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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ Wehry (00:02.447)
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Christopher F. Jones, Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University. And we're here today to talk about his book, The Invention of Infinite Growth. Dr. Jones, wonderful to have you on today.
Chris Jones (00:20.066)
Thanks for having me here. It's a pleasure to be here.
PJ Wehry (00:23.209)
So, Dr. Jones, tell us why this book?
Chris Jones (00:29.102)
Yeah, well, I wrote this book because I am deeply concerned about the sustainability of human thriving on this planet. And I think if we look at what is the great set of sustainability questions facing our world moving forward, it centers pretty heavily on what you imagine to be the future of economic growth.
And so I am thinking forward about how are we gonna create a sustainable economy and lifestyle, but I'm a historian, of course. So I am animated by desire to understand the present and what we look forward on. But I do that by thinking about how we got here. And I do that because I think as my fellow historians do,
that understanding how we arrived at our present moment is crucial because what we imagine to be possible actions to take in the present that will shape the future are fundamentally based in choices we've made in the past and what has come to us as sort of the received wisdom, as what seems possible and feasible and desirable. And when I look at the present, I see one
very, very strong intellectual disagreement that I think has an enormous effect on the world. And that is that when people look at the future of economic growth, you get two caricatured positions. Those who are environmentally inclined look and say it is physically impossible to have infinite economic growth on a finite planet, that our process of economic growth, while it has brought a large number of benefits, has had an increasing number of costs.
And we have to fundamentally rethink this. And so there's a deep pessimism, of course, coming from the environmental side of things. That is shared. If you wanted to put one group on that, call them environmental scholars, environmental scientists. But I think you see people in a lot of related fields sharing the sense that something is generally true about that position. There's a much smaller group of
Chris Jones (02:54.222)
folks who are much more optimistic about this. And on the whole, that's economists. And I've been very interested in how has it come to be that economists and environmentalists look at the same problem and come with such different answers. And the book I wrote largely is an explanation of how that came to be. To say more about it and sort of the content of the book itself,
It's an intellectual history largely of how economists have both come to think about growth and how they've come to think about the natural world and when those two discourses have met and not met. And it's kind of like a weaving area where sometimes in the history of economics, the action is really about growth. Sometimes it's really about the natural world or not. Sometimes decisions made in each of these domains are entirely separate of one another.
but they end up sort of converging because it shapes the way the thought develops. And so what the book ultimately is, is I go all the way back to Adam Smith and Malthus back 250 years ago. It moves pretty quickly into the 20th century and follows it up pretty much until about 2018, 2019 to try to see how, essentially, how economic optimism came to be.
came to be this sort of guiding ethos of that field. And I particularly do that because we also know that of the intellectuals who have power in the halls of governance, economists are often among the most influential. And so this is a, at one level, this is just a history of ideas and some people have these ideas and some people have these ideas, but we know it's not enough to just say you and I can have ideas in our own heads, right?
PJ Wehry (04:36.377)
Hmm.
Chris Jones (04:49.198)
But for ideas to be made manifest at power, they are associated with how a society reflects where those ideas come from, et cetera. And we're obviously at a moment where economists have had sort of more influence than many other intellectual thinkers. So grappling at this and using sort of my background as a historian is kind of how I came to do this book. And it's been a deep dive for 11 years.
PJ Wehry (05:02.959)
You
Chris Jones (05:18.574)
into lots of worlds I did not know much about.
PJ Wehry (05:18.808)
Yes.
PJ Wehry (05:22.441)
And I love, I mentioned this earlier, I love the interdisciplinary focus of it. I love that you are going through two different disciplines showing how they interact with each other. And I think maybe to place it for our audience, when I think of politics, economics are already part of the policies. You can talk about economic policies, but generally every policy has an economic component where it feels like we can take or add.
or drop environmentalism from policies. And I think that's kind of what, just to add on, I want to make sure I'm on the right track with you. That's what we're talking about with the dominance of economics in policy. Would that be a fair way to talk about it?
Chris Jones (06:12.48)
Yeah, I think it is. And actually it points us to one of the important distinctions in the books as well. And, you know, I will say I began this project very skeptical of economists. And I was really hoping that the piece might be pretty polemical, slam the economists for the stupidity of their ideas, be one of these books that really gets picked up because it just is fodder for those who want to hate on economists.
And there's a bunch of books like that. it turned out, you know, being a historian is about being faithful to the empirical reality of the past, the best we can understand that. And it turns out in this case, the economists I studied were not the sort of right wing market fundamentalists folks. So there are branches of economics where the founding people are
and Milton Friedman and some of these sort of names that are famous of free market economists opposed to government intervention. It turns out most of growth theory is actually center left economists. It actually turns out this is largely a story of people associated with like the Kennedy and Jimmy Carter presidencies rather than the Reagan or Eisenhower ones. And
I have learned that I've needed to be more empathetic to my economists as I've gone along. And one of the things actually about being faithful to them and sympathetic to them, and this goes to your point about policy, is there is an interesting disjuncture between the state of the art and economic theory and the economics that operate in the halls of government.
