Growth: A History and a Reckoning. By Daniel Susskind . Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2025. 304 pp. 32 illustrations. Paperback $21.95. ISBN: 978-0-674-30357-7.

A History and a Reckoning tells the story of modern economic growth as both humanity's greatest achievement and one of its most dangerous obsessions.The book is structured around a central tension: growth has delivered extraordinary improvements in human well-being, yet it now threatens many of the things we value most-including our environment, community, and democracy.Susskind's aim is to first celebrate growth and explain where it came from and then force us to confront the fact that it has come at a rather heavy price.The first half of the book is mostly historical, while the second half has more of a contemporary focus on public policy.One gets the sense reading the first half of the book that Susskind has mostly read economists, not historians.These sections offer a "hockey stick" history of the past, the graph-inspired term that has often been used by economist historians to detail the flat, zero-GDP "Malthusian Trap" humanity was stuck in for millennia until rather suddenly, around the turn of the nineteenth century, a sharp and sustained rise in economic growth allowed mankind to "escape" such destitution.Disappointingly, the explanations given for this epochal shift amount mostly to a highly engaging yet rather tired "Whig History" that revolves around the works of Joel Mokyr and Paul Romer and their respective emphasis on the "industrial enlightenment" and the fact that ideas are "non-rival" (once discovered, they can be reused at little cost and suffer no diminishing returns).Like the many economists Susskind has clearly read, one gets the sense from these chapters that growth came exclusively from "good" developments and traits-creative ideas, enlightened entrepreneurs, cooperative thinkers.Despite a lengthy discussion on why growth took off in Great Britain of all places, the words "slavery" or "violence" do not appear in the book even once, nor does the notion that perhaps European growth also had something to do with the conquering of the New World, elite confiscation of land, colonial extraction, warring nations, or ruthless labor discipline.It seems odd that a book purporting to show us a balanced and even-handed account of growth offers up absolutely no historical narrative regarding the "darker" causes behind its emergence.The following chapters examine the rise of monetized GDP metrics and the infatuation of policymakers and politicians with growth in the twentieth century.Susskind frames this development as a "lucky accident," and thus never really examines the structural reasons why commodity growth became the ultimate goal of human society.Sure, growth correlated with rising standards of living (at least until the neoliberal era), but might the rise of capitalism-a social system in which profitable returns on capital became a necessary condition for economic investment and thus