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half that improvement is not directly related to better medical technology, nar-rowly defined). It provides us with leisure:eight-hour workdays(rather than “Man’swork is from sun to sun,and woman’s work isnever done.”) It providesus with enough clothingthat we are not cold,enough shelter that weare not wet, and enoughfood that we are nothungry. It provides uswith amusements anddiversions, so that there is more to do in theevenings than huddlearound the v i l lagecampfire and listen yetagain to that blind poetfrom the other side ofthe Aegean tell the onlylong story he knows—

the one about Achilles and Agamemnon.As time passes, what were luxuries be-come, first, conveniences, and then neces-

sities; what were utopian dreams becomefirst luxuries and then conveniences; andwhat was unimagined even in wild fan-tasy becomes first utopian dreams andthen luxuries.

Economists have been less good at de-tailing the moral consequences of eco-nomic growth. There are occasionalapothegms: John Maynard Keynes ob-served that it is better for a man to tyran-nize over his bank balance than his fel-lows (a rich society has an upper class

20 January - February 2006

Growth Is GoodAn economist’s take on the moral consequences of material progress

by j. bradfold delong

e economists have always been very good at detailing

the material consequences of modern economic

growth. It makes us taller: we are perhaps seven

inches taller than our preindustrial ancestors. It

makes us healthier: babies today have life expectan-

cies in the seventies, not the twenties (and more thanWB

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Benjamin M. Friedman, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (Knopf, $35).

P h o t o g r a p h © B e t t m a n n / C O R B I S

T H E B R O W S E R

Full throttle: China’s re-markable growth, symbol-ized by the 1956 rice har-vest in Yunnan Provinceand by today’s Pudongdistrict, in Shanghai.

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that focuses on its wealth as power-over-nature, rather than on its power aspower-over-people). Adam Smith wroteabout how wealth made it attractive forthe British aristocracy to abandon theirfeudal armies and private wars and moveto London to take up positions in societyand at court. Voltaire (who not even I canclaim was an economist) observed thatpeople who in other circumstances wouldtry to kill each other for worshipping thewrong god (or the right god in the wrongway) were perfectly polite and civil whenthey met each other as potential tradingpartners on the floor of the London Ex-change. Albert Hirschman (who is aneconomist) wrote a brilliant little book,The Passions and the Interests, about the eigh-teenth-century idea that commercial so-ciety made humans “sweet”: polite, cour-teous, and civilized, viewing one anotheras potential partners in mutually benefi-cial market exchanges, rather than as clanmembers to be helped, clan enemies to bekilled, or strangers to be robbed. Butfocus on the moral consequences of eco-nomic growth has—from the economists’side, at least—been rare.

Benjamin M. Friedman ’66, Jf ’71, Ph.D.’71, Maier professor of political economy,now fills in this gap: he makes a powerfulargument that—politically and sociologi-cally—modern society is a bicycle, witheconomic growth being the forward mo-mentum that keeps the wheels spinning.As long as the wheels of a bicycle arespinning rapidly, it is a very stable vehicleindeed. But, he argues, when the wheelsstop—even as the result of economic stag-nation, rather than a downturn or a de-pression—political democracy, individualliberty, and social tolerance are thengreatly at risk even in countries where theabsolute level of material prosperity re-mains high.

Consider just one of his examples—acalculation he picks up from his colleagueAlberto Alesina, Ropes professor of polit-ical economy, and others: in an averagecountry in the late twentieth century, realper capita income is falling by 1.4 percentin the year in which a military coup oc-curs; it is rising by 1.4 percent in the yearin which there is a legitimate constitu-tional transfer of political power; and it isrising by 2.7 percent in the year in which

no major transfer of political power takesplace. If you want all kinds of non-eco-nomic good things, Friedman says—likeopenness of opportunity, tolerance, eco-nomic and social mobility, fairness, anddemocracy—rapid economic growthmakes it much, much easier to get them;and economic stagnation makes gettingand maintaining them nearly impossible.