Right, by the time you get to the second half of the 20th century, my growth theorists are using advanced mathematics for models that no congressman understands. And a colleague of mine, Peter Schulman, who teaches at Case Western, gave me this wonderful expression, which is that we also need to think when we're thinking about policy of vernacular economics. And vernacular economics is
Chris Jones (08:37.228)
the sort of general zeitgeist of economics that comes out, but not the advanced theory, right? So like people who are doing economics in government, I mean, the trained economists are doing some sophisticated things, but the policy aids, the other stuff, they're working with some broad ideas, not the sort of latest sophistication. So it's actually interesting because as a historian, I'm like, no one listens to historians. We don't have any influence and like, to be an economist where they do this. And my economists often write about how like,
they can't get the politicians to actually listen to them. Like they don't follow this. And so it's all relative in this regard, right? And certainly if you look today, we're at an interesting moment where very little of economic theory is being followed in national governance right now. mean, the economists are actually among those most critical of tariffs and other nationalist policies going on right now. And obviously they are not.
having an effect on that. That's kind of an aside, but it brings us back to, I think, what's a really crucial part of the whole book is how does the obsession with growth become the guiding principle of the nation? And I would actually argue there's a couple of things about it that are, this is a surprise, a more surprising and unexpected story than we would expect. So today I would argue,
we expect in demand growth from our politicians. When the economy is good, people usually stay in. When it's bad, they are usually voted out. It's arguably the single most important metric on which politics for the last several decades has been founded. What's interesting is go back to 1940 and economic growth barely exists as a concept. No one talks about it. It is not something that is
an explicit category of analysis and it is absent both the history of economic thought and political discourses. So again, this is a surprising thing. Before 1940s,
PJ Wehry (10:44.441)
That's... I was definitely not guessing 1940. Sorry, good.
Chris Jones (10:50.286)
Economic growth is not an explicit object of study. Now, let me qualify this a bit. Like, have rulers for almost all time cared about the material prosperity of their kingdoms, realms, countries? Of course. And there's been an interest, of course, in words like development, prosperity, material abundance. And that rhymes with the thought of economic growth.
But one of the things that's very interesting is come out of World War II, even past Truman, you have Eisenhower take over early 1950s. And he is opposed to the idea of growth actually. He's like, growth could be okay, but what we actually want is stability and full employment. And he's looking back, of course, at the depression with employment being the big issue. But.
You do not find politicians talking the language of growth. And you don't find economists with a theory of growth. And this is really interesting. get, then let me wrap this back further in time. So there's a couple important areas. Part of the reason I start the book all the way back with Adam Smith is that you have sort of, historians of economists like to break the past into some sort of large chunks.
So sort of before 1750, you of course have, mean, everyone has thought, every society has had people who've thought about exchange, you know, since dawn in memoriam, right? And I mean, there has been exchange in value and so you've had people thinking about it. But most economists say around the 1750s, you get a new,
era of what's called political economy, where people are sort of studying it more explicitly as a subject, studying it a little more in isolation from other categories, and still linked to some other things, but that the sophistication of the enterprise gets a big jump. This has some influence in France with the physiocrats, and then sort of in the Anglo world, Adam Smith coming along, followed by
Chris Jones (13:10.848)
Malthus and Ricardo and ultimately through John Stuart Mill gets us a period of what's called classical political economy, roughly, you know, late 18th century through the mid 19th century. What's very interesting about this period is the classical political economists do not believe in infinite growth at all. And they do so for two very explicit reasons. They look around the world and
they notice everything that the economy needs comes from the land. And so obviously most of the economy at the time is agricultural, but even the manufacturing sector, everything you manufacture needs land to grow. You wanna make bricks, you need straw, wood and clay to gather. You want to expand your meat production, you need more land to graze animals.
You want more iron, you need to set aside forests to make charcoal for that. So your first set of potential constraints is the amount of land that you have. And obviously, particularly a lot of these people thinking in England, you're pretty obviously, or Scotland, you can imagine the limits of land quite clearly when you're on an island. So.
PJ Wehry (14:27.368)
Ha ha.
PJ Wehry (14:31.597)
Yeah. The cliffs right there. Yeah, that's.
Chris Jones (14:35.188)
Exactly, exactly. Like it's pretty obvious when you've used up that land. So your options of expanding are occupy more land, which has an obvious end juncture. But they also know you can improve land. You can supply capital and labor to land. Right. And for the classical political economists, there are three factors of production, land, labor and capital. This is the sort of
three things they are most interested in studying. So you can improve land with capital or labor, right? Labor, hire more people. Capital, you can spend time to drain the soil, reroute irrigation things, or particularly like apply fertilizer to it. But, and this is the big but,
All of your ways to improve the land are subject to what they all agree on, which is diminishing marginal returns. And this basically means the first time you add more labor, you get a big boost. But the second time, it's slightly less, and the third time less, and the fourth time less than that. Same with fertilizer. And so, we can think about this. More workers can more carefully weed, tend the crops, do these other things.
But at a certain juncture, they run out of ways their efforts can be productive. They start bumping into each other, right, if you hire too many. They can actually, can, and they imagine a curve that ends up going up for a while and then coming down. Similarly, anyone who's home garden, add a bit of fertilizer, it's great. Add a little more, it's even better. At a certain juncture, you just fry the plants and you kill them. So this is very straightforward math that says,
you know, you can only grow so much and you will eventually get limits. And they refer to this as the stationary state. And so during the period in which sort of economics comes of age in a way, the prevailing ethos is that growth is fundamentally limited. And so I think it's particularly interesting as we move closer to the present where we're so obsessed with growth and it's so
Chris Jones (16:56.952)
baked in, I think one of the most important points I want to make in the book is that there's nothing natural or inevitable about assuming growth can continue forever or should continue forever. It is a surprisingly recent invention. Now, it's also kind of interesting to reflect for a minute on what the economists thought about this.
