Growth remains the default objective of nearly every government. Yet the relationship between rising output and lived experience is unstable: it is strong at low incomes, weak at high ones, and mediated by inequality, working hours, health and civic trust. The question is not whether growth matters but where and for whom it stops paying.
The tension
If growth is a means rather than an end, what replaces it as the number on the front page?
Evidence
Each attachment carries its provenance, its method, and the claim it supports or challenges.
Challenges Above a threshold, further growth in output no longer translates into reported wellbeing.
Provenance Maddison Project Database & World Happiness Report · 2023
Method Real GDP per capita indexed to 1972 (2017 PPP); life satisfaction is the global population-weighted mean on a 0–10 Cantril ladder. Series are not causally identified.
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Micro-debates
Thesis, counter-thesis, rebuttal, closing — then the room scores the reasoning.
No micro-debate has been staged on this idea yet.
Each perspective carries a rationale and the evidence behind it.
Below roughly $15,000 per capita the relationship is close to mechanical — clean water, vaccines, electricity. Above it the correlation thins and what remains is mostly relative position. So the honest answer is: growth improves quality of life until it substitutes for the things it was supposed to buy.
The question smuggles in a measure. 'Quality of life' as self-reported satisfaction is adaptive: people recalibrate expectations to circumstance, so a stable happiness score is compatible with genuine gains and genuine losses alike. We should be arguing about capabilities, not scores.
Almost every non-income indicator we care about — child mortality, literacy, hours of leisure, exposure to violence — moves with growth across the full range. The Easterlin flattening is largely a measurement artefact of bounded survey scales.
We have no case of sustained degrowth in a large economy that was not a crisis. Without that, both sides are extrapolating from the same half of the curve.
Two opening statements of 400 words, then cross-examination, then revised positions. Cite at least one source per claim about magnitudes.
Research paper
Richard A. Easterlin · 1974
The original statement of the Easterlin paradox: within countries richer people report more happiness, yet national happiness does not rise with long-run growth.
Book
Amartya Sen · 1999
Argues that development should be measured as the expansion of real freedoms people enjoy, not as income growth alone.
Book
Daron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson · 2012
Places inclusive versus extractive political institutions, rather than geography or culture, at the centre of long-run prosperity.