The Path to Growth
- didiermoretti
- Apr 1
- 4 min read
Updated: May 15
Why should we care so much about growth in a world with so many other pressing concerns? Growth isn't everything, but it creates the resources needed to fund education, healthcare, social safety nets...and clean up the messes it creates along the way.
Why the Focus on Growth?
Economic growth isn’t the sole measure of human flourishing—education, health, culture, equity, and a spared planet matter too. Yet growth is the bedrock that makes them feasible, as the remarkable transformations of the past 150 years have demonstrated. When William Bernstein argued in "The Birth of Plenty" that prosperity nudges societies toward democracy, he was acknowledging a pattern: scarcity often breeds rigid hierarchies; surplus offers room for broader inclusion. Growth isn’t everything but try funding schools or hospitals without it. The arithmetic is stubborn, even when our ideals are lofty. (1)
Think of it as fertile soil—not enough on its own, but essential for the harvest. Without surplus, social programs become exercises in redistributing scarcity rather than expanding opportunity. Today’s wealthy nations didn’t conjure universal healthcare or safety nets from goodwill alone; they grew the capacity to pay for them. Virtue’s lovely, but productivity writes the checks.
The Complexity of Progress
Growth isn't a cure-all. The industrial boom that yanked billions from misery also choked the planet. It can widen gaps when riches tilt to the already-rich—turns out the rising tide skips those without so much as a raft. Yet growth gives us the means for fixing these messes. Cleaning rivers, greening energy, or leveling the playing field takes cash, and stagnation leaves the coffers bare. Yes, growth can be a bit of a wildfire, but it also cooks dinner—and builds hospitals and funds research. The solution isn't to extinguish it but to control the blaze while harnessing its heat.
Evidence backs this up. Norway, flush with oil money, leads in the use of electric cars and renewables. South Korea went from smoggy backwater to green-tech hub as its GDP soared. The environmental Kuznets curve—pollution spikes early, then dips as wealth funds cleanup—may oversimplify matters, but it captures an essential truth: growth eventually buys the mop for its own spills. The trick is steering it, not swearing it off, channeling its energy toward shared prosperity and sustainable outcomes rather than merely larger GDP figures.
The alternative—a no-growth or degrowth world—has historical precedents, and they aren't encouraging. Periods of stagnation often feature social unrest, political extremism, scapegoating of minorities, and in the worst cases, violent conflict over dwindling resources. The zero-sum mentality that emerges when the economic pie stops growing tends to transform politics from debates about how best to create shared prosperity into bitter fights over who gets what remains.
This pattern repeats across time and cultures with remarkable consistency. Expanding economies can foster greater opportunity, tolerance, social mobility, and commitment to fairness; while stagnating ones breed the opposite. This isn't to suggest that material progress automatically improves moral character, but rather that growth creates conditions under which human cooperation becomes more advantageous than conflict. Take growth away for large segments of the population, and even stable societies can unravel with alarming speed.
Six Growth Factors
What fuels this engine? It is all about unleashing the human ability to Learn, Cooperate, and Innovate at Scale. We’ll trace the evolution of six growth factors:
Human Potential: 3 factors to unleash human creativity and productivity
Learn (Cumulative Knowledge)
Cooperate (The Corporation)
Innovate (Culture of Innovation)
At Scale: 3 factors that amplify scale
Money
Trade
The Rule of Law
Productivity creates value, but only scale can transform innovations into prosperity for millions. Significant changes in the late 1800s, when technology and institutions clicked, lit the fuse for modern prosperity.
This won't be an exhaustive or comprehensive history by any stretch, as it would take far too long. Instead, we'll spotlight key developments: pioneers who punched above their weight, as well as overlooked or lesser-known significant contributions.
Our exploration of the path to growth will begin with Money and Trade—the twin engines of scale. Of the two, trade emerged first, weaving human connections long before currency formalized them.
Trade Is as Old as Mankind
Wherever we look in human history, we find people exchanging goods, ideas, and know-how. The earliest known evidence of trade dates back an astonishing 320,000 years, in the now-dry basin of an ancient lake in southern Kenya. Archaeologists have uncovered obsidian tools transported from 50 miles away, along with pigment dyes sourced from 20 miles off—clear signs that early humans were exchanging resources well beyond their immediate surroundings. This suggests that even before Homo sapiens had fully emerged as a distinct species, our ancestors were already engaging in trade networks. Which came first, trade or our species? It’s a chicken-and-egg riddle for the ages, but one thing is clear: the urge to barter was etched into our make-up.
At its core exchange is part and parcel of human cooperation. People trade with one another because it makes both parties better off - it enables people to focus on what they do best while acquiring other things they need through exchange. No sensible person would try to be entirely self-sufficient—growing their own food, making their own clothes, building their own shelter, and performing their own dental work. The results would likely be pitiful (particularly the dental work). Instead, we specialize and trade.
Trade was never a mere economic
transaction; it was humanity's first truly global language. Long before we shared religions, alphabets, or TikTok challenges, we shared the universal grammar of "I'll give you this for that." This primordial bargain, scratched into clay tablets or sealed with ceremonial handshakes, created networks of trust that eventually wrapped around the entire planet. When our ancestors figured out they could get more by trading with strangers than by clubbing them, civilization got its first true upgrade—version Human 1.0.
Trade is not merely an economic necessity but a profound social glue. It fosters cooperation, and fuels innovation. A society that trades is a society that interacts, adapts, and prospers.
Previous Article: The Growth Enigma: How Humans Cracked the Code to Prosperity
Next Article: Early Globalizers: The Phoenicians
(1) This article borrows from "How the World Became Rich" by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin, "The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World Was Created" by William Bernstein, and "Open: How Collaboration and Curiosity Shaped Humankind" by Johan Norberg.
