How can we look beyond GDP and develop new metrics that balance growth with human flourishing and environmental well-being? How can we be more engaged global citizens? In this age of AI, what does it really mean to be human? And how are our technologies transforming us?
Daniel Susskind is a Research Professor in Economics at King's College London and a Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University. He is the author of A World without Work and co-author of the bestselling The Future of the Professions. Previously, he worked in various roles in the British Government - in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, in the Policy Unit in 10 Downing Street, and in the Cabinet Office. His latest book is Growth: A Reckoning.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
I've been enjoying Growth: A Reckoning. It's not something that I learned in school—this whole historical context of growth and GDP. These concepts were relatively recently introduced, as you outline in your book that until the Cold War, almost no economist was focusing on economic growth in the way that we do now. So, how did the emphasis on GDP emerge, and how did it inspire you to write Growth: A Reckoning?
DANIEL SUSSKIND
The history of growth is fascinating. This idea that we ought to pursue economic growth sits at the center of our common life together. And yet the amazing thing is, before the 1950s, no economists, policymakers, or politicians were talking about the idea of economic growth. Before the 1950s, there was no reliable way to know how big the economy was—whether it was growing, and if it was growing, by how much. Growth is actually a product of war more than anything else. In the 1940s, the British government was at war, and a basic question when you're waging war is: how much of the economy can you slice up and dedicate to the war effort, and how much do you have to keep behind for civilian needs? So, British economist John Maynard Keynes and American Simon Kuznets developed what became known—actually not until the 1990s—as GDP, a static snapshot of how big the economy is at a particular moment in time. What put growth on the map and this relentless pursuit of getting ever-larger GDP numbers was the Cold War. Since there were no traditional measures of who was winning—territory won and lost, soldiers killed, equipment destroyed, and so on—the size of the economies of the United States and the Soviet Union became a kind of proxy measure of who was winning that Cold War, because the view is that the country with a larger economy will be able to fund a larger military in the event there's ever a sort of mad decision is taken to turn this cold war into a hot one. As the 20th century unfolds and as the demands of war fall away, the pursuit of growth stubbornly remains behind.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Yes, you also kind of hint there that GDP almost measures all the metrics for human flourishing, but there are a lot of things that it doesn't measure or doesn't measure accurately. It's really a call to action towards the third section of your book: how can we be more engaged global citizens? How can we improve these metrics to imagine new futures that are based not just on those limitations of GDP? How do we develop those other metrics? I know it's not all about propositions, but how do you propose we develop new metrics to capture those aspects of social value that are overlooked?
SUSSKIND
Growth: A Reckoning really is a book of two halves—the first part of the book is on the intellectual history of the idea of growth and how little we know about the idea of growth despite its immense importance; the second half of the book turns to look at what we should do about the growth dilemma—this tension between the extraordinary promise of growth and the immense price of growth, this feeling of being wrenched in two directions at the same time. There are two big problems with the GDP measure. One is the technical limitations of GDP—it actually does quite a bad job measuring the amount of economic activity that takes place in the market in an economy. For instance, there are many things that are tremendously valuable but don't come with a price tag attached, such as a search engine or email. There are also lots of things that do have a price, but their quality changes very dramatically over time, such as an iPhone today might have a similar price to an iPhone five years ago, but it's in so many different dimensions, dramatically improved in terms of quality. Then there's a set of worries about the moral limits of the GDP measure—that there are many socially valuable things we don't include in the GDP statistics, such as the health of the environment and the level of inequality. There is a very strong intellectual current of thought that believes the way to deal with this tension between the promise and the price of growth is to capture the value of those other things that we do care about and bundle them into a more perfect GDP statistic—rather than pursue the morally flawed GDP measure we pursue today, we ought to instead pursue this morally enriched GDP measure which better reflects what we really value and care about as a society. The argument I make in the book is that it's probably a mistake: these questions about what we really value are fundamentally moral questions, and the place to answer them is not in treasuries and central government statistical offices—it's not for technocrats, economists and statisticians to answer these questions as they're trying to do today, but for citizens.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Yes, I think that that's really interesting. The average person, as you addressed, would like to find those statistics in one area so that we can have them at our fingertips because we’re drowning in data—the amount of data that's being stored is doubling every two years. I know you have practical knowledge, having worked in Downing Street, about navigating the societal trade-offs when we're pursuing growth. How do you propose we navigate those trade-offs, particularly with regard to the environment, equality, and globalization, without compromising long-term sustainability?