So some of them thought this was really depressing. Now I should say this is not, it doesn't pervade their writings. They didn't think that the stationary state was close. So they weren't obsessed with this. wasn't a huge thing. It would be wrong to call them proto-environmentalists. They wanted growth to happen. They just knew that it couldn't go on forever. know, Mill thought this was a kind of,
depressing situation, you know, he writes that this will be melancholy for people when, and that the poor people would be hurt the most. In the hands of Thomas Malthus, this of course becomes the devastatingly pessimistic conclusion about what will continue. John Stuart Mill is interesting in this regard. The polymath, he wrote on philosophy, on economics, on many subjects.
around the middle of the 19th century. He's kind of the end point of classical political economy. He says, actually, what if the stationary state was a good thing? And he writes that there's enough room for us to advance by the time we reach to that point that when we get to the stationary state, we can maybe stop hustling for money at every given moment. We can stop being forced to...
PJ Wehry (18:44.868)
Hmm.
Chris Jones (18:46.392)
this and we can maybe focus on living well, on arts and on culture. And, you of course there's an elitism to John Stuart Mill who, you know, came from a very privileged background saying this, but it's an interesting thing to hold on to the idea that could we see the end of growth not as a disaster, but as a potential opportunity to improve human life rather than decrease it.
PJ Wehry (19:13.263)
find to kind of make sure that at all, you know, once you've reached that stationary, we'll make sure it's a stationary state, then you can reproportionate so that everyone's kind of getting equal pieces of the pie. Would that be kind of, mean, I know he has that utilitarian view. If you don't mind, I actually, this is such a, I'm almost having like a deja vu moment. had Samuel Franklin on to talk about,
his book, The Cult of Creativity. And in The Cult of Creativity, he talks about the word creative and creativity really came about in the 50s and 60s. He said he could find one reference to the word creativity before 1950s and 60s. And it was Department of Defense and marketers who actually came up with it, which is a very strange
But what's the first question he got? It just made me think of the problem that it sounds like you constantly run into is people like, well, what did they call it before then? And it's like, well, he didn't have this bundle of characteristics that they were, they were studying, they were putting into it. So, it's always astonishing. It's like when I learned about diamonds, for engagement rings and finding out that was like the 1920s, there's all these things that we, we give credence, like tradition and the way to tradition too. And then you're like, that's like,
very recent and there's nothing really natural about it at all. It's not like some hallowed tradition. As you've been, there were a lot of threads and I'm excited about a lot of them. Are the physiocrats connected with camera-lism? Am I in the right ballpark there?
Chris Jones (20:57.731)
They, I am not fully sure. I touched them quickly. Partly what's very interesting about them is physiocracy is rule of nature. That's the sort of where it comes from. So they actually, and they have an impact on Adam Smith, but part of where they've come into my study is through that. Let me ask you to say more about Cameralism and how it might show in, and then I'll take them where they go.
PJ Wehry (21:05.197)
Okay.
PJ Wehry (21:28.065)
Yeah, it is not the same thing. So I was just reading Martin Rady on the Middle Kingdoms and it was very much on the development of land through administration and state control, which was very big and Prussia and that sort of thing. Very, very different. I wasn't sure. I think you mentioned, go ahead.
Chris Jones (21:45.838)
What?
Chris Jones (21:49.42)
Well, actually, yeah, they did have a connection to this. they, part of what makes them very interesting is they, their economic argument is that agriculture is the only true source of wealth. And they distinguish the agricultural sector from the manufacturing sector. And they
call agriculture productive and manufacturing sterile. And part of the point of this is their argument is only in agriculture do you create essentially with the support of nature or God, right? So part of what's interesting about agriculture is once a worker plants the seed, it continues to grow regardless of what the worker does. Whereas in a factory, the minute someone puts down a tool, nothing more happens on this.
They are very interested in scientific agriculture as a result. so they actually do want, they don't necessarily want the government to do it, but they want to support large scale scientific agriculture because small peasants don't have the knowledge and the capital to do agriculture effectively enough. So if you think agriculture is a source of wealth and you need to expand it,
ergo, you want scientific agriculture, you need a certain amount of capital applied to it, and they want to do that. But they are coming of an age in France where France is putting protective tariffs on manufacturing, which they think is completely backwards, because if manufacturing is derivative of agriculture, you are essentially taxing agriculture to support manufacturing. And that's exactly the wrong thing of what you would want to do.
And they are the ones who pioneer the famous phrase laissez faire. And they do that not necessarily because they have a complete philosophical objection to any form of government intervention, but because the government intervention at their day is so bad that doing nothing would be much better. So they pioneer laissez faire, laissez passer, excuse my French.
Chris Jones (24:09.647)
And that's where the phrase comes from. And it's in response to this. And so in the notion of scientific agriculture mattering, they are connected to that.
But let me maybe before, I love the early period, but let me bring our viewers more up to the present here as well. Yep.
PJ Wehry (24:22.743)
Yes. that's, go ahead.
PJ Wehry (24:32.751)
Well, could I say there's just one snarky thing and I'm actually that would my next question would be to jump to the 1940s, but there is this snarky. You started this 11 years ago. definitely no one expects you to predict the future, but it does seem like maybe if you'd included more history about mercantilism, if you'd known that tariffs were going to play such a.
You're like, and of course in the 16, 1700s they said tariffs were bad. Anyways, moving on because that's not going come up again.
Chris Jones (24:58.476)
No, absolutely.
