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economic growth

Monday 2nd of March 2026

American Dream Income beating inflation © 2018 Kwiple.com
By the numbers In the ten most dynamic states nearly 13 percent of the population was born abroad, compared with 6.7 per cent in the least dynamic quintile. West Virginia, which is the least dynamic, ranks last for immigration with 1.4 per cent of its population born abroad. Financial Times, May 24, 2017 [economic dynamism measures change in the number of companies, share of jobs in recently launched companies, labor force participation rate, etc.] © 2016 Kwiple.com
Consumerism The report concludes that today's average global rate of consumption would need 1.5 planet Earths to sustain it. But four planets would be required to sustain US levels of consumption, or 2.5 Earths to match UK consumption levels. The Guardian, September 29, 2014, on a report by scientists at the WWF and the Zoological Society of London  © 2017 Kwiple.com
Debt Debt is, quite simply, required to create GDP growth. Richard Vague, The Paradox of Debt © 2023 Kwiple.com
Declaration of Independence The authors of the Declaration of Independence made no anti-imperial or antigovernment statement. Instead, Thomas Jeffereson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, John Jay, and their fellow members of the Second Continental Congress proclaimed their commitment to a Patriot government that would promote American development. The Declaration marked not the end of empire but the beginning of a new and energetic government in North America. Steve Pincus, The Heart of the Declaration [Patriots believed in governments promoting economic development by raising consumer demand, subsidizing immigrants, helping the poor, taxing the rich, eliminating slavery] © 2018 Kwiple.com
Democracy Herin lies the main lesson of the Weimar Republic. If liberal democracy fails to deliver economic prosperity for a sufficiently large portion of the population over long periods, it ends — along with the financial and economic institutions it created. Wolfgang Münchau, Financial Times, May 21, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Economic growth An economy with a short-term horizon is an economy with a slow growth rate. Joseph Stiglitz, People, Power and Profits © 2019 Kwiple.com
Economic growth Ideas were the steam power of the Great Enrichment. Dierdre Nansen McCloskey, Bettering Humanomics  © 2021 Kwiple.com
Economic growth Its [International Monetary Fund's] researchers find that, provided it is well-directed, public investment is particularly powerful in uncertain times. The most striking effect is on boosting private businesses' willingness to invest: raising public investment by 1 per cent of gross domestic product raises private investment by more than 10 per cent. Martin Sandbu, Financial Times, October 11, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Economic growth The empires built by bankers and merchants in frock coats and top hats defeated the empires built by kings and noblemen in gold clothes and shining armour. The mercantile empires were simply much shrewder in financing their conquests. Nobody wants to pay taxes, but everyone is happy to invest. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens © 2016 Kwiple.com
Economic growth Its [International Monetary Fund's] researchers find that, provided it is well-directed, public investment is particularly powerful in uncertain times. The most striking effect is on boosting private businesses' willingness to invest: raising public investment by 1 per cent of gross domestic product raises private investment by more than 10 per cent. Martin Sandbu, Financial Times, October 11, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Economic growth A pin lies in wait for every bubble. Warren Buffett © 2016 Kwiple.com
Economic growth The tendency of capital to go from one rich country to another and more recently even to flow “upward” from poor to rich countries, as rich people from poor countries, fearful for their money and lives, invest abroad, has been termed the “Lucas paradox.” Branko Milanovic, The Haves and the Have Nots © 2019 Kwiple.com
Economic growth The third quarter of the Twentieth Century was a golden age of economic progress. It surpassed any reasoned expectations. And we are not likely to see its equivalent soon again. Marc Levinson, An Extraordinary Time © 2016 Kwiple.com
Economic growth U.S. economic leadership came from mass education, not from a small elite of billionaires. They have never been the source of U.S. prosperity, and they will never be. Thomas Piketty, New York Times, April 1, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Economic growth We are bringing our country back and a big focus is exactly that, with the, uh, minorities, specifically, if you look at, uh, the Asians. Donald Trump, May 19, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Economic growth We have an economy that’s so fragile, and the only reason it’s running now  is it’s running off the fumes of what we did. It’s just running off the fumes. And when there’s a crash — I hope  it’s going to be during this next 12 months  because I don’t want to be Herbert Hoover. Donald Trump, January 8, 2024, hoping for an economic disaster for millions because he thinks it's good for him politically [Trump and Hoover are the only presidents to leave office with fewer people employed  than when they entered —  2 million in his case. He didn't leave fumes behind; he left odors.] © 2024 Kwiple.com
