It was incredibly hard to pick a “favorite” book of 2024 given that I spent many amazing hours with the likes of Debt, Eleanor, and the brilliant science fiction of Cixin Liu. In truth I don’t feel that any one book stood out beyond the others for me this year, but there was one whose premise lies close to my heart, and whose ideas I’m still pondering many months later…

On the surface, Growth tells the familiar story of something we interact with every day in our drive to be more productive and make more money, the story of how entire societies came to value the accumulation of wealth. This simple premise completely undersells how revolutionary this book is. Growth questions this basic facet of modern society, astonishing readers with simple realizations, such as the fact that GDP isn’t even 100 years old, and that the entire artifice of economic growth was not central to political or economic life for most of human history until as recently as 200 years ago.

Susskind doesn’t set out to undermine the importance of economic growth to our lives, but to ask the far more meaningful question of how do we accommodate growth without sacrificing the environment, societal equality, and political cohesion? The book is thoughtful, highly focused, and packed with quotes from luminaries like John Maynard Keynes, Thomas Sowell, and Janan Ganesh.

“The most important fact about technological progress is that it can be directed” - 194