Chris Jones (25:06.318)
Well, let's flag this to hopefully return to at the end. I will say I would have written this book in seven years if I had stopped it in 2000. But actually the last 25 years of economic thought have been really turbulent in many ways. actually from the 1950 to 2000, you have this sort of
neoclassical synthesis, this widespread homogenous agreement. And in the last 25 years, you get a lot more variation in what counts as legitimate economic thought, a lot more debate within the field. And I think this is all a good thing, but it characterizing this was way more complicated because if you end it 1990s,
you can tell a sort of clear story about a path of economics and things have shifted in the last 25 years. Go ahead.
PJ Wehry (26:06.095)
Would it connect politically? I remember in college, I had a professor who had me read Francis Fukuyama. And it's so interesting how at the time everyone was so on board with what he was writing. And then even at the time that I was reading it in the, I think the British call it the naughties, the zeros, I was already, was like, I don't know that it's.
this obvious that this is going to work out this way. Is there a parallel, that liberal democracy is going to work and neoclassical economics is going to work? Are we on the same train there?
Chris Jones (26:45.326)
I think it is. it's, I mean, partly, you know, the 28 global financial crisis was not predicted or had obvious reactions to it. And then, you know, what we've seen in the last four five years, which seemed very improbable even five or six years ago, a real global turn against neoliberalism.
I mean, the extent which neoliberalism seemed so dominant and unquestioned, and it's on attack from the left and the right. And the centrism is almost gone because the center was neoliberal and Trump's attacking it from the right. And Bernie from the left, AOC from the left, Mondami from the left. And, you know, there's very few people happy with
neoliberalism anymore and you see it sort of globally. And so that has a big thing. There's also, there were influences on economics being interdisciplinary. So the influence of psychology to bring in behavioral economics was a sort of shift in approach. And there's been a big push towards randomized control trials.
PJ Wehry (27:56.142)
Yeah.
Chris Jones (28:05.024)
which are sort of the scientific idea that's been a big change in economics. And there's even been a little more injection of history with the sort of new institutional economics. And so I would say actually, you know, I think that this sort of neoclassical synthesis had this run so long and there's still lots of questions and research areas in it, but I think there was a feeling.
And particularly as the world got more chaotic, that this is not describing everything that matters, that these are increasingly small, specific games. And to understand the big things, to make new kinds of arguments, people need to bring in new areas. So I think there's been a social upheaval and I think there's been an intellectual injection of new ideas, and that's for the good.
PJ Wehry (28:53.603)
Yeah, absolutely. I wanted to ask, you talked about it's showing up in 1940s and I think you mentioned Eisenhower was against idea of growth or maybe I'm thinking of, maybe you said a different president. Who? Cautious, yes.
Chris Jones (29:06.826)
Mm-hmm. We're all just very cautious of it, I shouldn't say it gets, but like...
PJ Wehry (29:13.123)
My apologies. who is the thinker or group of thinkers that really starts coining this term and pushing this term in the forties and fifties?
Chris Jones (29:23.222)
Yeah. Great. Yeah, let's get there. The first thing I want to say that's what's kind of amazing is Mill writes his Principles of Political Economy in 1848. And it's got this sort of notion of macroeconomic, what is the future in there. And after Mill, you go almost 100 years with basically no analysis of growth. And this is kind of amazing because think about 1850 to 1950.
Like this is the industrial, both industrial revolutions, if you only need to use that term, happened. Massive changes have gone on. And if you look at economic textbooks, the only references to growth are like growth of population or growth of cities. And obviously people are looking at this prosperity, but at least in America, it doesn't seem hard to explain growth, right? You've got all these natural resources. You've got, you know, relatively limited.
government regulation, you've got lots of land, growing markets, growing population. And so the big economic questions are about distribution, about monopoly, about tariffs, know, questions like this. And so what happens...
PJ Wehry (30:35.023)
Forgive me. This is just completely my ignorance. mean, Marx is writing that time. He doesn't really talk about growth.
Chris Jones (30:47.765)
PJ Wehry (30:49.987)
Are you talking about from the English side of things?
Chris Jones (30:51.454)
He is he's still yeah, I mean, he's still in while he's writing in the English tradition largely. I think one of the real tensions that is a big thing here is that Marx wants growth, because he needs that for the workers. And and I think that they're they're within the environmental side of the world. There has always been a
discomfiture between Marxism and environmentalism. Because Marxists have been as pro-growth as capitalists in many ways, just wanting that abundance to go to the workers instead of the very elites. And I think that a lot of people say, well, isn't the problem of growth just the problem of capitalism? Well, like, look at China. I mean, is China communist? mean, it's unclear how you characterize China.
PJ Wehry (31:47.107)
Yeah, yeah.
Chris Jones (31:48.558)
moment and what its economic system truly is. But the Soviet Union had its five-year plans, its obsession on growth. So this is not just a sort of capitalism versus communism thing. And I think there's more interesting point. You know, there are certainly people trying to write about and forge quote unquote red-green alliances. But it's actually interesting that a lot of Marxists have been as eager for growth. And to put it kind of bluntly,
PJ Wehry (31:58.255)
Mmm.
Chris Jones (32:15.534)
When Trump first ran in 2016, he was pitching a 6 % growth rate, which has never happened and would never happen to fund his plans. But Bernie was pitching a 5 % growth rate, which would not happen either as the basis. Trump wanted his tax cuts in his military and Bernie wants free healthcare and universal college education. Underpinning that for both is that growth will pay for it. And so there's, I think it would
There's a whole set of interesting questions about how that might play out. So you get this period where people care about the economy. I mean, look what's happening in Gilded Age and progressive America, Huge labor strikes, deadly labor strikes. Obviously, politicians like Rockefeller are buying judges. People know the economy is both amazing and terrible.
