening inequality—critical factors shaping business and society.
In Growth: A History and a Reckoning, Daniel Susskind argues that a costly reckoning is now unavoidable: “Hard to think of a moment when the pursuit of ‘more growth’ has seemed more dangerous” (p. 3). Two commonly proposed solutions to the growth dilemma are, first, a technocratic fix whereby we tinker with the GDP measure to address the missing information, and second, a radical pause on growth, known as degrowth. Susskind contends that both are unsatisfactory. According to him, although “growth may be to blame for many of our most serious problems, it is also responsible for many of our greatest triumphs” (p. 110). Instead, he advances an alternative: a framework that continues to harness the discovery of new ideas while acknowledging that societies face hard tradeoffs between growth and other dimensions of prosperity.
Much has been written about growth by economic, policy, history, ecology, and management scholars, yet we remain uncertain about its causes. What Susskind adds is a sharper provocation: He challenges readers to consider not just how growth happens but what kind of growth we want, how much of it is enough, and who truly benefits. As inequality widens and the power of technology-shaping organizations becomes more concentrated, the book presses us to confront a fundamental question about the future: If GDP is our diagnosis of prosperity, do we really want to keep treating it as the sole measure of our collective well-being?
In the Introduction, Susskind reminds us that “for most of the 300,000 years that human beings have been around, economic life was stagnant” (p. 1). Only in the last 225 years did this stagnation come to an end, ushering in an era of spectacular economic growth. This growth brought tremendous achievements: longer lives, higher living standards, dramatic reductions in poverty, and unprecedented technological progress. Yet, as Susskind emphasizes,
the pursuit of this prosperity has come at an enormous price: the destruction of the natural environment, the desolation of local cultures and communities, the emergence of vast inequalities between those that have received the greatest share of this wealth and those who have not, and the creation of technologies whose disruptive effects on our work and political lives we might not be able to properly control. (p. 2)
Thus, the growth dilemma is upon us, and Susskind sets out to guide readers through its history, its tensions, and its possible futures.
Part I begins with a history of growth. Susskind reminds us that growth was a recent phenomenon tied to the industrial revolution and the cultural shift toward useful ideas. His retelling of history is clear and accessible, providing the foundation for his later arguments.
In Part II, Susskind develops the idea of growth, tracing how GDP’s invention and adoption made it the dominant benchmark for prosperity. He shows persuasively how growth became a political tool, a way to sidestep difficult tradeoffs under the belief that a rising tide lifts all boats. Our fixation on GDP, he argues, stems less from its accuracy than from its political convenience and our failure to view an economy as a system of interconnected activities. This section is particularly effective in showing how the single-minded pursuit of GDP growth has masked its climate-destroying, inequality-creating, work-threatening, politics-undermining, and community-disrupting consequences. He defines the tension between the promise and the price of growth as the growth dilemma.
In Part III, Susskind examines two common responses to the growth dilemma. The first is to prioritize growth but overhaul the GDP to correct its shortcomings. He argues that no single measure can morally capture a society’s prosperity; what is needed instead is a social welfare dashboard that combines GDP with measures of human development and inequality. Just as a patient requires multiple diagnostics to assess their health, so, too, does an economy. The second response, advanced by degrowth scholars, insists that economists have ignored the planetary limits to economic activity and the real-world constraints they impose (e.g., the think tank Club of Rome’s 1972 book The Limits to Growth). Here, Susskind parts ways. Drawing on Paul Romer’s work (1992, 1993), he contends that infinite growth on a finite planet may be possible by shifting from the material world to the intangible world of ideas: “What really matters for growth are the intangible ideas of combining these resources in new and valuable ways” (p. 140), and “the infinite universe of ideas allows us to sidestep the constraints imposed by a finite planet” (p. 141). These two contrasting responses set the stage for Susskind’s Goldilocks approach in Part IV, where he charts a course between these two extremes.
In Part IV, Susskind argues that we must unleash growth by overhauling who owns and controls ideas (i.e., address intellectual property issues), investing far more in R&D, increasing immigration, and relentlessly developing more technology. This growth, however, should not be rudderless. Building on the work of Acemoglu and Restrepo (2019) and Acemoglu (2025), Susskind proposes that technological change can be deliberately directed through incentives embedded in taxes, subsidies, regulations, and social norms. Yet, as I read his arguments, I was reminded of Herman Daly’s critique of economists in a New York Times interview (Marchese, 2022): “[Economics] doesn’t ask questions about the fundamental limits of the entropic nature of the world, of matter and energy and adapting to these physical limits.” Daly’s reminder that growth is ultimately constrained by biophysical realities underscores the sharp contrast between his steady-state vision and Susskind’s faith in the boundless potential of ideas.
Part V, in which Susskind turns to the solution of the growth dilemma, was the section I most anticipated. My interest in this discussion grew as I considered how urgently such prescriptions are needed, yet my concern deepened as I watch the United States move in the opposite direction. At the very moment when Susskind calls for stronger immigration, greater investment in R&D, and more deliberate institutional support for innovation, U.S. policy is moving in the opposite direction on precisely these levers. This tension between Susskind’s vision and current political reality underscores both the ambition and the fragility of his solution.
Susskind resists both degrowth and technocratic tinkering. His solution is not to abandon growth but to reimagine it, to retain its transformative power while confronting the tradeoffs it imposes. In this way, his reckoning is less about choosing growth or no growth and more about reshaping our diagnosis of prosperity to include the broader dimensions of collective well-being. But bigger isn’t always better. Many rightfully call for degrowth because economic growth in many critical areas has come by stealing from those who didn’t voluntarily trade resources, especially from the natural environment. Thus, I was hoping for more attention to the areas that cannot expand indefinitely, such as planetary boundaries of climate and biodiversity, or social goods like trust and community cohesion, which erode when treated as commodities.
What does the book offer organizational scholars? Above all, it provides a rich set of research questions. Business decisions will fundamentally determine how societies pursue well-being, and management scholarship is uniquely positioned to address these challenges. For instance, organizational scholars can examine the two faces of automation: Under what conditions do firms deploy technology to replace workers (substitution), and when do they use it to complement workers? This is particularly pressing in the age of artificial intelligence not only as it relates to employment but also in terms of energy and resource use. Equally important are the moral questions: What should we care about, and what do we owe the future? Here, issues of short-termism versus long-termism and debates over which stakeholders should have a voice in setting societal objectives are domains to which management scholars bring critical expertise.
Ultimately, Growth: A History and a Reckoning is not a definitive solution to the growth dilemma but a timely provocation. For organizational scholars in particular, the book offers less a set of solutions than an invitation to engage: a challenge to rethink how business decisions shape the prosperity and well-being of society.
