"Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists"
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“Unlimited economic growth” gets framed here less as an economic aspiration than as social technology: a way to pacify the many without asking the few to yield. Chomsky’s phrasing is deliberately clinical - “marvelous quality” reads like admiration until you catch the sting. He’s using the language of a product review to describe a political solvent. Growth, in this telling, doesn’t solve inequality so much as dissolve the pressure to confront it. If the pie keeps expanding, distribution becomes a secondary argument; people can be promised improvement without anyone powerful having to accept loss.
The subtext is a critique of liberalism’s comfort with technical fixes. “Liberal economists” are not cast as cartoon villains; they’re professionals who can see the social utility of growth and choose to emphasize it. Chomsky’s jab is that this choice is ideological even when it presents itself as neutral expertise. The “fact that has not gone unnoticed” implies quiet complicity: an establishment awareness that growth rhetoric keeps politics manageable. It’s a pressure-release valve for democratic anger.
Context matters: postwar Keynesianism, then the neoliberal turn, sold growth as a universal good while treating redistribution, labor power, and corporate governance as annoyances. Chomsky is writing against that consensus, pointing out how “endless growth” functions as a legitimating myth for a system that needs constant expansion to avoid confronting its own hierarchies. The line works because it punctures the optimism of progress-speak with a simple inversion: growth isn’t merely the goal; it’s the anesthesia.
The subtext is a critique of liberalism’s comfort with technical fixes. “Liberal economists” are not cast as cartoon villains; they’re professionals who can see the social utility of growth and choose to emphasize it. Chomsky’s jab is that this choice is ideological even when it presents itself as neutral expertise. The “fact that has not gone unnoticed” implies quiet complicity: an establishment awareness that growth rhetoric keeps politics manageable. It’s a pressure-release valve for democratic anger.
Context matters: postwar Keynesianism, then the neoliberal turn, sold growth as a universal good while treating redistribution, labor power, and corporate governance as annoyances. Chomsky is writing against that consensus, pointing out how “endless growth” functions as a legitimating myth for a system that needs constant expansion to avoid confronting its own hierarchies. The line works because it punctures the optimism of progress-speak with a simple inversion: growth isn’t merely the goal; it’s the anesthesia.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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