PJ Wehry (32:49.486)
Yes.
Chris Jones (33:12.728)
and they're writing about this and figuring it out, but they're not thinking about growth. And this, can maybe circle back to your cult of creativity. What does it mean to say you're talking about economic growth instead of something else? Well, part of this, and this is a sort of bigger point I like to think about, is that ideas need infrastructure. And one of the things is, and there's this really great argument that the political scientist historian Tim Mitchell mentioned,
which is he also argues that up through the 1930s Anglo Americans did not imagine an economy. That the word economy when it was used was a personal habit of thrift. If you tell someone to act with economy, it means go to the store and buy things on sale. But if you tell them to go improve the economy, they don't have a reference for that. And part of this is a data issue. There's no way to know what the economy is. People have a sense when the economy is good or bad.
They know it because factories are hiring or laying people off. They can observe activity at the docks. But in the 1920s and 1930s, you even get people saying like, what's the tonnage of railroad shipments? That's how they're trying to infer what's going on in the economy. And when the depression hits for a long time, no one knows how bad it is. We don't even have labor statistics on how many people are out of work. And it is the sort of crisis of the depression that leads to the first sort of national income accounting.
that becomes what is ultimately GDP today, gross domestic product calculations. And crucially before the late 1930s, you have no systematic gathering of that data. In response to the crisis of the Great Depression and then the need to mobilize the war, for the first time you develop the techniques government hires a bunch of economists to regularly gather this data. And suddenly you have data sets about the overall economy that you never had before.
And this provides a key impetus for being able to actually imagine what's going on. There's an interesting thing about all these terms, and maybe we need to do a synthesis of what new things were developed around this time. There's a similar argument about the global environment, that people understood environment as the space around them.
PJ Wehry (35:19.279)
Hmm.
Chris Jones (35:31.886)
But the notion that there was a quote unquote global environment that was an object you could study, that you could manipulate, that you could understand the health of doesn't emerge until around the 1950s. And it's also sort of a data question of imagination. And so of course, has there always been a global environment? Has there always been growth or its absence? Yes. But are they tractable categories for humans to analyze, manipulate and study?
not until you get a certain amount of data infrastructure on it.
PJ Wehry (36:05.487)
So when we're talking about like the environmental side of things, are we talking about, I mean, when you're talking about 1950s, are we talking about like Silent Spring, bringing that into popular culture? Is that Rachel?
Chris Jones (36:14.83)
Yeah, so Silent Spring is 62. There's even a little more going on early in the 1950s as well that Carson is responding to. And the important thing about this is not for people to imagine there's nothing, then there's everything. There's like quantum leaps, like significant shifts in what people understand. All right, we've been letting our people wait very long for this. So how do we finally get growth? So we get the intellectual structure of it.
PJ Wehry (36:18.178)
Okay.
PJ Wehry (36:29.377)
my god.
Yes.
PJ Wehry (36:39.407)
I'm excited. Yes.
Chris Jones (36:44.034)
and we can finally start to analyze it. And part of what's interesting is actually one of the first big proponents of growth is a guy named Leon Kiesling, who is the second head of the Council of Economic Advisors for Truman. And the Council of Economic Advisors is not formed till 1946. There's actually an interesting story of that economists and government before World War II and after is a sort of explosive story that's connected to all of this.
And he's someone who really pushes aggressively for growth. And so he starts bringing it into the political conversation and he's pushing it so hard in the Truman era that this is partly why Eisenhower is like, whoa, let's be careful of this sort of unbridled focus on growth, particularly fearing that it could be inflationary. Another thing that we relate to more at this present moment than we might have four years ago, that there's a danger to growth.
through inflation. So this starts to get it into the culture. the other thing, again, we sort of repeated this, and I should say, I never thought I would write an intellectual history. If you talk to Chris Jones,
15 years ago, 20 something years ago in grad school, I'd say intellectual history is lame. It's material things that matter. And my first book was a material history of energy infrastructure. I was into tons of coal, miles of oil pipelines, these physical networks that transformed the world and made it possible to live in different ways. And it didn't matter what you thought about it. You could not live the same way if you had that infrastructure or if you didn't. And so I didn't have to care about what was in anyone's mind.
because the physical stuff was there. And so it surprised me that I started caring about ideas, but certain ideas really do matter, it turns out. And they matter, you know, but they matter when they hit the right social moment. And so what happens to explode growth in 1940s is, you know, coming out of the war, no one expects growth to happen very aggressively. People remember the great
Chris Jones (39:02.67)
10 years of Great Depression. And then rationing during the war, uncertain what's going on after World War I, there was a sort of spike and then fall. Again, people assume that's gonna happen. And what happens turns out to be a quarter century of insane growth in the developed world. Turns out rebuilding war-torn Europe and the world needs a lot of manufacturing. You get this sort of surge of...
surge of economic activity and it's good in America, it's even better in Europe and Japan. And so here you have a moment where a few people are saying growth looks good and they get lucky because the world supplies that impetus and it kind of pulls them to it. Right, exactly. And I strongly believe that at any historical moment you can look and find lots of people saying lots of things.
PJ Wehry (39:49.487)
They look like prophets. Yeah.
