By Annie Crabill

The Mismeasure of Progress: Economic Growth and Its Critics

Written by Stephen J. Macekura

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020, 320 pp.

In 1934, several years into the Great Depression, a thirty-one-year-old economist delivered a report to the U.S. Senate. Simon Kuznets had calculated two measures of national income: “national income produced” and “national income paid out.” His findings were striking: they revealed that national income had halved between 1929 and 1932. The report helped policy makers structure a prescription, and, at twenty cents a copy, became a bestseller.[1]

For Stephen Macekura, the historian and author of the 2020 book, The Mismeasure of Progress: Economic Growth and Its Critics, the Kuznets anecdote is instructive. Kuznets’s aggregate economic measurements told a powerful story, and helped policy makers grasp the scope of the crisis. Leaders beyond the United States began using national income measures to fight the Great Depression, spurring the League of Nations to standardize estimates across countries.

Importantly, this set of numbers ended up winning out over another one. Reformers had been collecting standard of living statistics, which, unlike aggregate economic measures, tried to understand how income was distributed across different populations. Being so particular, however, these social statistics proved difficult to standardize.[2]

Macekura writes that the rise of blunt national figures in the 1930s and 1940s helped enable the growth paradigm, the notion that growth was “desirable, imperative, and essentially limitless.”[3] Growing the total national economy, as measured by Gross National Product (GNP), seemed like a silver bullet: it smoothed over class conflict (a rising tide, in theory, will lift all boats); promised a hopeful future; and, for both Western capitalists and Eastern Communists, who also wholeheartedly embraced growth, shored up the superiority of each political system.[4] In popular imagination, a narrative took hold: progress was synonymous with economic growth, and both appeared inevitable.[5]

But the story did not have to go that way. Macekura argues that the widespread belief in the growth paradigm is not ahistorical; it has a history of its own, full of contingencies. Macekura uses the twentieth century’s growth critics, those who proposed other ways and other things to measure, to show us where we might have pivoted. The growth paradigm is a persuasive narrative, but the growth critics prove it was never a consensus. In reviewing their objections, strategies, and impact, Macekura argues that their contemporary counterparts must offer a powerful, alternative narrative that makes sense of the world as it appears.

To do this, Macekura collates a staggering amount of research. The book draws on archival collections from five countries, as well as the works of development historians, political theorists, environmental economists, and, of course, the growth critics themselves. Some of these are household names; most are not. They include economists like Kuznets and Phyllis Deane, both of whom constructed national income estimates but emphasized their limitations; Mahbub ul Haq, a Pakistani economist who critiqued the reigning growth-centric ideas driving development; social critics like Herbert Marcuse, who bemoaned the isolation and alienation wrought by a culture of consumerism; and feminist thinkers like Betty Friedan, who decried the unwaged labor—typically performed by women—uncounted by GNP.

Each chapter is structured formally, with an introduction, a few subsections, and a conclusion. Macekura writes well, and the work is impressively readable. But perhaps because some of the chapters were published originally as articles, the connections between and sometimes within chapters can appear clunky. He repeatedly presents Haq—who admittedly had a long and varied career—and his innovations in ways that are repetitive and therefore confusing (my marginalia reads: “we’ve already covered this right?” “Is this like what happened to his Human Development Index?”). From a craft perspective, however, Macekura’s project is ambitious, and he succeeds. He is describing the origins and entrenchment of the growth paradigm, writing brief character profiles of growth critics and their major contributions, synthesizing the political contexts in which they operated, and offering ideas as to how these stories serve as “cautionary tales and sources of inspiration” to contemporary activists and policymakers.[6]

On this last point, he lends interesting insight to a question long dividing growth critics: can growth enthusiasts be beaten on their own terms? In other words, can you mitigate environmental degradation by putting a price on nature, or re-evaluate unemployment and welfare provisions by including informal labor in GNP?

The debate became particularly relevant in the 1980s and 1990s, because after a brief crisis of confidence in the 1970s, the growth paradigm came roaring back. But this time, there was a twist. The free market, not Keynesian planning, was allegedly powering unstoppable growth. Critics, meanwhile, had been making many of the same arguments for decades, but in this new context, their objections were absorbed into the hegemonic framework in counterproductive and disappointing ways. Critics’ insistence on acknowledging unwaged female labor, for example, was taken not as evidence for diverging from the growth paradigm, but as an argument for pricing domestic work. Incorporating it into Gross Domestic Product (GDP) estimates—which had become the more common metric—only reinforced the primacy of GDP growth. Growth enthusiasts accepted the challenge to consider informal and unpaid labor, but they framed this group as a “holding tank of would-be capitalists waiting to be unleashed,” using them to advance a deregulatory agenda in both rich countries and the Global South.[7] The list goes on: happiness studies, designed to center well-being and life satisfaction in policymaking, instead became a commercial cottage industry.[8] Efforts to incorporate environmental concerns into national accounts, such as “green GDP estimates,” remained purely supplemental, and thus easy to ignore.[9]

Contemporary growth critics, writes Macekura, must heed these and other lessons. The conditions are ripe for inviting a different way of operating. Climate change has made clear the environmental limits—or at least consequences—of the growth paradigm. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, it is easy to see why people have become skeptical of growth’s ability to really lift all boats. The pandemic fallout did not make it into the book, but Macekura would likely agree that the realities exposed by quarantine reinvigorated the call to recognize unwaged labor.[10]

More than anything else, Macekura argues, an effective critical strategy needs a powerful narrative anchoring it. A group of measurements must be more than an “incoherent maze” of different social indicators.[11] Growth critics must build political coalitions and connect their stories to real-life conditions as people perceive them. They must not let their arguments descend into “technocratic critique of technocracy,” which helped sink the 1960s and 1970s approach.[12]

Macekura is interested in stories. He sees the growth paradigm as “narrating economic life,” and the neoliberal insistence on the primacy of the market as serving to reinforce “fables about government.”[13] The chronicle of the growth paradigm still reins, but for many, it no longer makes sense of the world around them.[14] His story, about the people for whom it never made sense, will help in the decades-long effort to construct a new narrative.

About the Author

Annie Crabill is an M.A. student at the Yale Jackson Institute. She is interested in writing about global affairs for a broad audience.

Endnotes

1. Diane Coyle, GDP A Brief but Affectionate History - Revised and expanded Edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 13; Stephen J. Macekura, The Mismeasure of Progress: Economic Growth and its Critics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020), 27-28.

2. Macekura, The Mismeasure of Progress: 28-29.

3. Ibid., 5.

4. Ibid., 40.

5. Ibid., 198.

6. Ibid., 10.

7. Ibid., 190-191.

8. Ibid., 190.

9. Ibid., 188.

10. Jordan Kisner, “The Lockdown Showed How the Economy Exploits Women. She Already Knew,” The New York Times, February 17, 2021,  https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/magazine/waged-housework.html.

11. Macekura, The Mismeasure of Progress, 149.

12. Ibid., 140.

13. Ibid., 39-40; 82.

14. Ibid., 193.