Secrets of the Good Life

Can growth be equated to progress? Data show that it is not GDP growth by itself that improves people’s lives but how money is distributed, notably through investing in public infrastructures.

It is generally assumed, says Jason Hickel, that “We need to keep growing in order to keep improving people’s lives. To abandon growth would be to abandon human progress itself,” adding that “It’s a powerful narrative, and it seems so obviously correct. People’s lives are clearly better now than they were in the past, and it seems reasonable to believe that we have growth to thank for that.” But empirical evidence shows that “It’s not growth itself that matters – what matters is how income is distributed, and the extent to which it is invested in public services.”

Where does progress come from?

The fact, for instance, that populations in countries with higher GDP live on average longer than in poorer ones is often interpreted as proof that GDP growth equals progress. A closer look at history shows that extending life expectancy is primarily due to medical progress. In the second half of the nineteenth century, many people stopped dying at an early age once the importance of hygiene was scientifically established and public sanitation separating sewage from drinking water became a known necessity.¹

The economic challenge for better personal and public hygiene was not in increasing national wealth but in the fact that “public plumbing requires public works, and public money. You have to appropriate private land for things like public water pumps and public baths. And you have to be able to dig on private property in order to connect tenements and factories to the system. This is where the problems began. For decades, progress towards the goal of public sanitation was opposed, not enabled, by the capitalist class. Libertarian-minded landowners refused to allow officials to use their property and refused to pay the taxes required to get it done.²

If nations with higher incomes tend to have better life expectancies, there appears to be no causal relationship between these two variables. Historical records show, on the contrary, that without progressive policies, growth has regularly worked against social progress, not for it. The resistance of elites in Western countries was regularly broken by social movements, strikes, and all forms of popular upheavals to eventually leverage the state’s power and obtain public healthcare, vaccination coverage, public education, housing, better wages, or safer working conditions. “And once you have these basic interventions in place,” says Jason Hickel, “the biggest single driver of continued improvements in life expectancy happens to be education – and particularly women’s education. The more you learn, the longer you live.”³

Reclaiming the commons

Of course, economic growth is needed initially to finance universal healthcare, sanitation, education, and decent wages. But, by the same token, “after a certain point, which high-income nations have long surpassed, more GDP adds little if anything to human flourishing.”⁴ This explains how the United States, with a GDP per capita of $59,500, making it one of the world’s richest countries, is beaten down in life expectancy and education level by countries with far less income per capita.⁵ Other countries have, quite simply, invested more in building high-quality universal healthcare and education systems.

And the good news is that it does not have to be expensive. Universal public services are run for the public, not shareholders, insurance companies, and CEOs’ bank accounts. Spain, for example, spends only $2,300 per person to deliver high-quality healthcare to everyone as a fundamental right and achieves a life expectancy of 83.5 years. By contrast, the private, for-profit system in the U.S. sucks up $9,500 with far worse health outcomes and a life expectancy of 78.7 years.

“According to data from the U.N., nations can reach the very highest category on the life expectancy index with as little as $8,000 per capita (in terms of purchasing power parity, or PPP), and very high levels on the education index with as little as $8,700. In fact, nations can succeed on a wide range of key social indicators – not just health and education, but also employment, nutrition, social support, democracy and life satisfaction – with less than $10,000 per capita, while staying within or near planetary boundaries.⁶ What’s remarkable about these figures is that they are well below the world average GDP per capita ($17,600 PPP). In other words, in theory we could achieve all of our social goals, for every person in the world, with less GDP than we presently have, simply by investing in public goods, and distributing income and opportunity more fairly.”

Another interesting aspect of the relationship between GDP and human welfare is that, past a certain threshold, more growth begins to have a negative impact. When comparing personal consumption expenditure with income inequality and social and environmental costs, the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) data show that global GPI grew along with GDP until the mid-1970s. Since then, “[it] has flattened out and even declined, as the social and environmental costs of growth have become significant enough to cancel out consumption-related gains.”⁷ As the economist and ecologist Herman Daly pointed out, growth, after a certain point, begins to become “uneconomic.”

In purely financial terms, since Portugal, for instance, “has higher levels of human welfare than the United States with $38,000 less GDP per capita, then we can conclude that $38,000 of America’s per capita income is effectively ‘wasted’. That adds up to $13 trillion per year for the U.S. economy as a whole. That’s $13 trillion worth of extraction and production and consumption each year, and $13 trillion worth of ecological pressure, that adds nothing, in and of itself, to the fundamentals of human welfare. It is damage without gain. This means that the U.S. economy could in theory be scaled down by a staggering 65% from its present size while at the same time improving the lives of ordinary Americans, if income was distributed more fairly and invested in public goods.”

1. See Simon Szreter: – ‘The population health approach in historical perspective’; – ‘Rapid economic growth and ‘the four Ds’ of disruption, deprivation, disease and death: public health lessons from nineteenth-century Britain for twenty-first-century China?’ Tropical Medicine & International Health 4(2), pp. 146–152; –
2. Though landowners led similar fights in all Western countries, the author refers primarily to England. This country was the original object of the McKeown Thesis, famously arguing in the 1970s that GDP alone was the driving force behind health improvements. See Simon Szreter, ‘Rethinking McKeown: The relationship between public health and social change,’ American Journal of Public Health 92(5), pp. 722–725. ‘The importance of social intervention in Britain’s mortality decline c. 1850–1914: A re-interpretation of the role of public health,’ Social history of medicine 1(1), pp. 1–38.
3. Wolfgang Lutz and Endale Kebede, ‘Education and health: redrawing the Preston curve,’ Population and Development Review 44(2), 2018.
4. Julia Steinberger and J. Timmons Roberts, ‘From constraint to sufficiency: The decoupling of energy and carbon from human needs, 1975–2005,’ Ecological Economics 70(2), 2010, pp. 425–433.
5. Juliana Martínez Franzoni and Diego Sánchez-Ancochea, The Quest for Universal Social Policy in the South: Actors, Ideas and Architectures (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
6. Jason Hickel, ‘Is it possible to achieve a good life for all within planetary boundaries?’ Third World Quarterly 40(1), 2019, pp. 18–35 (This research builds on Daniel O’Neill et al., ‘A good life for all within planetary boundaries,’ Nature Sustainability, 2018, p. 88–95); Jason Hickel, ‘The Sustainable Development Index: measuring the ecological efficiency of human development in the Anthropocene,’ Ecological Economics 167, 2020.
7. Ida Kubiszewski et al., ‘Beyond GDP: Measuring and achieving global genuine progress,’ Ecological Economics 93, 2013, pp. 57–68; Manfred Max-Neef, ‘Economic growth and quality of life: a threshold hypothesis,’ Ecological Economics 15(2), 1995, pp. 115–118. See also William Lamb et al., ‘Transitions in pathways of human development and carbon emissions,’ Environmental Research Letters 9(1), 2014; Angus Deaton, ‘Income, health, and well-being around the world: Evidence from the Gallup World Poll,’ Journal of Economic Perspectives 22(2), 2008, pp. 53–72; Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Societies (Princeton University Press, 1997).