Chris Jones (40:00.726)
and we lose most of them to history because we just pick out the one that succeeds, were they more oppression maybe in some ways or were they just luckier? I mean, you know, and so that's where I think intellectualism, yeah, yeah. Or, you know, maybe right for the right reasons, but lucky that those reasons played out in reality. And I think that
PJ Wehry (40:15.981)
Right for the wrong reasons.
PJ Wehry (40:26.826)
Mmm. Better.
Chris Jones (40:30.19)
I think you could imagine scenarios where other things happened, where very smart people thought very intentionally with good rationales, and the world went a different way. So once growth really takes off in the 1950s, this is when some of my economists come back in. So the sort of most important founder of economic growth theory is man named Robert Solow. He actually just passed away about a year ago, lived till 99.
or so, and he works at MIT and he pioneers a little growth model. And I think that one of the things that's very interesting is this is when neoclassical economics comes in and his growth model is a Cobb Douglas production function. Like it's a kind of short, tidy thing that looks at how capital and labor impacts the growth of the economy.
with a residual of technological progress. And it's a really tight little thing. And this takes off and it's the rage. And it's the rage because economics at this time is moving to a very quantitative modeled oriented approach. And again, he's at the forefront of this. And he has a nice tidy way to do it that fits the zeitgeist of his era. And it becomes the basis of much growth theory since that time. There have been shifts in other approaches, but
He's there at the heart of it. this is, solo is a big reason why this piece is not a hit job on economists. Because it turns out he seems like a really good guy overall. I mean, he probably has his own other things, but like, he's funny, he's witty, he translates things well. Like he's a great writer. You know, he's famous for some of his turns of phrase. So he...
When he writes about Nixon's budget, he says it's a giant step forward for Nixon and, or it's a small step forward for Nixon and a great leap backward for mankind. Right? He sort of puns the moon on that. He is an intellectual adversary with Milton Friedman. He goes to Chicago, gives a paper and Milton Friedman's whole shtick is monetarism. And Milton Friedman, you know, immediately says, well, if you considered the monetarism
Chris Jones (42:55.542)
monetary supply in this, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so it blurt out, look, everything reminds Milton of the money supply. Well, everything reminds me of sex, but I leave it out of my papers. So he's got a sense of humor. He's got a turn of phrase. And he's open to other perspectives. He's actually more open to history and its influence and empirical study than many other economists turn out to be.
But he captures his age and the way he does set up growth theory at the beginning excludes the natural environment. And one of the things he does that also really matters and he's following others, it happens sometime in the early 20th century and by the mid 20th century. One of the telling things is, I mentioned this before, the classical political economist studied land, capital and labor as the three factors of production, which always gave you a sense that the natural world was in there.
Neoclassicals pretty quickly just say, hey, land is a subset of capital. And so they only study capital and labor. And so you don't even have land in it. And it's an indication of how caring about the natural world falls out of economics over this time. Not as an explicit decision where people like, we just hate the natural world or don't think we need to study it. But it's a, look, we could analyze it as a sort sub property of catagory.
PJ Wehry (44:08.334)
Yeah.
Chris Jones (44:20.302)
of capital that would make certain things easier to calculate and more straightforward. So let's start doing this. Right. It's not an intentional thing, but it's an orthogonal choice that has consequences down the road. Part of what's interesting about Solo is he writes these foundational articles in his early thirties, I think, in 1956 and 1957. And so then he actually
is around to comment on what happens when people start taking the environment more seriously. So in the 50s and 60s, there's more on this in the book to check out, lots of people are in for lots of different reasons. Almost none of them are caring about the natural world. You mentioned Silent Spring. By the late 60s, you get a resurgent environmental movement. 1972, you get limits to growth.
PJ Wehry (45:01.249)
yeah.
Chris Jones (45:17.14)
And it is enough attention that economists for the first time are really forced to look at are there limits to growth and what would those be? And Solow, who again I've said is a sympathetic figure, looks at limits to growth and is like, this is intellectual hogwash. He doesn't like their computer modeling and he particularly doesn't like, as many other economists do, that there's no price system. And so one of the things
One of the reasons why economists are much more optimistic, and in some ways these dynamics have worked out and I've had to acknowledge ways they work in things I didn't, is that price really matters. When you have scarcity, should have, it gives you incentives to do other things. And one of the real world ways this played out is the natural gas fracking boom of the 2000s.
If you went back to 2005, 2008, we were talking about building multi-billion dollar liquefied natural gas importing stations to get liquefied natural gas from Qatar and other places, because natural gas was getting too expensive. This, with some government investment, some private capital, some other stuff, spurs the effort to develop fracking. And fracking happens and boom, natural gas has
decreased so much that no one's importing liquefied natural gas to America anymore. And so this is an example that economists will point to, of say, you know, there's a famous oil minister of Saudi Arabia who says, we didn't leave the stone age because we ran out of stones. We found better ways to do what we want. We're not going to leave the oil age because we leave out of, run out of oil. We'll find better ways to do things when the prices go up.
PJ Wehry (47:13.454)
Hmm.
Chris Jones (47:13.6)
And so, so Solo draws on this. also looks at one of the things I talk about is, you know, again, I've kind of mentioned this a few times, but data matters a lot. There's a think tank looking at resources called resources for the future. And they sort of argue as an empirical test, there's three ways to tell if things are meaningfully running out. You can look at the price of the good over time. You can look at the extraction costs.
and you can look at proven reserves, which are how much we know we can get out of the ground. And that amount of proven reserves changes based on technology and the price. But they, in 1960s, study a whole bunch of things for the past 80 years. And they argue, even though we've been using up so much of this stuff, most minerals are still seeming to be cheaper and more abundant as we go on. Part of what helps this is an international story.
