During campaign speeches leading up to the 2016 US presidential election, a prominent senator championed the need to “create a growing and vibrant economy” and on foreign policy suggested that “the European community has got to work with Greece to create economic growth.” Such innocuous language could come from nearly any elected official. Such bipartisan sentiments do not register objections from any corner of the political landscape. These words are so inoffensive that they’re almost meaningless. It’s almost difficult to hear them they are so banal and perfunctory.
These snippets were spoken by Senator Bernie Sanders during his first presidential run. This is probably not an altogether powerful revelation. Despite being the most outspoken opponent of profit-firstpolicies during his tenure in office, despite consistently advocating for regulations on unbridled corporate profits, despite leading efforts to aggressively tax the most inequitable accumulators of wealth, despite prioritizing worker dignity over GDP, despite all this, Bernie Sanders still believes that economic growth is a goal the world should pursue.
That a self-identifyingdemocratic-socialistaffirms the virtue of economic growth is not shockIt is inconceivable that a politician could win an election in the US today running on a platform of halting economic growth or drawing down economic output. “Growth is often treated as an arbiter of political success. Few leaders dare to challenge GDP growth.”1A no-growthpolicy would entail less work, less private property, less vacations, less movies, less cars, less furniture, and less restaurants. And less is nearly unanimously agreed to be worse.2When studying archaic societies like the Classic Period Maya that halted construction of pyramids, abandoned urban centers, and began pursuing a less resource-intensivelifestyle, archaeologists say such societies “collapsed.”3A society is considered to have failed if it transitions to exploiting fewer resources.
This book investigates the remarkable consensus regarding the presumed benefits of economic growth. The goal within is to illuminate the history of the normalization of economic growth, particularly through the simple financial tool called interest. Economic growth was not always normal, expected, or pursued. Over the past few centuries, though, it has become the primary goal of nearly every governing body on the planetThis change co-occurredwith the gradual legalization of charging and disbursing interest in Europe since the fifteenth century. Nearly every society has had taboos restri(or interest’s nonmonetary equivalents) that prevented runaway economic growth. Such restrictions broke down in European Christendom over the last few centuries. This book explains how and why.
How do abject and self-destructivepractices become normal? Most agree that honesty, generosity, and empathy are virtuous. Yet the perpetual economic growth the world has endured these past few centuries has been built upon mass murder, theft, and deception. How has the world normalized a form of social organization that is so directly incompatible with its professed values? This book investigates this history, highlighting the trail of violence and injustice wrought by the valorization and pursuit of economic growth.
The aim of this book is “very simple: it is nothing more than to think about what we are doing.”4As opposed to accepting that the growth of wealth is an inherent and unassailable good, perhaps we can think a little harder about what it takes to grow wealth and question if all this wealth is worththe cost.5This book takes seriously the idea that the drawbacks of economic growth outweigh any circumstantial benefits. Bringing a sudden halt to economic growth is not an easy sell, so, short of this, it is hoped this book can at least make economic growth a bit more controversial.
Epitomizing dominant economic perspectives, Richard Landes suggests historians have difficulty understanding the lack of economic growth in the Middle Ages because they take growth for granted. “When it’s not there . . . we either find reasons why it didn’t happen or imagine that, contrary to impressions, it did happen . . . we assume that economic growth is natural, and that as soon as conditions permit, it appears.”6Herein, I pulverize this assumption, showing that economic growth is not natural or unnatural. Economic growth is a choice motivated by certain values, particularly the valuing of egoistic individualism over social well-being
In many regards the task before this book resembles Angela Davis’s discussion of prison abolition in the US. “The prison is considered so ‘natural’ that it is extremely hard to imagine life without it. . . . The prison has become a key ingredient of our common sense. It is there, all around us. We do not question whether it should exist. It has become so much a part of our lives that it requires a great feat of the imagination to envision life beyond the prison.”7“The prison” could be seamlessly replaced with “economic growth” in this quote. As Davis highlights, the work of denaturalization isdaunting.