Economic growth What we Republicans should stand for is growth in the economy. We ought to make the pie higher. George W. Bush © 2015 Kwiple.com
Economic growth When the US has a party, the rest of the world gets an invitation. A European strategist at JPMorgan Asset Management quoted in Financial Times, March 22, 2021, on the likely effect of Biden's $1.9tn stimulus on increasing imports of consumer goods to the U.S. from countries like China © 2021 Kwiple.com
Global warming Justice demands that, with what little carbon we can still safely burn, developing countries are allowed to grow. The lifestyles of a few must not crowd out opportunities for the many still on the first steps of the development ladder. Narendra Modi, prime minister of India © 2015 Kwiple.com
Global warming  U.S. CLIMATE STUDY  HAS GRIM WARNING OF ECONOMIC RISKS  — — — — — — — — — — — Reduction of Up to 10 Percent in G.D.P.— Findings Are at Odds With Policies headline, print edition, New York Times, November 24, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Global warming Years ago, Roger Pielke Jr, political scientist at the University of Colorado,  formulated the Iron Law of Climate Policy: “When policies on emissions reductions collide with policies focused on economic growth,  economic growth will win out every time.” That law still holds, and not because our leaders are bad people or in hock to fossil-fuel lobbies. It holds because economic growth is what electorates want. We vote for emissions. Simon Kuper, Financial Times, November 11, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Government Why will the state tend to grow faster than the economy? First, the economy needs a well-educated and healthy labour force. Second, the services supplied by the state are ones in which it is hard to raise productivity, which tends to make them increasingly expensive. Third, spending on transfers and health will rise with the proportion of the population that is old and infirm. Finally, higher spending on transfers and essential services is also what voters demand. Martin Wolf, Financial Times, November 13, 2022, © 2022 Kwiple.com
Ideas The bottom line: Big ideas –the ones that truly drive economic growth or a change in the standard of living– are harder than ever to find because they're more costly than ever before. Fortune, December 15, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Income inequality A generation ago, mainstream economists believed that greater equality  fostered dysfunction. Any attempts to restrain income at the top, this mainstream held, would reduce incentives to save and invest and throttle the economic growth necessary to “lift all boats.” But that mainstream has reversed course and now sees inequality as more likely to sink boats than lift them. Sam Pizzigati, The Case For a Maximum Wage  © 2018 Kwiple.com
Innovation  David Edgerton of King's College London,  Britain's foremost historian of technology, argues that “Only in techno-nationalist fantasies…does national invention drive national economic growth. In the real world, global innovation leads to national growth, and national innovation leads to global growth.” At most times and places, most of the technology which creates growth is imported from elsewhere, not made at home. The Economist, January 16, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Modernity To outgrow one’s parents is a kind of pre-bereavement before the actual one. It is also the universal tax on upward mobility, levied in all jurisdictions. But the alternative is what? Static communities? Knowing one’s place? It is an odd moral vision, but one with lots of takers on the de-growth left and the alt-right. Neither side can see that modernity creates different connections and duties, which are more touching, not less, for having no basis in blood or ethnic kinship. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, September 8, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Monopoly Today, in America, competition is dying. Consolidation and concentration are on the rise in sector after sector. Concentration threatens our markets, threatens our economy, and threatens our democracy. Elizabeth Warren © 2017 Kwiple.com
Populism This is the liberal nightmare: not that populists abolish democracy to remain in power, but that they perform well enough not to have to. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, January 23, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Populism This picture is very different from the 1930s, when rising populism in countries such as Germany went hand-in-hand with a deep economic recession. And it consequently raises a crucial – little discussed – question: if the western world has seen populism jump when economic times are good, what on earth will happen when the next recession hits? Is it possible that those levels of support for populism could spiral even higher? Or is it a mistake to presume that populism is “just” about economics – or that some- thing can be “fixed” by mere growth? Gillian Tett, Financial Times, August 1, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Sleepers at the wheel say Having an industrial policy is a sign of a nation's weakness © 2017 Kwiple.com
Sleepers at the wheel say Increasing aid to the poor reduces economic growth  © 2015 Kwiple.com