PJ Wehry (47:54.511)
Discovery, yes.
Chris Jones (48:13.388)
Right? What happens in the 1960s? The, you know, colon, European colonization finally, quote unquote, officially ends. But suddenly you have countries all over Africa, Asia, South America looking to develop their resources. And you do get resource gluts on the markets because of that. So, and others look at this at this time and just say, we're not seeing in the empirical data that this is really coming up other than
mean, obviously the 1970s oil crisis, crises caused spikes in oil, but they weren't particularly long lasting. And so they sort of argue this doesn't hugely matter. And that we look at this, but we don't see this. And Solow, who's not an unreasonable person, even publishes a paper arguing basically if you assume some substitutability of human capital for natural capital, you can grow forever.
And he has a pretty strong statement to that effect that environmentalists look at a gas, but is based on these sort of calculations.
PJ Wehry (49:23.951)
Thank you. That's, uh, I love that. I love that there's a, he did a great job of providing that overview with just a real sense of the complexity of it. I love that there's, that last 20 to like 2025 story that we haven't gotten to. And I want to encourage people to buy the book. So then you get how this, we started to realize, Oh, maybe there's, there's a different story to this, but be, I want to be respectful of your time. And there is another question I wanted to ask you at the beginning.
This is something I generally ask almost every historian I have on the podcast. At the beginning, you said that we need to be faithful to the empirical reality of the past. And so one thing I do like to ask, because I get different answers from different historians, is what is the point of history when you're doing this intellectual history? You've touched on it, obviously. And why should we be faithful to the empirical reality of the past?
Chris Jones (50:22.67)
Yeah. So let me use this as a chance to highlight some of the surprising things from the end of the book and what I would love those who've been persistent enough to follow, keep with us to this juncture. The subtitle of the book is How Economists Came to Believe a Dangerous Delusion. Just a little like cheeky and taking a little poke at the economist.
who I think I would like to think would read this and begrudgingly respect the account I've offered, even if they disagree with it. One of the things that really strikes me is that we can get stuck with ideas from a former era that no longer serve us and need to be reinvented. And so if there's a single biggest takeaway, it would be that the invention of infinite growth and the idea that it occurred without natural limits
made a certain amount of sense at the time it was done, through this period from the 50s to the 70s, a time that combined resource abundance with relatively little knowledge of global environmental problems. We knew local pollution, but climate change really wasn't on the horizon then. And the other thing that we haven't talked about, but is where I've been really focused a lot lately,
It was not only golden era of growth from the 1940s to the 1970s because growth was robust. It was extraordinarily broadly shared. And this was a result of very high progressive tax rates to pay for World War II. It was a product of increasing union strength. The New Deal finally allowed unions and labor to argue for things. It was a result of federal support for military workers, GI Bill, housing policy, and
America coming out of the war with its economy in much better shape than the European nations, ready to rebuild it. What you get for 30 years is if you break down the growth in income across the top 20, 20 to 40, 40 to 60, 60, 80, 80 to 100, remarkable degree of evenness, more even than anything before and after. And this has enormous benefits for the quality of life. The middle-class jumps from 30 to 60 % of the population.
Chris Jones (52:44.654)
And people feel this like, right, you can, people are more securely fed. People have more secure housing. They have the access to leisure time. You start to get the, you know, if you talk to grandparents about this, right, I still remember talking 15, 18 years ago with my advisor who, you know, is probably mid eighties now. She was, you know, she was saying,
When I grew up, you knew who was poor by their clothes. And that's much less often the case now. And so what you get during this period is a remarkable boom in wellbeing for many people. Lives are concretely better. What's really notable to me is that from the mid 1970s to today, we've had a huge additional sets of upsurges of growth.
PJ Wehry (53:17.133)
Hmm.
Chris Jones (53:42.05)
But has our wellbeing improved that much? I mean, certain things are better. There's some improvements in medicine, but you can look at a lot of scores of wellbeing. Life expectancy, not up a lot, starting to drop. The average workday is not much shorter, even though we're much richer. The middle class has actually shrunk. Educational outtainment, there's mixed data on that. Rates of depression.
have grown enormously. And so I think there's a real question as to how much better off are we today versus late 70s. And there's a number of cases where you can say we are, but there's a number you can't. And one of the things that is, I think you could look, are we significantly better off than in the 1920s? Absolutely. Very little doubt about that. But I think like,
PJ Wehry (54:35.279)
Yes!
Chris Jones (54:40.694)
From the period from the 20s to the 70s, I think you could see well-being and growth move somewhat in tandem. I think from the 1970s on, you have this story of growth and you have at best marginal improvements in well-being, which should be the whole point of growth. At the same time, for the last 50 years, we've started to see so many more costs of growth. So as an environmental historian, I've been particularly concerned with
climate change with loss of biodiversity forever, plastics in our systems, all of these immediate problems. But you can actually point to much bigger things. Why is America so fundamentally fractured right now? It's because the neoliberal promise that growth would benefit everyone has been shown to be a lie. It's been a lie because government policies stopped taxing the wealthy more, government stopped investing in working class people.
