"When first I went down to the dirt
I had no cowl nor no pitshirt
Now I've gotten two or three
Walker Pit's done well by me"
Adam Smith began the reasonable dialog of economics in 1776 with a study of "the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations," that is, economic growth. Economic growth is an increase in production in society. In modern economics, as we have seen, overall production is measured by real gross domestic production (RGDP), so we would understand economic growth as an increase in RGDP over time.
As we have seen in the last chapter, RGDP is not a measure of economic welfare, but of production for the market. All the same, economic growth has done as much as any other force to transform societies since Adam Smith wrote. The lines quoted above are an example. They are from a folk song, "Byker Hill," as shown in the Digital Tradition Folk Song database at Xerox PARC. "Byker Hill" is a miners' song, and, I believe, the cowl and pitshirt are miners' work clothes. The song is a reminder of a society poorer than modern American society, in which a young person of the working class might not have work clothes when he began the job, and think himself well-to-do when he could afford two or three sets of work clothes.
It is hard to imagine the life of people much poorer than ourselves. My own experience includes a few years of poverty -- more or less voluntary poverty, actually, on my Dad's part. I was five and I didn't volunteer. What I remember most vividly is the outhouse. We lived in a two-room "dog trot" house with outdoor plumbing. We kids were allowed to use a potty, indoors, at night, but in daylight we had to go to that outhouse. There were spiders in that outhouse! I remember holding it in until after dark so I could use the potty rather than the outhouse.
On a world scale, though, neither I nor the Byker Hill miner were really very poor. Neither account mentions hunger, homelessness, nor life-threatening deprivation. According to the Economist (June 8th-14th, 1996, pp. 38-39) "More than half of India's under-fives, some 70 million children, face a life of stunted mental and physical growth" due to malnutrition. It is not that there is not enough food -- the "shortfall amounts to only 2-3% of an average family's daily food intake." Rather, there is habit and tradition of underfeeding infants; but the habit and tradition are themselves a product of centuries of poverty. In deep poverty, father eats first, regardless of how that impairs the health of mother and child, and that is necessary, because if father doesn't eat first, father won't be strong enough to work all day to earn money to buy food, and that means the whole family will starve. That is the real world of deep poverty.
Increased production is not the same thing as improved human welfare, but it increases the potential for human welfare. On the other side, it is much easier to romanticize poverty if one has never experienced it. Economic growth creates the possibility of reducing poverty and getting such things as adequate nutrition, indoor plumbing and a change of work clothes to real people -- as well as television sets, air conditioners, and computers to at least some of them. It is important from many points of view and is the theme of this chapter.
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