The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth

I highly recommend Benjamin Friedman's excellent book.

Friedman says in this 2009 interview:

I look at four or five quite specific issues. One is opportunity. A key issue for any society is whether the young people who are given an opportunity to get ahead are simply the sons and daughters, and nieces and nephews of people who are already at the very top, or whether opportunities are made available more broadly.
I argue in the book on the basis – not just of theory, but also lots of social and political evidence for the U.S. and Western Europe and other countries – that when the broad bulk of the citizenry is moving forward in its living standard and has a sense of optimism that that forward progress will continue, then not only is the society better able to afford to make opportunity available more broadly, but people are more likely to support it.

A second issue is tolerance. Tolerance with respect to what? As an American, I would immediately think of race relations. As an American, I would immediately think of attitudes towards immigrants. But, I also have in mind things like religious tolerance, or discrimination, ethnic prejudice, and the like.
A third issue that I have in mind is generosity toward the poor. It's all very well to provide opportunities, but everybody knows that for one reason or another, lots of people are not going to be able to take advantage of the opportunities that are provided.

In economics, we talk often about people's individual endowments. We have this marvellous phrase called "labour market luck." Well, some people are not well endowed and others have bad luck, and then what? What are we going to do?
Once again, the idea that I advance in the book is that when the broad bulk of the society's population has this sense of forward progress in their material living standard, then people are also prepared to be tolerant in each of these ways.
And then finally, the fourth one that I'll mention is democracy, by which I mean creation of new democratic political institutions in societies around the world that are not yet functioning democracies, but even for a society like ours that already is one, the strengthening and nurturing of the democratic institutions that we already have.

Now, in each of these four cases, and in a few others besides, my argument is that sustained economic growth broadly distributed across the population leads to forward progress also in these moral dimensions, to call it that using the 18th century sense of the word.