Economic growth is back as a political goal in the United States and across much of the West. Among progressives, advocates of the so-called Abundance movement are enthusiastic for making it easier to build new infrastructure and homes, eclipsing the Malthusian pessimism characteristic of the Left since the Seventies. On the Right, meanwhile, retro-futurist visions of space colonisation and flying cars have edged out the rural utopias of “crunchy conservatives”.
Abundance progressives and pro-growth conservatives are right to reject the hostility to science, industry, and entrepreneurialism of “de-growthers,” who dream of an economic stationary state in the near rather than distant future. Such a stationary state existed for most of human history, when long periods of economic and technological stagnation meant that powerful individuals and states could increase their wealth only by plundering the weak. The explosive growth and once-unthinkable technological advances of modernity have vindicated the 18th-century British writer Jonathan Swift since he wrote in Gulliver’s Travels: “Whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.”
But we can reject mindless anti-growth ideology without mindlessly embracing growth for its own sake. Yes, we need growth — but good growth, not bad growth. To understand the difference, don’t look to the Silicon Valley overlords who are increasingly determining the shape of politics on both sides of the political spectrum.
Good growth leads to, and sustains, countries with strong middle classes and workers and families with decent wealth, leisure, and the power to bargain with their employers. Bad growth maximises gross domestic product at the expense of individual autonomy, social solidarity, and other fundamental elements of a decent human society.
As an economic metric, GDP is compatible with both good growth and bad growth. Because it measures output per hour worked, it can be improved in a good way — improving the productivity of each worker, lowering the prices of goods and services for society as a whole, and allowing workers to earn the same income with less effort, assuming they can bargain effectively with employers to share in the profits.
But GDP can also be boosted in bad ways by expanding the hours worked in a country without boosting individual worker productivity. In a modern industrial society, in which the majority of adults must toil for wages, GDP can be raised by cutting social-insurance benefits to compel the elderly to have much longer working lives, or by legalising child labour. Abstract GDP would go up, but few people other than some employers and capitalists would be happier.
It’s also possible to expand GDP without increasing productivity by flooding a country with migrants. Excessive immigration may lower wages in various occupations, immiserating natives and immigrants alike, even as GDP improves in numerical value because of the population-driven ballooning of the workforce. Conversely, birth rates that outstrip productivity growth can impoverish a country, even as its GDP rises because more workers mean more work hours.
In a good society, work must be balanced with time for family and community and recreation. Members of a society with a healthy work-life balance would be rational to choose somewhat less growth in personal income and the national economy — if the higher-growth alternative requires sacrificing essential social values.
Edith Cresson, the Prime Minister of France from 1991 to 92, is (barely) remembered today for asserting that a quarter of men in Anglo-Saxon countries are homosexuals who aren’t interested in women and that the Japanese were “little yellow men” who “sit up all night thinking how to screw us”. Whatever may be the case with Anglo-Saxon men, the Socialist premier was right to defend the work-life balance of the French against East Asian cultures of overwork, however chauvinistically: “I said they were working like ants. We cannot live like that, in miniscule apartments with a two-hour journey to work like animals. Work and work and work and producing children to work like animals. We want to keep our social security, our holidays, and live like human beings.”
Long work hours have been correlated with low fertility rates, and East Asia has some of the lowest birth rates in the world. In 2024, South Korea won the dubious honor of being the country with the lowest fertility in the world for six years in a row — 0.75, far below the 2.1 children per woman needed to maintain a national population without mass immigration. In response, South Korea has imposed a 52-hour work week — compare that to the 35-hour work week in France and 36 to 40 hours a week in Germany. Likewise, Japan since the Seventies has suffered from an epidemic of karoshi — stress-related death by overwork.
Which brings us to Silicon Valley. The tech tycoons who have emerged as the dominant oligarchy in 21st-century America have contradictory views of work and life in the future. Many predict that automation will eliminate most jobs, making it necessary to create a universal basic income that allows citizens to enjoy a minimal level of subsistence without working at all.
Other tech leaders, however, want to import the East-Asian model of overwork and fanatical schooling to the United States (and the West more broadly). According to Elon Musk, who despises labour unions and laws protecting American workers, Chinese factory workers “won’t just be burning the midnight oil. They’ll be burning the 3am oil. So they won’t even leave the factory type of thing. Whereas in America, people are trying to avoid going to work at all.”
Vivek Ramaswamy, initially appointed by President Donald Trump as co-director with Musk of the ill-fated Department of Government Efficiency, has claimed that East- and South-Asian students are superior to American students. In an X post that likely doomed his political career, he wrote: “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers…. More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of Friends. More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less ‘chillin’. More extracurriculars, less ‘hanging out at the mall’.”
