Why Does Stephen Jennings Treat Growth as the Default?

Stephen Jennings says per capita GDP growth is the default. Unless a country does things really badly, per capita GDP is going to grow, and it is probably going to grow quite quickly. His bias is massively toward more change and more growth.

The view started in New Zealand. He saw how a country could be changed and how growth could be catalyzed, and he says that opened his mind to change. Humans, he says, evolved over a period of time when no change happened, so people are wired to think the world does not fundamentally change. He calls that a cognitive default. Since the Industrial Revolution, a wider and wider group of countries, with a more and more diverse set of institutional settings and styles of government, has experienced economic takeoff and very high rates of growth by historical standards. He says that is what has happened in most countries in the world. People look at Africa and look at the past and hold the opposite default: probably nothing is going to change.

He says there is a disconnect between the way people think and what has actually happened. The record since the Industrial Revolution pulls the other way, toward more change and more growth.