The moral case for growth: material progress and moral progress, which have always embodied an optimism about the human enterprise, go together. That's why growth is essential in any society.

• Author: Friedman, Benjamin M.

Are we right to care so much about economic growth as we clearly do?

For citizens of all too many of the world's countries, where poverty is still the norm, the answer is immediate and obvious. But the tangible improvements in the basics of life that make economic growth so important whenever living standards are low--greater life expectancy, fewer diseases, less infant mortality and malnutrition--have mostly played out long before a country's per capita income reaches the levels enjoyed in today's advanced industrialized economies. Americans are no healthier than Koreans or Portuguese, for example, and we live no longer, despite an average income more than twice what they have. Yet whether our standard of living will continue to improve, and how fast, remain matters of acute concern for us nonetheless.

At the same time, perhaps because we are never clear about just why we attach so much importance to economic growth in the first place, we are often at cross-purposes--at times we seem to be almost embarrassed--about what we want. We not only acknowledge other values; as a matter of principle we place them on a higher plane than our material well-being. Even in parts of the world where the need to improve nutrition and literacy and human life expectancy is urgent, there is often a grudging aspect to the recognition that achieving superior growth is a top priority. As a result, especially when faster growth would require sacrifice from entrenched constituencies with well-established interests, the political process often fails to muster the determination to press forward. The all-too-frequent outcome, in low- and high-income countries alike, is economic disappointment, and in some cases outright stagnation.

The root of the problem, I believe, is that our conventional thinking about economic growth fails to reflect the breadth of what growth, or its absence, means for a society. We recognize, of course, the advantages of a higher material standard of living, and we appreciate them. But moral thinking, in practically every known culture, enjoins us not to place undue emphasis on our material concerns. We are also increasingly aware that economic development--industrialization in particular, and more recently globalization--often brings undesirable side effects, such as damage to the environment or the homogenization of what used to be distinctive cultures, and we have come to regard these matters too in moral terms. On both counts, we therefore think of economic growth in terms of material considerations versus moral ones: Do we have the right to burden future generations, or even other species, for our own material advantage? Will the emphasis we place on growth, or the actions we take to achieve it, compromise our moral integrity? We weigh material positives against moral negatives.

I believe this thinking is seriously, in some circumstances dangerously, incomplete. The value of a rising standard of living lies not just in the concrete improvements it brings to how individuals live but in how it shapes the social, political, and ultimately the moral character of a people.

Economic growth meaning a rising standard of living for the clear majority of citizens--more often than not fosters greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness, and dedication to democracy. Ever since the Enlightenment, western thinking has regarded each of these tendencies positively, and in explicitly moral terms.

Even societies that have already made great advances in these very dimensions, for example most of today's western democracies, are more likely to make still further progress when their living standards rise. But when living standards stagnate or decline, most societies make little if any progress toward any of these goals, and in all too many instances they plainly retrogress. Many countries with highly developed economies, including America, have experienced alternating eras of economic growth and stagnation in which their democratic values have strengthened or weakened accordingly.

How the citizens of any country think about economic growth, and what actions they take in consequence, is therefore a matter of far broader importance than we conventionally assume. In many countries today, even the most basic qualities of any society--democracy or dictatorship, tolerance or ethnic hatred and violence, widespread opportunity or economic oligarchy--remain in flux. In some countries where there is now a democracy, it is still new and therefore fragile. Because of the link between rising or falling living standards and just...