We are the inheritors of a profound cultural misunderstanding about growth.

Those born in much of the 20th century grew up immersed in the gospel of growth as an unqualified good—the simple result of the march of progress. The swelling suburbia of the postwar era was a self-evident good, mass car ownership a self-evident good, a rising stock market a self-evident good. We had more elbow room than our parents and their parents. We had ever-bigger houses, bigger yards, a higher material standard of living. And if we were uncomfortable with the way strip malls stomped across a once-pastoral landscape, we saw it as part and parcel of that same progress: This is the price of a society getting richer.

This post won't be devoted to refuting the gospel of growth-as-progress, because that would likely be preaching to the choir. It's not hard in 2019 to find people who have rejected the idea that a sane economic system can be premised on indefinite growth. The world millennials have grown up in is one in which economic recession, growing inequality, failing infrastructure and looming environmental catastrophe are the backdrop. And the hollowness of material affluence—its lack of connection to a meaningful, happy life, beyond a certain point of having enough to subsist comfortably—is, to many, more obvious truth than provocative heresy these days.

Rather, this post will be dedicated to what we need to prioritize, as a society, instead of growth-for-growth's-sake. What we need is productive growth that generates real, lasting wealth across generations.

Can’t Live With Growth. Can’t Live Without It.

Today, we cling to the ideology of growth not because we have any real expectation that it will make our lives richer, but because we can't imagine an alternative that isn't inhumane in its implications. We have to grow because the economy, and therefore people's well-being, depends on it.

The domain of Strong Towns is cities and the built environment, so let's talk about what it means to flat-out reject growth in the place you live. Local growth-control advocates seem too often to evoke a world in which the spoils of a bountiful way of life accrue only to those who got there in time to pull up the drawbridge behind them. "We're full; there's no room here to grow" is an easy thing to say for the owner of a home in San Francisco, in a state in which half of residents (and two-thirds of millennials) say they have considered leaving because of the high cost of living brought on by a shortage of homes.

Anti-growth sentiment for environmental reasons takes on an even more unseemly cast: when, for example, an anti-development activist suggests that restricting building in his city will reduce carbon emissions (a baffling claim which ignores that if people are deterred from moving to one particular city, they'll still live somewhere) the misanthropic implication not so far below the surface is that the maybe the actual people whose needs are met by growth are the problem, and shouldn't exist.

When growth stops, the pain isn't felt equally. If we were to utterly stop building new homes and businesses in retiree-haven Florida, whose economy is powered by real estate, the losers wouldn't be those retired doctors and lawyers in Michigan contemplating a move south. Those folks would still buy the beach homes they want. The losers would to a large extent be the working class already in Florida, priced out in the world's cruelest game of Musical Chairs.