culture | simple statements about economic growth, culture, and technology (20260910)

These statements should be, roughly speaking, common sense. From many conversations I have had they do not appear to be.

1. Economic growth does not imply population growth.
2. Population growth does not imply economic growth.
3. Exponential population growth requires exponential economic growth with at least the same growth rate if the average quality of life per human is to be maintained, assuming that the technological frontier remains constant.
4. Just because aggregate economic activity grows at the same rate as the population (or faster) does not imply that the median quality of life per human is maintained; and, in fact…
5. …economic growth at any rate is conditionally independent of the quality of the median human by any measure (or human of any one specific income or wealth percentile); a latent causal or independent factor is wealth distribution; another is factor productivity; another is property rights and more generally rule of law; etc.
6. Economic growth, by itself, does not create (or halt) cultural change.
7. Cultural change, by itself, does not create (or destroy) economic growth.

These should, again, really be common sense, at least to any person capable of thinking clearly. A broad takeaway is that economic growth as a concept or metric is not at all sufficient for describing one’s societal goal state, and actually is probably best left as a downstream metric or more-observable statistical quantity rather than a variable to be optimized.

There are two more empirical statements that are worth contemplating:

1. If the technological frontier expands then the average quality of life per human *can* increase while economic growth decreases, or even contracts; and can also increase dramatically when economic growth also increases; and could even decrease dramatically while economic growth increases (e.g., as Gini -> 1); and so, with an expanding technological frontier, literally anything is possible and precision in the measurement of both population welfare and technological frontier expansion is required to say anything further (and we are, today, not so good at measuring either).
2. Empirically, an expanding technological frontier has generally meant dramatic long-run population-wide welfare increases after transient conflict which is sometimes intense. Cato has many stories of the former cataloged at https://humanprogress.org/; they don’t focus as heavily on the latter. It is also very important to repeat the mantra that past performance does not guarantee future results in a nonstationary system.

From the above and a select set of normative views (backward derivation left to the reader…for now…) a few other statements can be derived.

1. A high temporal average economic growth rate is a moral imperative.
2. High temporal average economic growth is not sufficient for societal flourishing.