But also, once you reach a middle-class existence, more money helps with some things, but it's not the same shift. And so I think one of the things, and this goes to why history matters and why the invention of infinite growth, even if it made sense at a time, fundamentally needs to be rethought from our era, is that I firmly believe we do not have to have infinite growth for better lives now. And in fact, we have ignored
enormous political costs of growth that they've fueled inequality. Like, I mean, look at all the data on growth since for the last 20 years. It is 80 % to the top 10 % and of that huge amount to the 1%. And so GDP comes out, grow 2.5 % this quarter. We're supposed to all celebrate, but the middle class has been stagnant. 90 % of Americans have been stagnant. That's why people are angry and they should be angry.
And Trump has offered one set of solutions. Some on the left have offered that. Those who have been centrists have not seen fit to do this. I was having an exchange with someone recently, like, yeah, this is kind of a pitchforks moment. If you're not waving a pitchfork or talking to someone who gets a pitchfork, you're not going to make real traction. And so we are...
Chris Jones (57:04.268)
We are trying to, we are holding on to ideas of growth that were formed in a radically different moment. And the delusion is to hold onto them when the strong empirical evidence of the last 50 years suggests we're at a moment where this needs to be rethought. And the final thing I'll throw on this for those who are more of the environmentalists, it's as if we're trying to manage the Anthropocene with the tools of the Holocene. Right, like it's.
PJ Wehry (57:31.414)
Mm, yeah.
Chris Jones (57:32.93)
the set of thinking and ideas from an era that no longer serve us. And so the ultimate critique of economics is not that these ideas were developed so much as there's been a failure to change and update those. And part of that's on the economists, but I want to be clear, even if the economists wrote differently, voters expect it, politicians talk about it, media commentators talk. So we do need a social reckoning with growth that is not just about the economists.
PJ Wehry (58:00.569)
And that goes back to what you were saying about vernacular economics, right? It's not just because congressmen aren't going to work through the advanced computer models. They're going to have to have talking points.
Chris Jones (58:12.942)
Okay. All right.
the economists do matter because the Congress will say to the economist, can we do this? the economist will say, well, according to the comment, a little bit of things they won't understand. person's like, yes or no. They're like, we think probably yes. And that's what they take away. So there are dynamics like that where there's a culpability for micro-comers.
PJ Wehry (58:31.119)
That's...
Yes. Yes. Yeah. I wasn't trying to dissolve that the, is it okay if I add.
Chris Jones (58:41.082)
But no, no, but it is, it's both. It has to be both. There's something in the intellectual pantheon of economics that is there. But one of the lines I like from the book is that economics is too important to leave to the economists. That there is a social buy-in, a social expectation of this that needs to be part of the story. And if we just imagined, if we just imagined you could fix a few economists and it would solve the problem, you would be fundamentally
misunderstanding this. And it's in the same way, this is another analogy I really like. There's a set of environmentalists who hold that you could get two buses, put the CEOs of the hundred largest companies in the world, or hundred most carbon emitting companies in the world, drive those two buses off the cliff, and you would make a great start towards a more sustainable world. And, you know, I find that utterly unsatisfying.
Let's leave aside the murder ethics of that. But it misses that there's a buy-in, right? That most people want access to fossil fuels. Most people want access to consumer goods. And we shouldn't deny that, but we need to find ways to think about that in relation to other goods we want and have a better analysis of how obtaining certain things
makes other things unattainable and there needs to be level of social discussion about that that is not just about us being lied to and manipulated by like a few evil arch masterminds.
PJ Wehry (01:00:21.665)
Yes, whoever they may be. Everyone has their own little, well, that's different type of pitchfork. if you don't mind, I grew up with Beauty and the Beast, so I like pitchfork and torches moment, but I definitely want to steal that. The pitchfork and torches is such a great, yeah, I'm just going to start using that and I'll do my best to credit you.
Chris Jones (01:00:25.559)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (01:00:50.233)
But with all that said, want to be respectful of your time. We're drawn up on the hour here. Besides reading, buying and reading your excellent book, what would you recommend to someone who has listened through this whole hour to either think about or do? I mean, you talked a little bit about social buy-in, but is there something that you'd want people to really kind of meditate on over the next week after listening to this podcast?
Chris Jones (01:01:16.278)
Yeah, what I would say is to really start to look at and consider what are the costs of growth. Growth seems like it seems like such a good word. It is so unquestioned and we imagine that it produces benefits. But I think the biggest thing is one of the huge things missing about this is it's a hamster wheel.
Right? There's no end to growth. There's no getting off of it. You always have to grow to keep up with your neighbor. America has to grow to not be outpaced by China. Right? It is a perverse logic that never has a satisfaction of what's at the end of it. And I think we lack a discussion of what would be a sufficiency and what would it mean to shift our society from
the acquisition of ever more to what would be a satisfactory way of living with ourselves. And might that not actually be a more pleasant world to live in? we, you know, it is absolutely the case that economic growth in a lot of the global South would have enormous impacts on wellbeing. And I think there will be environmental costs for that. But I am not going to stand here and say,
people in other parts of the world don't have the opportunity to have the life I have been privileged to live and get at that. And we have to do a lot to try and offset those damages, like, I'm not gonna turn that, say that that spigot has to be turned off. But I would say for those of us who are at a middle-class level of existence in the global North,
It's really time for us to think about what is it that's more that we would really need or what would a society that didn't depend on growth look like and might that not be a world with less political fracture, with less environmental damage, with more quality of life? Like I think to be in the notion that that could be a possibility really worth exploring.
PJ Wehry (01:03:33.869)
really encouraging and hopeful answer. Dr. Jones, been an absolute pleasure having you on today. Thank you.
Chris Jones (01:03:41.283)
Thanks so much, I've really enjoyed the conversation.