It may sound obvious, but what a nation prioritizes has a lot to do with its economic outcomes. If nations do not make growth and innovation their overarching goal, they will have less of both. This orientation, or lack thereof, influences every policy, governance, and administrative question. If growth is not the goal, robust growth will not be the outcome. It’s that simple.

Competing National Priorities

In a January 2025 Financial Times article on Britain’s struggle for growth, Janan Ganesh astutely comments that all the talk about growth strategies is for naught if a nation does not have a growth preference, meaning “a settled view that, when growth comes into conflict with another goal, growth must prevail.” He goes on to compare the UK and U.S., arguing:

When growth bumped up against another imperative—tax cuts against income equality, corporate expansion against antitrust concerns, fracking against local sensitivities—the American bias was for growth, at least compared with the western European average.

We will return to whether America has as much of a bias for growth as Ganesh suggests. But first, it’s important to note that at least five overarching goals compete for dominance in advanced economies today. Only the last one maximizes growth.

1. Social Justice

At all times in history, including our own, humanity has fallen short of ideals of justice, especially in outcomes. But surprisingly, the more countries address their growth challenges and make concomitant progress on social justice, the more social justice rises to the paramount goal. By all measures—at least in OECD countries—racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual-preference justice have never been higher. Yet the focus on these issues has also never been higher.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made social justice his government’s paramount priority. U.S. President Joe Biden did the same, ensuring virtually every policy issue went through the filter of race and social justice.

When social justice is the overriding goal, growth and innovation are subservient, as economic policies and regulations are shaped with equity concerns at their core. And despite what certain social-justice advocates will argue, there is almost always an inherent tension between more equity and more growth.

2. Green

Usually going hand in hand with social justice is the campaign to solve climate change. For green advocates, nothing is more important than fighting climate change. Everything, even growth, must be sacrificed on the altar of climate change. Al Gore epitomizes this view when he states: “The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity.” If that is the case, everything else is secondary.

Of course, the real win-win is combining social justice and green into the climate-justice movement. Naomi Klein captures this view when she asserts: “Climate change isn’t just a disaster. It’s also our best chance to demand and build a better world.” What she means by a better world is not a more prosperous one, but a more just one. Likewise, the Climate Justice Alliance “envision[s] a world in which fairness, equity, and ecological rootedness are core values.”

We see this in places where voters put green before growth. In Sweden, just 12 percent of the population thinks economic growth is more important than protecting the environment, while no EU-17 nation has a rate higher than 40 percent. No wonder the EU’s main economic focus—after attacking American tech firms—is on climate.

3. Freedom

While the left prioritizes green and justice, many on the right prioritize freedom. “Live free or die,” they proclaim. They might argue that freedom leads to growth, but that’s not the case—at least compared with an effective government growth agenda.

Ronald Reagan epitomized this view with his famous statement: “I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.”

In their zeal for freedom, these conservatives often oppose growth-inducing policies such as increased spending on science and engineering or trade restrictions on Chinese mercantilists.

4. Family

The new populist wing of the right pays less attention to freedom and more to family. A recent manifesto by a number of leading populist conservatives stated:

As scholars, writers, and policy experts, we believe that public policy should direct technology toward the flourishing of the family and the human person. Our laws and regulations must seek to form a technological order that provides a functional economic role for the household, protects human sexuality, rewards marriage, enriches childhood, preserves parental and communal authority, enables the practice of liberty, and ennobles our common life.

Note the absence of the word growth. In fact, the manifesto opposes technologies that “replace human labor,” one of the principal sources of productivity growth. And, sounding like anti-growth guru E. F. Schumacher, they want to “accelerate the transition to a new household economy, clear away policy restrictions on home production”—something that would surely lower productivity.

Yuval Levin, a signer of the anti-technology innovation manifesto, goes even further. In an analysis of Marc Andreessen’s noted pro-growth manifesto, he writes:

an understanding of the nature of the human person and the character of human flourishing that could help him see that what we most need to build are families and communities, and that technological progress ultimately cannot be sustained without the kind of cultural confidence that makes itself evident first and foremost in a commitment to the next generation. There are times when this commitment does require some deceleration of technology.

In other words: Let’s decelerate growth.