Ramaswamy is confused. Individual Indian-Americans excel in many areas, but national productivity is the result of well-designed economic, legal, and political institutions, not overwork by particular individuals. That explains why India, with the longest work hours among the top-10 economies (49 hours or more per week), is much poorer than the United States (38 hours) and Canada (32.1 hours). Indeed, thanks to their productivity, countries with high per-capita GDP in general have lighter workloads.
Not content with opposing organised labour and wage-and-hours laws, many of today’s techno-libertarians dream of carving up democratic nation-states into “freedom cities” or “charter cities” — privately owned cities free to create their own regulations without interference by the countries in which they are geographically situated. This is the revival of an old and very bad idea, formerly embodied in the United States in early-industrial-era company towns and mining towns policed by private detectives — and symbolised today by the high-tech despotism of city-states like Singapore and Dubai.
If the new city-states were bottom-up democratic versions of Athens or Florence, the idea might be appealing. But the tech oligarchs have something more sinister in mind — top-down autocracies in which privileges bestowed on workers by investors and managers replace civil rights in a given territory.
Curtis Yarvin, treated as a guru by some tech executives, has popularised the acronym RAGE (Replace All Government Employees) and called for a “Butterfly Revolution” to centralise “absolute sovereignty” in a corporate state with a dictator-CEO. And foreshadowing Trump’s appointment in 2025 of Musk to head DOGE, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney in 2014 called on then-President Barack Obama to appoint Google boss Eric Schmidt as CEO of America, terminate all federal employees, turn federal power over to the tech industry — then resign.
Symbolising the convergence of libertarianism with the libertine drug culture in Silicon Valley and the Burning Man festival, Peter Thiel has funded a project to promote private “seasteads” unregulated by nation-states, which might allow medical experiments on human beings that are banned elsewhere: “Could you have something where you use psilocybin” — the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms — “or MDMA” — better known as the rave culture drug ecstasy — “as an antidepressant drug? Or could you get new medical treatments where you break the FDA monopoly on medicine worldwide?”
A comment on X by a Thiel protégé, Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir Technologies, suggests the danger of replacing liberal, constitutional democracy with the tyranny of an all-powerful tech-industry Wizard in a private charter city of Oz: “If I’m in charge later, we won’t just have a three strikes law. We will try and quickly hang men after three violent crimes. And yes, we will do it in public to deter others. Our society needs balance. It’s time to bring back masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable.”
Public executions and deregulated experimentation on human beings, combined with technological innovation as a goal in itself — it is hard to imagine a better example of bad growth.
Then there is the Freedom Cities Coalition, which calls for states to cede land to new private corporate governments exempt from selected federal and state laws and regulations, no doubt including labour laws. President Trump, who in his second term has largely abandoned his working-class voters in favour of tech plutocrats like Musk and Ramaswamy and David Sacks, has called for 10 such post-national, privatised corporate zones on the soil of the United States.
In this dystopian fantasy, America’s federal lands — divided in the 19th century by Lincoln and his allies into homesteads for free family farmers who were considered to be the bulwarks of bottom-up democracy — would now be given over to capitalists and managers to create special economic zones like those in China that host Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer, which has had to install “suicide nets” to prevent overworked and underpaid workers from jumping to their deaths from their dormitory towers.
In Honduras, experimental corporate-controlled charter cities like Prospera, which drew more than $100 million in investments from tech libertarians including Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Adam Draper, were seen as so menacing by locals that the Honduran government has repealed the laws that enabled their establishment.
Undeterred by the popular rebellion against Prospera, libertarians bankrolled by tech plutocrats are promoting new, semi-sovereign company towns in places like the Presidio in San Francisco and Guantanamo Bay.
In the “Immigration and Workforce Strategy” section of its Orwellian proposal for a Guantanamo Bay Charter City, the Charter Cities Institute proposes using it as a probationary detention center for potential immigrants to the United States: “this model also introduces a phased approach to immigration: Individuals demonstrate their skills and reliability in Guantanamo Bay before transitioning to the US mainland.”
The new Guantanamo Bay charter city would combine Dubai’s indentured-servant workforce with the pleasing façade of a Potemkin village: “by controlling the narrative — weekly media updates, tours for foreign dignitaries, and televised speeches from the new city — administration officials can shape the story of ‘America’s frontier spirit, revived.’”
A humane and enduring society doesn’t resemble a mining boom town or a slave plantation or a nightmarish “freedom city” of the kind promoted by ketamine-dosing, harem-collecting, neurodivergent tech oligarchs. Technological innovation and economic growth are means to an end, not ends in themselves. Good growth is economic growth that balances desirable technological progress and economic innovation with equality of condition and worker bargaining power. Bad growth increases GDP at the cost of the powerlessness of most citizens in the workplace, as well as the voting booth.
Edith Cresson inadvertently spoke for all human beings, French and Japanese and Hondurans and Americans alike. We are not ants.
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