The book is a delight to read, probingrelatively deeply into individual topicsand yet managing to hurry along fromdiscussions of political order in Africa toeconomic growth and the environment,to growth and equality, to the Enlighten-ment thinkers of eighteenth-century Eu-rope, to the twentieth-century historiesof the major European countries, to ahost of other subjects. Yet each topic’s re-lationship to the central thesis of thebook is clear: the subchapters show thevirtuous circles (by which economicgrowth and sociopolitical progress andliberty reinforce each other) and the vi-cious circles (by which stagnation breedsviolence and dictatorship) in action.Where growth is rapid, the movementtoward democracy is easier and socie-

ties become freer andmore tolerant. And so-cieties that are freeand more tolerant (al-beit not necessarilydemocratic) find iteasier to attain rapideconomic growth.

Friedman is notafraid to charge head-on at the major twen-tieth-century counter-example to his the-sis: the Great Depres-sion in the UnitedStates. Elsewhere inthe world, that cata-strophe o≠ers no chal-lenge to his point ofview. Rising unem-ployment and declin-ing incomes in Japan inthe 1930s certainlyplayed a role in the as-sassinations and silentcoups by which thatcountry went from afunctioning constitu-tional monarchy withrepresentative institu-tions in 1930 to a fascist

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The Talking Ape: How Lan-guage Evolved, by RobbinsBurling, Ph.D. ’58 (Oxford Uni-versity Press, $29.95). A per-suasive, urbane, and gin-clearaccount of how language cameto be, and how it a≠ects theway we think and behave, by aprofessor emeritus of anthro-pology and linguistics at theUniversity of Michigan.

Pull: Networking and Suc-cess since Benjamin Franklin,by Pamela Walker Laird ’69(Harvard University Press,$29.95). This is America: withtalent and industry, anyone can risefrom messenger boy to tycoon, just asAndrew Carnegie did. Bunk, writesLaird, associate professor of history atthe University of Colorado, Denver.There are no self-made men. To succeedin business one must have socialassets—mentors, access to influentialnetworks, a way around gatekeepers.

The Trial: A History, from Socrates toO.J. Simpson, by Sadakat Kadri, LL.M. ’89(Random House, $29.95). Four thousandyears of courtroom drama. The author, acriminal lawyer in England, explores seri-ous societal matters with captivatingverve and humor.

The Conference of the Birds, by Je≠reyLewis, J.D. ’70 (Other Press, $22.95).Lewis’s quartet of novels tracking thepost-war “elite” of American life over thecourse of 40 years began with Meritocracy:A Love Story, set in the 1960s. This is thesecond, portraying members of the gener-ation in New York City in 1978, feelingdisinherited.

The Formation of Chinese Civilization:An Archaeological Perspective, by thelate Kwang-chih Chang, Ph.D. ’60, Hud-son professor of anthropology, Xu Ping-fang, and others, edited by Sarah Allen(Yale University Press, $65). The authorstake readers into the great archaeologicalfinds of the past hundred years in a large,

handsomely illustrated book for scholarsand interested tourists as well.

Trees, National Champions, photo-graphs by Barbara Bosworth, with essaysby Douglas R. Nickel and John R. Stilgoe,Ph.D. ’77, Orchard professor in the historyof landscape (MIT Press, $39.95). “Thelone mature tree or compact group of ma-ture trees in otherwise open country,”Stilgoe writes, “stands outside of ordi-nary American landscape aesthetics andat the edge of photographic possibility.”

Our Parents, Ourselves: How AmericanHealth Care Imperils Middle Age andBeyond, by Judith Steinberg Turiel, Ed.D.’77 (University of California Press; $55,cloth; $21.95, paper). Med-ical writer Turiel considershow social and healthcarepolicies a≠ect our dailylives. She may be especiallyhelpful to people caring foraging parents.

Tempting Tropicals: 175Irresistible Indoor Plants,by Ellen Zachos ’82 (Tim-ber Press, $29.95). The ir-resistibility of theselargely uncommon plantsis furthered by many color photographs,most by the author, and by substantial,helpful descriptions of the exotics andtheir desires. Zachos teaches at the New

York Botanical Garden. (For more abouther, see “Miserable She’s Not,” July-Au-gust 2003, page 87.)

