[EQ] Growth and Inequality: Understanding Recent Trends and Political Choices

Growth and Inequality: Understanding Recent Trends and Political Choices

 

By Thomas Pogge, Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the Australian National University and (soon) in the Philosophy Department of Yale University

Foundation for Study of Independent Ideas - Dissent.org Winter 2008

 

Available online at: http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=990

 

“….In current debates about the world economy, “growth is good” often appears as a truism. Growth leads to wealth, it is said, and greater wealth is surely desirable, especially for the poorer developing countries. Closer inspection, however, leads to a far more nuanced assessment.

Legend has it that there was a time when economists celebrated economic growth, regardless of its distribution. Such economists would have judged alternative economic practices and policies exclusively by their relative impact on the inflation-adjusted (per capita) social product. I am not sure such economists were ever dominant. Economists have long seen the point of income and wealth in the satisfaction of human preferences and understood that, insofar as such satisfaction increases with rising income or wealth, it does so at a declining rate.

 

At any rate, the legend of the growth-only economists is useful because it allows real economists to stress that they are different, that they favor pro-poor growth, growth-with-equity, or some such thing. This is crucial to their theological role of appeasing the conscience of their wealthy constituents and of reconciling rich and poor alike to the great globalization push of the last twenty-five years. If economic experts committed to equity and eradication of poverty celebrate this push and the growth it produces, how can we withhold our approval?...”

 

 

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