SUSSKIND
I think the starting point is that—and it might sound counterintuitive given what I said about the growth dilemma and immense price of growth—but we desperately need more growth. Of course, if we were to only pursue more economic growth, we would be committing the same mistake—relentlessly pursuing more growth, but neglecting the extraordinary price of doing so. We should instead imagine that politicians and policymakers are sailors on a boat, and they can put up the sails and go faster or pull them down and go slower, but they can also choose whatever direction they want on the open sea. What I set up in my book is how we can have growth that is more respectful of place—doesn't cause as much damage to the environment, doesn't lead to as large inequalities in society, doesn’t disrupt politics, doesn't undermine the availability of good work. You have politicians like Caroline Lucas, environmentalists like David Attenborough, activists like Greta Thunberg, all appealing to the idea of degrowth, but when you actually look at what is meant by degrowth—it is extraordinarily confusing. At one end of the extreme is very strong degrowth, which says we should even reverse shrink certain economies around the world, which would be the greatest act of harm humanity could inflict on itself. There is the other end of the spectrum, where I sit, where it’s not about pursuing less growth or no growth, but recognizing there might be a price paid in terms of growth, and that price is worth paying to demote growth in the hierarchy of things that we collectively care about as a society. I see this as an opportunity for moral renewal—to pay more attention to the valuable ends that we have neglected until now through our dogmatic focus on growth. People often have an old-fashioned conception of growth—that growth comes from using more and more of our finite resources. But that isn't where growth comes from. It comes from discovering new ideas about how to make use of those finite resources. Those finite resources are finite, but the world of ideas is unimaginably vast—as good as infinite. The degrowth movement is wrong in its understanding of how growth works, and once we recognize it's wrong—new possibilities emerge for how we might resolve the growth dilemma.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
I like the idea that we have this potential infinite resource of good ideas. I know you also serve on the Institute for Ethics In AI at Oxford, and there’s also the book you’ve co-authored with your father The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts, where you discussed the impact of automation and how technology should assist rather than replace workers.
SUSSKIND
Yes, the running theme in all of my work has been technology. The first book that I co-authored with my dad was published in 2015. The second book I wrote was A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond, published in 2020, just before the pandemic began. My new book Growth: A Reckoning is about growth, but also technological progress, because what drives growth is technological progress—we have a choice to change the nature of growth, and the same is true of our technological progress. To reach a dynamic economy capable of generating ever more ideas about the world, we need to use the technologies we have to generate new ideas about the world. One of the technologies I've been particularly excited by was AlphaFold, developed by DeepMind to solve protein folding problems in biology. Essentially, understanding the 3D shape of proteins is important for understanding disease and designing effective treatment, but incredibly difficult to figure out, and Alpha fold has solved this problem by providing the 3D structures of millions of proteins. As the only economist in The Institute for Ethics in AI, I’ve always found the moral, ethical side of technology interesting. I often get asked, “What can machines do, and what can they not do?” But I think one of the most troubling, but also one of the most fascinating things about technology is it is forcing us to ask the question “What does it really mean to be human? What is humanity?” For a long time, many people thought the core of what it means to be a human being is to be a creative thing. But with the arrival of generative AI in the last few years, I think that that has been really called into question. These AI systems are particularly good at creative tasks—coming up with original, novel text, images, and video. In fact, I actually use these AI systems to generate bedtime stories with my children—getting the kids to craft a good prompt is quite a fun, intellectually demanding exercise, and these technologies now give my children a storytelling capability that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. So, one of the interesting philosophical consequences of technologies is that it's challenging some of the complacency and deep-rooted assumptions about what it really means to be a human being.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
That's interesting—using AI as a collaborative tool. I would hope then in the end, they would say, “Well, that wasn't exactly the story I wanted, but let me add to that now.” But speaking of co-authoring with your father—and you also referenced your brother Jamie in your book—as you reflect on some of those mentors that have been especially important in your life and writing, what did they pass on, and what do you pass on to your students?
SUSSKIND
My dad’s entire career has been thinking about technology and artificial intelligence—he wrote his doctorate in the 1980s on artificial intelligence and law, so almost 40 years ago, he was already trying to build systems that could solve legal problems. He was really part of the vanguard. And my brother writes about the impact of technology on politics, so it's a sort of funny family preoccupation. But beyond that, the biggest thing I got from my parents was a love of books and ideas. I was very lucky that my parents were very generous and always bought me books growing up. I spent a lot of time teaching mathematics and economics at the start of my career, and because of my parents, I always try to get students excited and interested in ideas. Economics has taken an extraordinarily sharp mathematical turn in the last few decades—it's almost indistinguishable from some of the most complex branches of mathematics, which is a complete contrast to how people did economics in the first half of the 20th century. Economics has gone from being a literary tradition to a mathematical tradition, so I always try to make sure my students understand intuition and see mathematics as a sort of language. I've always been slightly jealous of the great storytellers in science, particularly physicists who are able to tell these extraordinary stories about the world and the universe. So what I try to do in my work is take these relatively obscure, technical, dry, academic, difficult economic ideas and tell stories that make them far more accessible, engaging, and interesting.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Yes, and in Growth: A Reckoning, you share this lovely quote from Nietzsche: “The sea, our sea, lies open again; maybe there has never been such an open sea.” You know, getting us to dream about this vast and endless sea, talking about reconnecting with the earth and maybe a more sustainable level of growth. I know you're a gardener, and as you think about planting trees for future generations, what are those ways that you reconnect with the earth and the beauty and wonder of the natural world? And ultimately, as you think about the future and the kind of world we're leaving the next generation, what would you like young people to know, preserve, and remember?
SUSSKIND
Recently, I have become a very enthusiastic gardener—borderline obsessive—and it was sort of inevitable. I remember, even when I was very young, my mom knew the RHS Royal Horticultural Society Encyclopedia of Gardening almost by heart—there wasn't a flower she couldn't identify, and it was completely brilliant. So it was always a matter of time until I became a gardener myself. It was a consequence of the lockdown, of all those walks that all of us did during the pandemic, and just paying more attention to the natural environment—the trees, the plants, and the animals on walks and in my own garden. Now, I am completely obsessed. At the moment, I am collecting seeds with my children. As a team, the three of us are collecting seeds, and getting ready to sow them. Right now, there are a lot of labeled jars and trays of seeds drying out. And we'll get planting in a few months.