The Intellectuals and the Flag, by ToddGitlin ’63 (Columbia University Press,$24.95). The fundamentalist left, writesGitlin, professor of journalism and sociol-ogy at Columbia, “negates politics infavor of theology. It wheels away from thenecessary debates about where to gofrom here. It takes refuge in the margins,displaying its clean hands, and recuses it-self.” The left, he argues, must imagineand propose a reformed America.

Graffiti Brasil, by Tristan Manco, LostArt, and Caleb Neelon, Ed.M. ’04

(Thames & Hudson,$22.50, paper). A guide inwords and 300 colorphotographs to the ex-traordinarily creativegra∞ti of Brazil, towhich alumnus Neelonhas made his own con-tribution in paint.

Bees Besieged: OneBeekeeper’s Bitter-sweet Journey to Un-derstanding, by Bill

Mares ’62 (Root, $25, paper). A tour deforce on beekeeping. Naturalist EdwardHoagland ’54 calls it “torrentially infor-mative…fun and fascinating.”

O F F T H E S H E L F

A sampling of current books received at this magazine

Barbara Bosworth photographs “champion” trees—the biggest of their species. She made this panoramic view of a Darlington oak in three parts with an 8x10 camera.

A detail from a wall adjacent tothe Carandiru Prison, São Paulo,

by artist Speto


military dictatorship in 1940—a dictator-ship that, tied down in a quagmire of aland war in Asia as a result of its attack onChina, thought it was a good idea to at-tack, and thus add to its enemies, the twosuperpowers of Britain and the UnitedStates. In western Europe the calculus isequally simple: no Great Depression, noHitler. The saddest book on my shelf is a1928 volume called Republican Germany: AnEconomic and Political Survey, the thesis ofwhich is that after a decade of post-WorldWar I political turmoil, Germany hadfinally become a stable, legitimate, democ-ratic republic. And only the fact that theGreat Depression came and offered Hitlerhis opportunity made it wrong.

In the United States, however, thingswere di≠erent—and not favorable toFriedman’s broad thesis. The 1930s werean extraordinarily painful economicshock to this country, but also a decadeduring which our nation strengthened itscommitment to the liberal values that areits best nature. Admittedly, things mighthave gone otherwise: consider Huey Longin Louisiana, Father Coughlin over theairwaves, California’s treatment of De-pression-era migrants from other statesthat we read about today only in TheGrapes of Wrath, and the white-hot hatredfor Roosevelt as a class traitor that putstoday’s shrill, unbalanced critics of Bushand Clinton in the shade. (Up until hisdying day six months ago, my 98-year-oldgrandfather would still say the countrywas lucky to have survived FDR.) Allthese examples show us signs of an Amer-ica that could have gone the other way inthe 1930s. Yet, as Friedman writes, “Amer-ica during the Great Depression strength-ened its commitment to these positivevalues [of openness, tolerance, anddemocracy], and, moreover, did so inways that proved lasting.” The New Dealwas a:

chaos of experimentation...to mobi-lize the e≠ective energy of govern-ment to spread economic opportu-nity as widely as possible—toinclude those whom birth and thetide of events had left out of thedistribution of America’s economicdividends. Rather than seekingscapegoats to exclude...the routeAmerica took in the 1930s was de-liberately pluralist and inclusive,seeking input and participationfrom a more diverse collection of

constituencies than ever before.And the intent of all this politicalactivism was not just restored eco-nomic prosperity but more equaleconomic opportunity.

The line I use in my American eco-nomic-history lectures starts by suggest-ing that before the Great Depression,America’s rural, small town, and urban(and overwhelmingly Protestant) middleclasses—farmers, druggists, merchants,and so forth—did not really believe thatthey had interests in common with thenon-white rural and the not-quite-white(and Jewish and Catholic) urban-immi-grant working classes. The Great Depres-sion impoverished enough people whothought they had it made to convinceenough of the middle class that they hadenough interests in common with theworking class to make it worthwhile topush for equality of opportunity foreveryone—or at least for some peoplewho weren’t white, northern-EuropeanProtestants. This is my best guess, but itis only a guess. Friedman does not reallyknow why the Great Depression did notmake America a less democratic, less tol-erant, less free country. But he does notapologize: he concludes his chapter byquoting the noted Harvard economic his-torian Alexander Gerschenkron—“His-torical hypotheses are not...univer-sal....They cannot be falsified by a singleexception.”

