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Growth is essential to human life. Always has been, always will be. From the moment we are born, we grow, and we continue to throughout our lives, whether that is physically, mentally, or otherwise. Societies grow too.

But what is growth? Real growth is replicable, durable, and sustainable (and not in the sense that immediately comes to mind). Your seven-year-old doesn’t shrink back down after she grows an inch. It might happen when she’s ninety, but that’s gravity (and don’t you think she’s had a good run at this point? We should accept that it’s ok to have a growth recession every now and again). So how have intellectuals conceptualized the growth of societies, environments, and economies over time? And how should we think about growth?

The wonderful Henry C. Clark joins us on the podcast today to answer these questions and more. He is the program director of the Political Economy Project at Dartmouth College and the author of several books including the newly released The Moral Economy We Have Lost: Life Before Mass Abundance. Go check it out!


Want to explore more?

• Henry Clark on the Enlightenments, a Great Antidote podcast.
• Pierre Desrochers, From Prometheus to Arcadia: Liberals, Conservatives, the Environment, and Cultural Cognition, at Econlib.
• Robert Pindyck on Averting and Adapting to Climate Change, an EconTalk podcast.
• Sandra Peart and David Levy, Happiness and the Vanity of the Philosopher: Part1, at Econlib.
• Deirdre McCloskey and Economists' Ideas About Ideas, a Liberty Matters forum at the Online Library of Liberty.

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