SISU-105.015 F2019 blog question #11

Short question this week, but don’t be deceived: it may be an easy question to state but it is far from an easy question to answer. As Todorov asks on p. 62, “Did the Spaniards defeat the Indians by means of signs?”

SISU-105.015 F2019 blog question #10

Hopefully after class today you have a better idea about the history of these international financial institutions, and about the centrality of economic growth to the various strategies that they have pursued over time. The question I would like you to wrestle with a bit is: should growth be as central to international economic policies as it is? The presumption of a growth-oriented approach is that if the economy grows, a variety of practical problems will be solved or resolved, because there will be more economic circulation and hence more opportunity and improvement. I’m less interested in empirical assessments of that proposition, since at this point in your education you probably don't have enough background knowledge to say with any certainty what economic growth does or does not generate. Instead, I’m interested in the set of values embedded in a focus on economic growth. Are there other ways that we ought to be running economic policy, and other goals that we ought to be pursuing? Why, or why not?