Boktips: The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth

Den ekonomiska debatten präglas ofta av antagandet att ekonomisk tillväxt skulle göra oss till sämre människor. Vi hör ofta begrepp som "roffarsamhälle", "rovdrift på miljön" och hur marknadsekonomin gör oss till egoister. I The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth presenterar Harvardprofessorn Benjamin M. Friedman en helt annan bild. Han talar om hur ekonomisk tillväxt, utöver att skapa välstånd för människorna, lägger grunden för en ökad tolerans, rättvisa, social mobilitet och demokratiska institutioner.

När han presenterade boken vid American Enterprise Institute beskrev problematiken med att moraliska värden och ekonomisk tillväxt alltför ofta beskrivs som motpoler (presentationen finns som videolänk):

We need to change, in a fairly fundamental way, the nature of our conversation in the public arena about economic growth. We have fallen into a mode of talking about growth in which we recognize, of course, the material advantages of growth. But then, against those material advantages, we balance various draw backs of the growth process, most obviously environmental degradation, but other draw backs as well to which over time we have come to attach a moral connotation . And as a result, the standard conversation about growth is one of balancing material benefits against moral costs, and people come away from this conversation with a sense that there is a self image of themselves; where do they place themselves on the spectrum between "do I care only about material things or do I mostly emphasize moral concerns?". Their self image in this material versus moral spectrum is somehow supposed to map into where they should be, on whether they should support or resist economic growth, and policies for economic growth. /.../The most fundamental implication of the hypothesis I advance in the book is that the notion of evaluating growth by balancing entirely material benefits against entirely moral negatives is a false balancing, and therefore the mapping of that into one's preferences about 'should I therefore be for growth versus against growth' is a false mapping as well. Economic growth brings with it, I argue, very important moral benefits. To repeat: tolerance, opportunity, mobility, fairness and democracy.

Det är ett budskap som svensk borgerlighet borde lyssna på. Det enda sättet att vinna diskussionen är att föra in de positiva aspekterna av ekonomisk tillväxt. Om de populistiska påståendena om den ekonomiska tillväxtens förbannelse övervinns kan också, på sikt, de politiska besluten påverkas i positiv riktning.