Whether it is or isn't, the optimal strategy for a nation is likely exponential growth until it can't, and then switch as quickly as can be done with the least problems.
Since nations are competing, and we're talking about exponentials here, the cost for cutting off exponential economic growth too soon is likely to become irrelevant to the future, which every nation is going to strive to avoid.
Countries which grow quickly bake those assumptions into financial, industrial, economic, and political policies. They create companies, regulatory bodies, and financial systems which are predicated on growth. They create economic ideology and the mechanisms for promulgating it which are founded on growth. They create development patterns (most especially of urban land use --- the most massive impact of the automobile was on city and suburban landscapes), and consumption patterns.
Once entrenched, those are all exceedingly difficult to dislodge.
I'd argue that China is wrestling with this now, and that a fair bit of the disruption of the past few years (above and beyond exogenous shocks, notably Covid-19) involve this, as the CCP attempts to wrest power back from industrial, financial, and real estate interests.
Some European countries (notably the Netherlands and Amsterdam with its bicycle- and transit-centric transport planning), Japan, and possibly others such as Costa Rica, seem to have followed a lower-growth curve. These may actually find transition more viable.
At the capital of capitalism, the United States, transition faces absolutely massive obstructions in the form of politics, politics-expressed-as-social-values, economic interests, finance, real estate, land use, transportation, building codes (residential, commercial, and industrial), and more. Those are far more significant obstructions than actual technical solutions, and the more illuminating advocates of sustainability that I follow tend to emphasize this.
(I'll list these later, though I'm still waiting for XorNot to cough up. I'll give them a few more hours.)
I think it's a mistake to assume stability in nations and a strong self governing community between them can be assumed at all points in the future, especially if there is some stop to exponential growth at some point (but not only because of that). Economic power is somewhat fungible with mitary power, and lack of power in a possible future less stable system of nations could be very problematic.
In short I think the safest and most conservative path for any nation to protect it's future is to take advantage of as much growth as it safely can for as long as it lasts.
Another way to look at is that is the U.S. was to opt out of growth right now, how long would it take for us to become irrelevant on the world stage, and how long after that before we were (and our citizens) negatively impacted by trade deals because of lack of leverage (which is probably a best case scenario of negative possibilities IMO). It's the job of a government to avoid that scenario.
Transitioning is hard, but I'm not sure it's harder than the alternative, depending on how far out we are to it being forced on everyone.
That said, I'd be happy to read whatever info you have on the topic to expand my thinking.
To that extent, "rapid growth" seems largely a matter of "reaching your ultimate potential earlier". And the post-rapid-growth phase turns out to have ... interesting challenges: environment, politics, demographics, and more, many of which emerge after sheer growth alone can no longer paper over conflicts or issues which had been present all along.
There's also of course the argument that GDP doesn't measure actual net wealth or common weal, which is a criticism that dates back to the origins of GDP/GNP, and even its creator, Simon Kuznets. There are numerous alternative measures that are proposed. One aspect I've not seen much addressed is that GDP is largely a tool for managing macroeconomic monetary dynamics, that is, as total monetary exchange grows or shrinks, then the monetary base itself must be adjusted, which is the remit of central banks. Those banks can create or destroy money at will (pursuant to policy goals and prime directives), because money itself is not wealth. The knock-on effects are felt profoundly in asset markets, that is, goods or securities whose principle or significant function is to serve as an inflation-resistant store of wealth: stocks, bonds, real estate, precious metals, collectables (art, wine, cars, etc.), and the like. Asset value inflation is not itself economic productivity. It may reflect economic productivity (that's at least the fig leaf covering stock markets), but far more often, asset inflation simply follows national and global monetary policy, most especially rising in times of loose money or easy loans (largely equivalent terms). John Kenneth Galbraith's The Great Crash 1929 remains an excellent post mortem of one such event. To that extent, measuring GDP growth alone provides distorted view of actual wealth growth, both at the level of individuals (say, median, bottom quintile), and of net national power and stability, though of course how distorted is the stuff of legendary disagreements.
There is a history of countries burning through growth potential with immense rapidity, most especially in the case of natural resources extraction. Instability in the Levant following the mid-2000s has been tied to loss of net-exporter status among oil producers (Syria, Egypt, Libya), as well as food scarcity through both climate-related crop shortages and reduced imports as oil revenues decline. One of the more spectacular cases is the Pacific island nation of Nauru, which underwent a birdshit apocalypse after (briefly) highlighting as the world's richest nation (per capita) after what proved to be a highly limited resource reached its limits. <https://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/10/world/a-pacific-island-na...>
The country's recovered somewhat by entering into the hospitality business. That is, it runs internment camps for the refugees Australia would prefer to pretend don't exist and sends elsewhere: <https://devpolicy.org/nauru-riches-to-rags-to-riches-2021041...>
To the extent that contemporary economies run on the basis of extraction (petroleum, coal, natural gas, minerals, groundwater, topsoil) and sink exhaustion (the ozone layer, heavy metal contamination, greenhouse gasses, plastics and endocrine disruptors, habitat and species disruption, ...), none of which are costed into either market transactions or national wealth/income statistics ... well, we're all on busses headed toward various cliffs, some nearer, some further.
