DONDENA Seminar - Daniel Markovits

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“Three Views of the Age of Growth:  Romantic, Cynical, and Pragmatic” 

SPEAKER: Daniel Markovits (Yale Law School) 

ABSTRACT: In the beginning and for thousands of years after that, all the world stayed stagnant and poor. Human populations increased at a glacial rate; meanwhile, average incomes remained literally flat over centuries and even millennia. Then, sometime in the 18th century, everything changed, and the Age of Growth began. The world’s human population had taken 2500 years to increase by a factor of 100 million to reach 1 billion almost precisely in 1800; it will take just 250 years to increase by another factor of 10, reaching roughly 10 billion by 2050.  Meanwhile, average incomes worldwide, which were literally no greater in 1500 than they had been in 1000, are today roughly 30 times greater than they had been in 1750. What explains the Age of Gowth? Familiar views take two forms.  A dominant view of the origins of growth is romantic and serves a celebratory view of a prosperous present and an optimistic dream for a better future.  An alternative, cynical view is gathering force, and serves a critical view of a polluted and unjust present and a pessimistic nightmare that the future will be only dirtier and crueler.  I defend a third pragmatic view against both of these. According to the pragmatic view, growth was an enormous practical and also moral achievement. But it’s an achievement with a shelf life.  And the Age of Growth is rapidly approaching its best before date. Civilizations before the Age of Growth weren’t trying and failing to grow.  Rather, they were pursuing an alternative set of projects and moral ideals.  These civilizations of differed enormously from one another, and in different ways; but across all this variety, they all differed from the Age of Growth in the same way.  For all their differences, the civilizations before the Age of Growth—all across place and time—embraced variations of an ideal also articulated by Aristotle, who doubted the value of money-wealth, and condemned money-lust, and insisted that value must determine desire.  In short, these civilizations shared that they didn’t want wealth; and they didn’t get growth. Then, in the 17th century, a series of thinkers—prominently including Samuel Puffendorf, William Petty, and John Amos Comenius—invented the growth ideal.  This ideal completely inverts the world view, articulated by Aristotle, that had united civilizations before growth. The growth ideal holds that prices capture value, and therefore that money wealth is good, and furthermore that more wealth is better.  The growth ideal enabled civilization to solve a series of material, social, and spiritual problems that prior civilizations could not solve. And this help to unleash growth in fact. This view of the origins of growth is pragmatic rather than celebratory because the growth ideal doesn’t supersede or erase Aristotle’s concerns with money-wealth, his objections to money-lust, and his rejection of unevaluated desire.  Rather the growth ideal functions as an antithesis to Aristotle thesis.  All the Aristotelian reasons remain in play, therefore, and they help to explain why after 250 years of growth, the growth ideal now exacerbates the problems that it used to solve.  Where the growth ideal once drove productivity, it now threatens destruction. Where it once produced solidarity, it now drives discord. And where the growth ideal once brought comfort, it now drives despair. The pragmatic view of the Age of Growth is also pragmatic for being fundamentally presentist and even forward looking rather than historical. By understanding how the growth ideal inverted the prior Aristotelian world order, it becomes possible to imagine a synthesis of the two that will help to secure the good life after the Age of Growth.

BIO: Daniel Markovits is the Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale Law School and the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Private Law.  Markovits publishes widely and in a range of disciplines, including law, philosophy, and economics.  His writings have appeared in Science, The American Economic Review, The Yale Law Journal, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, and The Atlantic. In 2021, Prospect Magazine named him to its list of the world’s top 50 thinkers. His last book, The Meritocracy Trap (Penguin Press, 2019), develops a sustained attack on American meritocracy. He is also working on a new book, tentatively called The Good Life after the Age of Growth.