• • •
Today’s dominant economic behavior (how we exchange and distribute resources) is predicated on the perpetual growth of wealth, and, when that growth shows signs of letting up, it induces widespread distress for millions in the form of depressions and recessions. However, this is not a compelling argument for the benefits of economic growth. Rather, it is like paying off the mafia. We have an infrastructural gun to our heads threatening to pull the trigger if we stop producing and buying kitchen appliances. We can continue to oblige this figurative assailant until we commodify every inch of the solar system, or we can work together to disarm this systemic tormentor.
Stretching this violent metaphor further, the “gun to our head” is interest. Interest makes it so that if we don’t grow our wealth, we face privation. No development has been more significant in shaping today’s socioeconomic circumstances than the legalization of charging interest in Europe over the past few centuries. From the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire (roughly 476) to the dissolution of ecclesiastic authority across Napoleonic Europe (roughly 1807), charging interest at any rate was, if not illegal, then scandalous and sinful. This book offers a deep interrogation of the history and function of interest, including the multiple shifts in social perception of the concept over the millennia.
I draw from the fields of history, theology, anthropology, economics, and philosophy to make two overarching arguments: 1) the pursuit of perpetually accelerating economic growth is unavoidably violent, exploitative, and ecocidal (if not genocidal and suicidal); 2) the pursuit of economic growth is mandated and normalized through interest. Today it is normal to grow wealth, and it is normal to let one billion people go hungry.8I suggest the pursuit of the former causes the latter. From sixteenth-centurySpanish monasteries to contemporary Indian farms, I interrogate the formation and perpetuation of beliefs, values, and traditions that support the peculiar idea that economic growth is beneficial.
The focus here is primarily on the Eurowestern sphere. This “zone of interest” has proven least capable of living without economic growth. Polities within this sphere unleashed the never-ending(and accelerating) conversion of the world’s resources into commodities. While it would certainly be fascinating to look at the unique ways that economic growth became normalized in Nigeria, Russia, or China, the search here is for the origins of this phenomenon.
Each of the following chapters tells and retells the economic history of the previous six centuries (roughly 1400 to today) through a different lens: a) the normalization of interest; b) banking and privatization; c) insurance and risk; d) stock markets and investing; and e) the invention of “the future” in economic thought. The line between banking, insurance, and the stock market is rather blurry today, intentionally so.The collusion of these domains over the years has been key to large-scaletransfers of wealth from peasant to aristocrat (from the many to the few). These sectors are essentially three sides of the same coin. When this oddly shaped coin is brandished by any single entity (CitiGroup, for example), it is incredibly dangerous. It basically allows financial institutions the power to make riskless investments.9I parse the conceptual divides between these three domains to illustrate how they work together to perpetuate widespread grief. Each chapter discusses particularly grim episodes, demonstrating that seemingly neutral fiscal pursuits are inescapably malignant.
This cycling through history is meant to haunt: “repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what’s been in your blind spot comes into view.”10The world built from Enlightenment colonialism needs an exorcism. While seventeenth-century revolts in England may seem incongruous with the rise of life insurance, this interlacing of atrocity with banality is meant to keep the reader from getting too comfortable. To encourage this unsettling, I occasionally use iconoclastic or sardonic language to de-normalize the taken-forgranted. At its most pretentious, this book fuses the joyful disrespect of a drag culture “reading” with Reinhart Koselleck’s search for the “pathogenesis” of modern society.11
In the remainder of this chapter, I unpack key concepts discussed throughout the book, specifically the notions of interest, economy, growth, and normalization. This is followed by a concise itemization of reasons that economic growth might be considered detrimental, delusional, or sociopathic. Finally, I discuss the emerging “degrowth” movement and its capacity to challenge never-­ending wealth accumulation.
Writing in-between, above, and below several unfolding political, economic, linguistic, and theological spheres, Dante speaks with astute clarity to the prevailing sentiment of a rapidly financializing Florence in the early fourteenth century: “And what imperils and destroys cities, territories, and individuals day by day more than the accumulation of wealth. . . . Such an accumulation uncovers new desires which cannot be satiated without causing injury to someone. What else were . . . Canon Law and Civil Law intended to curb if not the surge of greed brought about by the amassing ofwealth?”12
This book interrogates why the imperiling and destroying of cities by the accumulation of wealth lamented by Dante has become not only normal but also celebrated over t


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