Friedman has not written his versionof economic history and moral philoso-phy just for the sake of antiquarians likeme who like to read about the strange andfaraway places that are our own past. Hetakes historical patterns and draws fromthem immediate and powerful lessons forthe present.

Consider China. There are those todayin Washington, D.C., who look forward toa future in which China is America’senemy: they believe it will in some wayincrease our “national greatness” to wagea new Cold War in Asia—albeit againstan enemy weaker than Stalin’s SovietUnion was. There are those in Vice Presi-dent Cheney’s o∞ce who think that tradewith China is a bad idea: it creates a pro-China lobby that will stop any attemptsby the United States to slow downChina’s growth and acquisition of tech-nology. Better, they think, to try to keepChina as poor and barefoot as possible foras long as possible.

From Friedman’s perspective—andfrom mine—this is simply insane. In alllikelihood, China a century from now willbe a full-fledged post-industrial super-power whatever the policies of the UnitedStates. Do you want to maximize the like-lihood that that superpower will have arepresentative government presiding overan open, free society? Then work to maxi-mize economic growth, says Friedman.(And I would add: Does it really improve

Harvard Magazine 23

C H A P T E R & V E R S EA correspondence corner for not-so-famous lost words

Dale Higbee hopes to learn the sourceof a comment by Archibald MacLeish:“We know all the answers; it’s the ques-tions we don’t know.”

Alethea Black requests the title and au-thor of a poem about how life would beif we grew younger over time. The lastline is, “And su≠ering, of course, is joy.”

Karl Engelman asks if anyone can iden-tify an “insightful commentary” that de-fines conversation between two peopleas, in fact, an interaction among six par-ticipants, with each side consisting ofthe person speaking, the person thespeaker thinks he is, and the person theother speaker thinks the first speaker is.

“Rooty-toot-toot” (November-Decem-ber 2005). David Challinor, whose fatherwas in the first graduating class ofCarnegie Institute of Technology (nowCarnegie Mellon), in 1908, recalls hear-ing this verse sung in Pittsburgh in the1920s. But Catherine Dwyer and otherfans of Rice University (“Institute” until1960; opened in 1912) vehemently claimedthis variant of what may be an old BoyScout cheer. (Robert Bradbury supplied atraditional last line, rendered in falsetto:“Our class won the bible!”) Among othercandidates: the city jail and MIT.

Send inquiries and answers to “Chapterand Verse,” Harvard Magazine, 7 WareStreet, Cambridge 02138.


the national security of the United Statesfor schoolchildren in China to be taughtthat the United States sought to keepthem as poor as possible for as long aspossible?)

In fact, the China policy of the Clintonadministration was to do whatever wecould to speed China’s growth in the ex-pectation that rapid economic growthwill introduce the political cuckoo’s eggof democracy into the nest. A rapidlygrowing, prosperous middle class will beinterested in liberty and opportunity, andwill be a much more powerful force fordemocratization and personal freedom inChina than a battalion of lecturing neo-conservative think-tanks or a host of re-motely guided cruise missiles.

Consider the developing world morebroadly. Friedman is—as I am—a card-carrying neoliberal. We economists donot understand very much about howknowledge of modern technologies ande≠ective organizations and institutionsdi≠uses from region to region around theglobe. We do know that it di≠uses ap-pallingly slowly: there are still three bil-lion people throughout the world whoselives are largely preindustrial (even ifthey are far above the Malthusianpoverty in which most of our preindus-trial ancestors lived). We suspect thatmaximizing contact—economic, social,and cultural—is a powerful way to trans-fer ideas and practices. Hence the neolib-eral imperative: do whatever you can tomaximize economic growth in the devel-oping world, and hope that rapid growthgenerates in its train the strong localpressures for social, environmental, cul-tural, and political advance that areneeded if non-economic forms ofprogress are to be stable and durable.

