Daniel Susskind: Why More Growth Won’t Make You Happier

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Mark Pearson-Freeland (0:07)

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Mark Pearson-Freeland (0:12)

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Mark Pearson-Freeland (0:18)

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Mike Parsons (1:00)

Hello and welcome to the Moonshots Podcast. It's episode 297 I'm your co-host Mike Parsons. And as always, I am joined by the man himself, Mr. Mark Pearson-Freeland. Good morning, Mark.

Mark Pearson-Freeland (1:13)

Hey, good morning, Mike. And good morning, listeners, subscribers, watchers and everyone in between. Thanks for joining us on episode 297 We are approaching that 300 mark very, very soon, Mike. Isn't that exciting?

Mike Parsons (1:27)

It is. It is like creeping up on us. It's before we know it, we're going to be thinking about 300 plus episodes. I think we're going to be close to doing the show for almost a decade next year, which is, I don't know, but I think that's resilience and that's a Moonshot characteristic. So at least we're eating our own dog food. But what's really interesting about this show is what a switch it is in this world of finance and wealth that we're in the middle of. This new show is a radical turn. It's a real new take on this idea, isn't it?

Mark Pearson-Freeland (2:08)

Yeah, that's right. We are delving into a continuation on our money series.

Last week, we had Morgan Housel. This week, we have a brand new author for the Moonshots Podcast, which is Daniel Susskind and his 2024 book, Growth, which Mike, it was pretty prolific when it came out. Growth is inherently good, as we all know. But what I think caught a lot of people's attention with Daniel's book is how it helped contextualize, I suppose, what are the balances that sometimes take place when it comes to growth. For example, when you see a vast amount of growth within a technological space, you might see a bit of a drop off maybe in the environmental protection side, for example, with the idea of data centers, all front of mind for us. So it's an interesting one when we see, and you said this just before we hit the record button. If Morgan was our direction on how to choose what to spend on, I think Daniel's book here is helping us understand why.

Mike Parsons (3:11)

The big old why question, and what it really was for us, I think in choosing the work of Daniel Susskind was, what a perfect time to ask about why grow? How do we want to grow? How do we want the businesses that we're in to grow, the communities that we're in to grow? These are all these framing questions, and we wanted to mix it up a little bit because we don't want to mindlessly grow for just more money, more market share or whatever your metric is. There's a chance for us to ask, well, personally, what is my purpose? What impact do I want to have? With how many people do I choose to have that impact? These are all growth questions. Frankly, we live in this boom or doom times. You don't know whether it's the best or the worst of times. But one thing for sure is growth has always been an assumed thing. For the last decades, we've all just assumed growth. If you think about GDP, it's growth of 3% every year on year. But why? What is it? How does it work? And how can we personally get a bit more out of it? How can we get some agency in a world that is crazy and diabolical? How can we navigate a path? This show is for you. It really helps us understand what is growth, how to get better growth and how to do it for us and the people around us.