Selfishness, Greed and Capitalism. Christopher Snowdon

‘and it’s time we focused not just on GDP, but on GWB – general well-being’ (BBC 2006). In this, Cameron was echoing the words of Tony Blair, who wrote in 1999: ‘Money isn’t everything. But in the past governments have seemed to forget this. Success has been measured by economic growth – GDP – alone’ (Easton 2006).

      Both political leaders were tapping into a widely held belief that British society had become obsessed with increasing national income at the expense of the good life. According to this narrative, the neoliberal counter-revolution of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had focused exclusively on the creation of wealth. In their blinkered materialism, advocates of free markets pursued money in the belief that it would make them happy. The production and consumption of goods had become the sole goal of public policy and all efforts were judged by whether they increased Gross Domestic Product.

      Sometimes this obsession is put in terms of disease, addiction, religion or pathology. We are ‘addicted to growth’, according to the Centre for the Advancement of a Steady State Economy (Gardner 2011). The economist Joseph Stiglitz has urged politicians to ‘get away from GDP fetishism’ (Jolly 2009). In a reference to Alcoholics Anonymous, the campaign group Post Growth offers a twelve step programme to ‘treat our growth addiction’ (Nelson 2010) while Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation says that ‘the “call to prayer” of conventional economics has been the incantation of economic growth figures’ (Simms 2009). For Stephen Lacey of Climate Progress, GDP ‘is the crack-cocaine of economic indicators’ which ‘fits in perfectly with society’s single-minded obsession with growth’ (Lacey 2012). George Monbiot writes of ‘the iron god of growth to which we must bow’ (Monbiot 2013) while Oxfam’s Economic Justice Policy Officer complains about ‘the “growth at all costs” neoliberal mantra of the last 30-odd years’ (Oxfam GB 2012).

      It is a powerful narrative. The only thing missing is an example of any economist or politician ever expressing support for the ‘growth at all costs’ mantra which has supposedly been the global doctrine of capitalism for several decades. Cameron and Blair both saw themselves as challenging the conventional wisdom and yet it is surprisingly difficult to track down advocates of the alleged orthodoxy. It may be that some people truly believe that GDP is the only measure of success, as Blair claimed. Perhaps they genuinely think that there is nothing more to life than money, as Cameron asserted. But if so, they have kept their thoughts to themselves. Public discussion about national income almost invariably centres on the more credible assertion that GDP is not a measure of anything other than economic output and that money does not necessarily buy you happiness.

      It is doubtful whether anyone has ever viewed GDP as the be-all and end-all. Simon Kuznets, the economist who invented GDP as a measure, told the US Congress in the 1930s that ‘the welfare of a nation can … scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income as defined by the GDP’ (Faris 2009). Many years later Robert Kennedy (1968) delivered a famous speech in which he addressed the limits of gross national product:

      Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

      Then, as now, it was not clear to whom this rebuke was being directed. Even among economists, GDP is not seen as the only, or even necessarily the main, indicator of economic progress. Statistics pertaining to unemployment, inflation, debt, inequality, wages and the balance of trade have all preoccupied economic strategists to a lesser or greater extent in the last century. In 1944, Friedrich Hayek – a free-market economist if ever there was one – shared the consensus view when he said that ‘the conquest of unemployment’ was ‘the one aim which everybody now agrees comes in the front rank’ of economic priorities (Hayek 2001: 211). Throughout the Thatcher era, the averagely well-informed newspaper reader was more likely to have had a better idea of what the current unemployment and inflation figures were than to know the last quarter’s GDP growth rate.

      A blind obsession?

      Perhaps we do not need to identify a specific individual who espouses the ‘growth at all costs mantra’ for such an attitude to be the implicit doctrine of government. Politicians from Kennedy to Cameron might deny that they are smitten with GDP, but their actions may betray them. In other words, there may not literally be a temple to the god of economic growth, but our leaders pray to it all the same.

This argument does not stand up against the facts. If ‘growth at all costs’ were truly the mantra of the last thirty years, we would expect this to be reflected in policy. If society has a ‘blind obsession with growth’ (Peck 2012), as the New Economics Foundation claims, we should have seen massive deregulation, open borders immigration, huge tax cuts, looser planning laws, the abolition of subsidies and the withering away of the state. Instead, we have seen bureaucracies expand, regulations spread and taxes rise. Public spending in the UK more than doubled in real terms during the era of supposed neoliberalism, from £337 billion in 1979/80 to £735 billion by the end of the last decade (see Figure 1, inflation-adjusted to 2013/14 prices).11

      1 Public spending in 2013/14 prices (UK)

      Source: IFS (2014).