5. Growth

“Growthers” prioritize faster per-capita income growth driven by technological advancement. Unlike the above four goals, which are linked to political orientation (justice and green for progressives, freedom and family for conservatives), “growthers” can be found across the political spectrum. Some liberals support growth because boosting take-home pay is at the top of their agenda. Some conservatives recognize the important ways governments can facilitate growth.

This gets back to Ganesh’s point. If political leaders and voters don’t put growth as number one, why be surprised when governments don’t focus on it? Wanting growth is the single most important question a nation has to answer. And by growth, I mean per-capita income growth, not just GDP growth. If we wanted to double GDP growth, we could quadruple the U.S. population with mass immigration. But what really matters is per-capita growth.

So, if a government wants per-capita income growth, it should want:

• Organizations to boost productivity and do as much as possible with as little as possible
• Companies to automate as many tasks as possible
• Organizations to get big enough to be highly innovative and productive
• People who want to take risks and who are allowed to fail
• A tax code that promotes business investment
• An education system that helps gifted students become even more talented
• Meritocracy in education and the workplace
• Regulations that do as little harm to growth as possible while providing adequate social protection
• Public investment in the drivers of innovation and growth
• Social attitudes that welcome creative destruction and make it easy to build and bring new things to market

The Waning Growth Imperative

For over a century, the core of American political economy was growth. Occasionally—such as during the New Deal—justice gained more prominence. But until the turn of this century, growth dominated.

However, since then, growth has been on its back foot in the EU and the United States. In Europe, justice and green are the overarching priorities. Likewise, much of the Anglo world—especially Canada and the UK—has largely abandoned growth as a goal or preference in favor of equity and green.

Because growth is still seen as something politicians must mention, many leaders still invoke it—but usually only to justify their other goals, especially green and justice. Ángel Gurría, former OECD secretary-general, said the perception that we must sacrifice growth to protect the environment is wrong, declaring that green can be a new driver of growth. Well, not really. Energy represents around 7 percent of most economies’ GDP, and it’s highly unlikely—absent some breakthrough in nuclear fusion—that clean energy will be any cheaper than dirty.

China apologist Jeffrey Sachs claims: “The path to shared prosperity begins with justice in our economic systems. When markets operate with fairness and justice, they become powerful engines of growth.” And Jeff, your evidence is what?

Why Growth Must Come First

Technology-powered growth should once again become the West’s paramount goal. Without it, incomes—including for women, minorities, Indigenous peoples, LGBTQ+ communities, and families—will lag. Without it, societies will not be able to fund the expenditures needed to address climate change. And without it, China will win (as there is no way the CCP will let China be bogged down by the first four goals). That is a much bigger threat to Western freedom than whether the federal government is 18 percent of GDP instead of 15 percent.

Ganesh got it right: Having a growth goal—or, as he called it, a growth preference—is foundational. Without it, critical questions across society, at all levels of government, and in all major political parties will be answered in ways that do not maximize growth.

Building a Growth Coalition

If this is right, it suggests that the West is stagnating because the growth imperative is under attack from both the right and the left across democratic, developed nations. Policymakers and other elites might give lip service to growth, but the underlying reality—which should be clear to any astute observer—is that this is almost all lip service. Other than the radical climate faction, who wouldn’t say they want growth? Likewise, who wouldn’t be for social justice, reducing global warming, supporting strong families, or more freedom? The point is: which one is paramount?

Restoring the growth imperative will not be easy. One reason is that the imperative must span the political spectrum. Many new growthers are almost libertarian, decrying almost any role of government as freedom-crushing totalitarianism. But clearly this community—including the newly formed abundance movement, even with its free-market strains (“less regulation solves most everything”)—needs to be part of the growth coalition.

So do more liberal and progressive voices, like Congressman Ro Khanna, who are committed to social justice but see growth as a key to enabling more of it.

And so does the industrial union movement, which needs to get back to its roots of supporting a bigger pie, with more of it shared with working people.

And finally, the community of centrist pragmatists on both sides of the aisle, who see growth as the sine qua non for achieving a wide array of goals.

Whether this community can come together around a common growth agenda is not clear. It may end up more like the splinter factions in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. And given the winner-take-all partisanship in American elections, the prospects of a pro-growth centrist from either party winning a presidential nomination appear distant. So perhaps, for now, all we can do is continue to counter the non-growthers while making the case for growth.

The Bottom Line

Unless we can restore the growth imperative in the West, we can—no surprise—expect slower, or in the case of some countries like Canada and the UK, negative per-capita income growth. So, are you with me?