Oxford economics professor Daniel Susskind’s recent book, , underscores both the historical novelty of the concept of sustained economic growth and why democratic capitalism needs it to continue to be a priority. Susskind begins by explaining how new a phenomenon sustained economic growth is. For millennia before the Industrial Revolution, stagnation was the norm, with brief periods of higher living standards punctuated by setbacks due to supply constraints, population growth or pillage by thieves or invaders.
In an owing to economic historian Jonathan Levy, the result was economies that expanded and contracted like accordions, with no continuing progress overall. Permanent stagnation resulted in all human cultural narratives assuming the economy was a zero-sum exercise in which the only way of improving incomes was at the expense of someone else. As sociologist Jack D.
Douglas , “the zero-sum game is really the most ancient way of thinking, found in all primitive societies and highly exaggerated in peasant mentality.” Ubiquitous belief in the zero-sum model was self-reinforcing: the resulting focus on redistribution limited the possibility of sustained growth. Oxford’s Eric Beinhocker this is because “societies that believe in a fixed pie of wealth have a difficult time engendering cooperation and tend to be low in mutual trust,” both of which are required for capitalism and trade to flourish.
In addition, economic historian Deirdre McCloskey suggests, the denigr.