There is a criticism of the neoliberalview that holds that higher material in-comes cannot be the cure to poverty, forpoverty is also a lack of voice in society, alack of security in one’s position, and alack of respect. With all this Friedmanagrees. But he adds that faster materialprogress is the best way to generate pres-sures to produce voice, security, and re-spect.

Hence the neoliberal imperative: lowerbarriers to trade and contact; lower bar-riers of all kinds; lower barriers in the ex-pectation that faster economic growthwill itself generate countervailing pres-sures that will undo and cure the bad so-



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cial and distributional side-e≠ects offaster growth. Friedman’s reading of themoral consequences of economic growthprovides a powerful piece of support tothis neoliberal imperative. (Support sopowerful, in fact, that Joseph E. Stiglitz,our Nobel Prize-winning non-neoliberalfriend, has an attack on The Moral Conse-quences of Economic Growth in the Novem-ber-December 2005 issue of Foreign Af-fairs.)

Consider the United States today. For ageneration now, the benefits of economicgrowth have been concentrated in thoseslots in American society that are at ornear the top. To the extent that any ofAmerica’s working class is richer today ininflation-adjusted terms than the nation’sworkers were in the early 1970s, it is be-cause today’s households have fewer chil-dren and a greater proportion of theirmembers out earning money. America’smiddle class today does live better than themiddle class lived in 1970 (and a bunch ofthe children of the 1970s working classare in today’s middle class). But today thegap between America’s middle class andits upper class yawns extremely wide, at

levels not seen since before the stock mar-ket crash of 1929.

Friedman is very worried that unequal-ly distributed prosperity is not reallyprosperity at all. During the past genera-tion we have seen the U.S. governmentplace its thumb on the scales on the sideof making the distribution of income andwealth in America more unequal. Some ofthis has been for reasons of economic e∞-ciency: withdrawing the regulatory um-brellas that allowed some unions to turnblue-collar jobs into occupations withmiddle-class salaries, or reducing taxrates while eliminating loopholes. Somehas been for reasons of moral purity: thereplacement of the idea that being a singlemother raising children was an importantsocial task that deserved support withthe idea that single mothers ought towork. Some is simply a naked wealth grabby the politically powerful.

What will the moral consequences ofunequally distributed prosperity be?Friedman fears, and perhaps for good rea-son, that they will resemble the conse-quences of economic stagnation. Peoplewho feel that they are living no better, or

not much better, than their parents willsearch for enemies: Hollywood writers,foreigners, people of “loose” morals, andHarvard graduates. And America will be-come a less free and less democratic soci-ety. The argument follows the lines of theargument in Thomas Frank’s What’s theMatter with Kansas? Those for whom theAmerican market economy is not deliver-ing increasing prosperity do not reach forthe right answer: policies to strengthenthe safety net, provide security throughsocial insurance, and improve opportu-nity through better education. Instead,they reach for the wrong answers: closingdown society and denouncing enemies—anti-Hollywoodism as the social democ-racy of fools, one might say.

I find myself more optimistic. This isnot to say that I disagree with the politi-cal program for America today that can bedrawn out of Friedman’s book: the pro-growth, pro-opportunity, pro-social-in-surance policies of today’s national Dem-ocratic Party are mother’s milk to me. ButI do not think we look forward to thegeneration of stagnation in the workingand the middle classes that Friedman

Harvard Magazine 25


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fears. Yes, the past generation has been adistributional disaster for America. Yes,at some point in the future the “outsourc-ing” of jobs made possible by moderntelecommunications and computer tech-nologies will produce enormous struc-tural change in the American economy.But the population of the United States is

growing slowly. The desirability of theUnited States as a place in which to lo-cate economic activity is growing rapidly:the underlying engine of technologicalprogress is spinning faster than it has inat least a generation. I see rising working-and middle-class incomes in Americaduring the next generation generating

what is in Friedman’s terms a virtuous,not a vicious, circle.