Sleepers at the wheel say Population growth translates into economic growth © 2016 Kwiple.com
Sleepers at the wheel say Raising taxes on the rich reduces economic growth  © 2015 Kwiple.com
Sleepers at the wheel say Regional inequalities lessen over time because poorer and cheaper regions attract investment and grow faster than rich ones © 2017 Kwiple.com
Sleepers at the wheel say A rising tide lifts all boats © 2015 Kwiple.com
Sleepers at the wheel say Surging economic confidence leads to surging household spending © 2017 Kwiple.com
Sleepers at the wheel say Tax cuts pay for themselves © 2015 Kwiple.com
Sleepers at the wheel say Tax cuts spur economic growth © 2017 Kwiple.com
Snapshot The rooster who took credit for the sunrise was outraged to be blamed for the sunset. Donald Trump portrayed by David Frum © 2020 Kwiple.com
Socio-economic mobility [M]ost of the decline in absolute mobility is driven by the more unequal distribution of economic growth in recent decades, rather than by the slowdown in GDP growth rates. In this sense, the rise in inequality and the  decline in absolute mobility are closely linked.  Growth is an important driver of absolute mobility,  but high levels of absolute mobility require broad- based growth across the income distribution. With the current distribution of income, higher  GDP growth rates alone are insufficient to restore absolute mobility to the levels experienced by children in the 1940s and 1950s. If one wants to revive the “American dream” of high rates of absolute mobility, then one must have an interest in growth that is spread more broadly across the income distribution. Raj Chetty et. al., Science, April 24, 2017 © 2024 Kwiple.com
State of the union [A] broad sweep of statistics reveals a peculiar weariness spreading through the economy. Belying breathless headlines about the fabulous opporunities that technology is about to bestow on society, it suggests that many rich market democracies have lost much of their dynamism. Their companies are getting old, and their labor markets are getting stuck. Productivity growth has slumped. And many workers in their prime are peeling off from the labor force. Eduardo Porter, New York Times, February 6, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
State of the union While US political risk in global comparisons is still relatively low (it ranks 85 out of the 127 countries tracked by [Mark] Rosenberg) [who has been tracking political risk on a daily basis since 2013], it is now by far the highest of any developed market. Only countries such as Turkey, Colombia, Mexico and Israel look anything like the US within the OECD nations. Even more worrisome is the fact that the change and volatility of key metrics, including the risks of social and government instability, political violence and even the risk to democracy, make the US look much more like a developing nation than a developed one — let alone the supposed leader of the free world. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, July 10, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Taxes In sum, all the data at our disposal today  suggest that virtually confiscatory tax rates have been an immense historical success.  They have made it possible to greatly reduce the divergences of fortunes and incomes, while at the same time improving the situation of the middle and lower classes, developing the welfare state, and stimulating better economic and social performance overall. Historically, it is the battle for equality and education that has made economic development and human progress possible, and not the veneration of property, stability, and inequality. Thomas Piketty, A Brief History of Equality © 2022 Kwiple.com
Trust Trust is to capitalism what alcohol is to wedding receptions: a social lubricant. In low-trust societies (Russia, southern Italy), economic growth is constrained. People who don’t trust other people think twice before investing in, collaborating with, or hiring someone who isn’t a family member (or a member of their criminal gang). The concept may sound squishy, but the effect isn’t. Jerry Useem, The Atlantic, November 24, 2021 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Trust Virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust, certainly any transaction conducted over a period of time. It can be plausibly argued that much of the economic backwardness in the world can be explained by the lack of mutual confidence. Kenneth Arrow, “Gifts and Exchanges,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1(4), 1972 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality  From the late 1940s, to the early 1970s, workers and investors did share in the wealth generated by a strong, growing economy. But since then that social compact has frayed: worker productivity has risen by about 70 per cent, but hourly pay has grown by only 12 per cent. Meanwhile, corporate profits have hit record highs. US workers are more educated, more skilled and do more to create corporate profits, but they share far less in the fruits of that labour. Leo Strine, Delaware Supreme Court chief justice, Financial Times, October 1, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
 
the West The west must accept its relative decline or engage in a grossly immoral and probably ruinous struggle to prevent that. That is the most important truth of our era. Martin Wolf, Financial Times, May 16, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com