Edwin Stennett’s book — important reading. Growth Education MovementNot long ago we examined an important Brookings Institution paper by Paul Gottlieb titled Growth Without Growth. Gottlieb shows convincingly that population growth is in no way necessary for a U.S. city to see per-capita income growth. His findings go a long way toward debunking the myth that population growth is necessary for per-capita economic wellbeing.
Edwin Stennett expands on Gottlieb’s finding in In Growth We Trust. This book is a key work on the relationship between sprawl and population growth. I recommend it to anyone serious about studying the issues covered on the Small Town Project.
In it, Stennett reviews the Growth Without Growth paper, then looks at the same question on the level of nations. (pp 61-62) He examines the relationship between rate of population growth and rate of growth of per-capita gross domestic product (as percentages per year) for the United States and 15 western European countries. [1] (The latter data came from U.S. Census Bureau tables.) Using the time span from 1970 to 1998, he finds no significant correlation between the two variables in question. [2] His scattergram shows the individual countries spread essentially randomly around an almost horizontal trendline. Notably, the United States shows by far the most population growth among the 16 countries, yet is only about average in per-capita gross domestic product growth. This is a strong indication that population growth is simply not an important factor in creating or explaining a country’s per-capita economic health. (To be consistent with our series exposing the myths of growth, we can label as “myth #5″ the notion that a country does need such growth.)
Should we be surprised? I don’t think so. Recall Albert Bartlett’s question:
Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor, on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases in population, locally, nationally, or globally?
Considering both the Growth Without Growth study and his own finding, Stennett concludes:
The negligible correlation between population growth and per capita economic growth at both the national and the major metropolitan area levels should give anyone ample reason to reconsider blind belief in the notion that population growth is necessary for economic wellbeing.
Indeed, we’ve been lulled, in part by pervasive growth machine claims, into a kind of collective blind belief that, no matter what, “growth is good.” It’s become the conventional thinking in the U.S. Stennett’s observations help us open our eyes, putting another crack in the wall of conventional thinking.
[1] Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom
[2] R^2 = 0.0123