J. Bradford DeLong ’82, Ph.D. ’87, professor ofeconomics at the University of California atBerkeley, is at work on “The Economic History ofthe Twentieth Centur y: Slouching towardsUtopia?”


He was an admiralty lawyer whose second career was to e≠ectimprovements in public a≠airs—“meddling,” as he put it. CCB:The Life and Century of Charles C. Burlingham, New York’s First Citizen,by George Martin ’48 (Hill and Wang, $35), tells of the roleplayed by the high-spirited CCB, as everyone called him, inkeeping peace on Commencement day in 1935. As president ofthe Harvard Alumni Association, CCB, A.B. 1879, LL.D. ’34,presided over the afternoon speechifying, and the situationwas tense. He had proposed as speakers William Allan Neil-son, president of Smith, and Henry A. Wallace, secretary of

agriculture, both of whom would receive honorary degreesthat morning. Speeches by President James B. Conant andJames Michael Curley, governor of Massachusetts, were preor-dained. Rumors of an honorary degree for a New Deal o∞cialraised protests and predictions of a political storm at Com-mencement. Hearst newspapers had called for loyalty oathsfor teachers, Curley was strongly in favor of legislation to re-quire them, and Neilson was strongly opposed. CCB orches-trated the order of speakers to be as little incendiary as couldbe and began the proceedings, Martin relates, as follows:

On commencement day, in hisbrief introductory speech, he saidgenially that he personally had “nocontribution to make on higher, orany other, education.” Instead, “I

will venture to tell you what GertrudeStein [A.B. 1898] said when she recentlyrevisited” New England:

Education is thought about and as itis thought about it is being done inthe way it is thought about, which isnot true of almost anything. Almostanything is not done in the way it isthought about but education is donein the way it is thought about andthat is the reason so much of it isdone in New England and Switzer-land.…

In New England they have done it,they do do it, they will do it and theydo it in every way in which educa-tion can be thought about.

I find education everywhere andin New England it is everywhere, itis thought about everywhere inAmerica everywhere but only inNew England is it done as much asit is thought about. And that is say-ing a very great deal. They do it somuch in New England that theyeven do it more than it is thoughtabout.

The predominantly New England audi-

ence, feeling somehow flattered by thismodernist talk, smiled, though later onealumnus, in congratulating CCB on hisability to quote Stein “so comprehensi-bly,” confessed: “I do not feel quite surewhat all of it meant, but I expect that ismy own stupidity. At any rate, it gave memuch pleasure at the time.”

CCB touched lightly on one of theday’s sore topics….Before closing with ageneral statement about freedom andtruth, CCB o≠ered his own opinion:

I see no reason why a good teacheror student should be dropped fromthe rolls of any college because he isa pacifist, a communist, an atheist,or any other form of “ist,” providedhe sticks to his last in the classroomand is a propagandist only extramures…I have no fear of Fascism inthis country, but I confess that Ilook with some apprehension on thesuccesses of self-styled patriotic so-cieties in putting on the statutebook laws…requiring teachers inprivate as well as public schools totake a loyalty oath.…The next month the Alumni Bulletin re-

ported, “Throughout the addresses…ran an[undertone] of tension.” But CCB’s han-dling of the day won praise on all sides,not least because he had spoken forth-rightly yet not given o≠ense. Within the

university he was nowconsidered a graduateworth consulting, andHarvard o∞cials beganto seek his thoughts ontroublesome issues.…One problem [JosephR.] Hamlen [publisherof the Bulletin] took pri-vately to CCB con-cerned preparationsfor the university’s ter-centenary celebrationin September 1936.Former Harvard pres-ident [A. Lawrence]Lowell was refusing tointroduce or even siton the dais with eitherGovernor Curley orPresident Roosevelt.His reasons had moreto do with ego andmisunderstand ingthan politics, and CCBhad a part in restoringpeace. A disagreement between Conantand the faculty over salaries and retire-ments threatened to be more divisive, butit, too, was resolved successfully. And inJune 1940 the alumni association inaugu-rated an “Alumni Medal” for service to theuniversity by awarding it to CCB.

O P E N B O O K

They Do It So Much in New England

Charles C.Burlingham in New York, 1930.

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