The doom-loop of a falling fertility rate Today's best articles Daily business briefing Growth is good. On that, most of us agree. Sure, there are some agrarian localists on the right and antimodern environmentalists on the left who pine for a smaller, simpler world in which we make do with less as well as fewer â fewer cars, fewer smokestacks, fewer cities, fewer carbon dioxide molecules, and yes, even fewer people. But they are very much in the minority. Most of the rest of us consider growth â economic as well as demographic â incredibly important, if perhaps for somewhat different reasons. Nationalists believe in greatness for the political community, and they view growth of all kinds as a means to that end. Mainstream environmentalists understand that combatting climate change will have to involve advances in technology that are driven by a mixture of growth-fueled economic dynamism and public investments paid for, in part, with revenue generated by economic growth. And liberals recognize the crucially important role that economic growth plays in making possible a rising standard of living â and how giving people at all levels of the economic hierarchy hope for personal, familial, and community betterment diminishes the allure of antiliberal political movements on the far left and far right.