And it’s worth asking: Is it true that since 1974, policy debate in the United States has been dominated by a “growth-at-all-costs” brand of “free-market fundamentalism”?
I don’t think that actually is true. Technically, the biggest pieces of environmental legislation passed just outside that window — the Clean Air Act in 1970, the Clean Water Act in 1972, and the Endangered Species Act in 1973. But it’s pretty clear that environmental regulation is a lot stricter in 2024 than it was in 1974. The Americans With Disabilities Act was passed in 1990. Land use regulation — which was explicitly called “growth control” when it was new — has grown dramatically stricter since the seventies.
The idea that for the last 50 years we’ve been on a manic quest for growth is confused. In reality, we’ve seen during that time period increasing levels of political influence wielded by people (mainly environmentalists and NIMBYs) who are skeptical of economic growth. It’s true, as skeptics of growth sometimes note, that internal policy disputes in the 1950s and 60s rarely featured pushback on the grounds of the necessity of focusing on economic growth. But that’s not because anti-growth sentiment was stronger in the past — it’s because back then there was almost no one in a position of power who was arguing for explicitly anti-growth policies. Degrowthers have obviously not dominated American politics since the 1970s — we have had economic growth — but growth has been slower because anti-growth ideas have gotten some real purchase over the last 50 years. The Hewlett thesis statement about this is backwards.
Here is the full post, gated but worth paying for.
