Growth by Vaclav; Smil

Author:Vaclav; Smil
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2020-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

Tracing the growth of economies can be done by focusing on some key proxy measures of key inputs (total energy or electricity demand, food supply), products (steel, cars) or product groups (total manufacturing output) but by far the most revealing commonly used indicator, gross domestic product, is also one that is questionable, both because of how it is accounted for and what it omits. In any case, this measure (particularly in an internationally comparable form) has become widely available only after WWII although some ingenious reconstructions have quantified it for some countries as far back as the late early modern era (late 1700s) and attempts were even made to estimate it for select years in the Middle Ages and in antiquity (Maddison 2007).

I will start my coverage by reviewing these grand historic contours of the growth of the global economy and of its key national (or imperial) actors. Then I will proceed with a more detailed coverage of modern economic growth, focusing first on its major sectoral constituents before concentrating on longer historic trends for the leading countries with the best statistical coverage (US, UK, France, Japan) and on the recent rise of China. I will also address the most obvious weaknesses of the standard GDP approach and look at some additional or alternative ways to assess economic growth and its wider impacts, including the Human Development Index and recent efforts to measure subjective satisfaction with life and to compare self-assessed happiness on the global scale.

Populations

Interest in population growth has a long history and there is no shortage of comprehensive analyses at the global level (McEvedy and Jones 1978; Keyfitz and Flieger 1971, 1991; Livi-Bacci 2012; Bashford 2014), as well as those focusing on continents (Livi-Bacci 2000; Liu et al. 2001; Groth and May 2017; Poot and Roskruge 2018) and on major nations (Poston and Yaukey 1992; Dyson et al. 2005). Rising numbers of people have had many inevitable impacts on national and global capacities to supply adequate nutrition and to sustain desirable levels of global economic growth, as well on the state of the Earth’s environment and on the strategic options of major world powers. The first linkage, addressed just before the end of the 18th century by Thomas Robert Malthus, has remained a matter of concern ever since (Malthus 1798; Godwin 1820; Smith 1951; Meynen 1968; Cohen 1995; Dolan 2000).

During the early 1970s this concern was potentiated by claims of imminent resource scarcities and a perilously deteriorating state of the global environment (Meadows et al. 1972). In turn, these claims were challenged by those who saw growing populations as the ultimate resource (Simon 1981; Simon and Kahn 1984). More recently, population growth has been seen as part of a much larger challenge of coping with anthropogenic global warming, particularly in African countries which will experience the largest population increments during the 21st century while many of them already face serious environmental degradation and recurrent droughts.

The declining importance of physical labor—due to advancing mechanization, automation, robotization, and the large-scale

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