š§¬ The case for growth is the case for life
Prosperity advanced medicine. AI might be about to advance both
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:
Is there an intellectually serious case against economic growth? My prior here is so strong that I really have to force myself to even address the issue in an eye-roll-free way.
Like, isnāt it obvious? What are we doing here? Can we quickly move on to figuring out how to accelerate growth? Faster, please!1
The health revolution
To that point, a recent paper with a super wonky-sounding name, āThe Medical Expansion, Life Expectancy, and Endogenous Directed Technical Change,ā makes what is a pretty fundamentalāyet somehow underappreciatedācase for growth. The phenomenon at issue:
Over the last two centuries, the United States transitioned from an economy with short and stagnant adult lives and negligible medical spending to one that is an order of magnitude richer, with long lives and a modern, innovation-intensive health sector.
Consider three relevant observations highlighted by economists Leon Huetsch, Dirk Krueger, and Alexander Ludwig in that analysis:
Since 1820, a 20-year-oldās remaining life expectancy has risen dramaticallyāfrom about 40 years to over 60 years just before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Over the same period, real income per person surged from roughly $2,700 to more than $55,000 (in 2011 dollars).
Today, about one-fifth of that income is devoted to healthcare, reflecting the scale and sophistication of the modern medical sector.
Those extraordinary Up Wing facts by themselves give a sense of the long-term rise in human welfareāparticularly the rise in life expectancy, which is the focus of the paper. (Degrowth types and those with misplaced nostalgia for a pre-industrial past they never experienced should deeply ponder these facts.)
