先進国における経済成長の意義

●Benjamin M. Friedman, “Moral Consequences of Economic Growth: The John R. Commons Lecture 2006（pdf）”（American Economist, vol.50(2), Fall 2006, pp.3-8）

For those of us who are blessed to live in a society where the average standard of living is far beyond anything our ancestors historically could have imagined, therefore, the question remains: Why should we, and why do we, care about rising incomes? Why does it matter that we keep our economy producing close to the existing frontier, and, moreover, work to expand the frontier over time?

the hypothesis I am suggesting is that economic growth brings benefits in the form of opportunity, tolerance, democracy and fairnes− characteristics of a society that ever since the eighteenth century we have valued explicitly in moral terms. It is wrong, therefore, to structure the debate over economic growth as one of balancing purely material benefits versus purely moral drawbacks. The benefits are, importantly, moral as well. Similarly, the mapping of a person's location on the spectrum from material concerns to moral concerns into his or her indicated stance in either favoring or resisting economic growth, and hence either supporting or opposing growth-related policies, is a false mapping.