One option is to expend resources on things which presently have relatively low value but would be exceedingly useful in a post-carbon / post-collapse society. That includes basic skills, sustainable practices, sustainable infrastructure, and the social patterns which can effectively utilise these. Keep in mind that this runs directly contrary to market signalling as markets have an overwhelming present-bias in assigning values, as anyone caught holding the bag after a crash can tell you. Potential future utility simply isn't considered, and in general, non-market mechanisms seem to be required to encourage such investments.
(There are other systems which similarly fail to consider long-term value, and it's long been a favourite trope to note the immense ecological contamination and pollution which occurred in the Soviet bloc. However similar desecration was seen both earlier and simultaneously under market systems ... both are poor at delivering ecological equity. Ultimate reforms have tended to emerge through social movements, legislation, and legal recourse, none of which are market-based.)
My final argument is that much of the advantages attributed to economic growth can be had at relatively low levels of same. That is, equity and distribution count for far more than total gross production or consumption. Invest in infrastructure, healthcare (with a strong emphasis on basic access and preventive measures rather than heroic interventions), education, affordable housing, social safety nets, and sustainable development of transport, built infrastructure (at individual building, community, regional and national levels), resource preservation and enhancement (e.g., water, soil, forest, and wildlands cultivation), actual productivity, mitigation of undesired consequences, and the like, and ... I think you might see a path which whilst it might not register on mainstream metrics is actually preferable over the long run.
Japan also consciously entered on a relatively lower-energy path than the US, largely through energy and vehicle taxation and licencing practices, though there were others. That's not to say Japan doesn't have a large number of automobiles, or a strong automobile sector. It does.
But domestic autos tend to be smaller than those made for export elsewhere, there's a tremendous domestic transit system (famously the Shinkansen), and Japan's electronics industry (with hits and misses) was the result of a deliberate government-directed policy toward more efficient resource utilisation over simply mass consumption.
Not perfectly achieved, by any means, but a contrast to policies elsewhere.
I question this definition of relevance. To me, relevance is having a healthy, happy, sustainable society and culture. It's not accumulating goods and energy consumption in a self-destructive and planet-destroying way. The sooner nations realize this, the better.
A well regulated and lawful country where your rights are respected both internally and internationally is a luxury of a powerful nation and a stable system of narions. The former is what I'm saying is is important with regard to growth, because the latter can't be assumed to always exist in the future.
There's a long-standing observation that countries in which stable political, economic, and technological cultures have emerged have tended to have natural defences. The British Isles and Japanese archipelago in particular both avoided successful foreign invasion or even significant attack for nearly 1,000 years, until the 20th century.
Contemporary stability has more to do with Superpower alliances than geography, though geography still matters. The grand central-European plain had been the parade ground of invading armies since before the Mongol invaders, but today is largely peaceful, so long as one looks underneath the NATO umbrella. Ukraine suffers not only flat geography, ready river and sea access, railway infrastructure, and a long and unrespected border with Russia, but status as an unalligned state, whose prior security treaties with Russia have been abrogated.
The first four factors are common to numerous other states, it's the last which has proved critical to its history since 2014.
And such alliances don't require especially robust economic capability. Among the 31 members of Nato are wealthy states in absolute (Germany) and per-capita (Liechtenstein) terms, but also some of the poorest, notably Montenegro at 75th worldwide per capita and ranked 46 of 50 among European states in overall GDP (2023). Albania, Croatia, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia, Romania, and Slovakia are other states with low overall or per-capita GDP:
State GDP EU rank GDP/capita (WW)
----- ----------- ---------------
Albania: 40 101
Belgium: 12 18
Bulgaria: 26 73
Canada: n/a n/a
Croatia: 29 54
Czechia: 19 37
Denmark: 16 9
Estonia: 35 38
Finland: 18 15
France: 3 21
Germany: 1 16
Greece: 22 39
Hungary: 24 51
Iceland: 37 6
Italy: 4 25
Latvia: 34 50
Lithuania: 30 44
Luxembourg: 27 1
Montenegro: 46 75
the Netherlands: 7 12
North Macedonia: 42 92
Norway: 13 3
Poland: 10 49
Romania: 17 55
Slovakia: 25 45
Slovenia: 31 34
Spain: 6 29
Turkey: 8 53
United Kingdom: 2 22
United States: n/a n/a
- I've listed the North American members, but omitted their GDP as these are not European states.)
- EU rank is 1--50 inclusive.
- GDP/capita rank is 1--134 within Europe, based on global IMF rankings of 192 states worldwide.
Sources:
- GDP overall: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...>
- GDP/capita: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...>
Takeaway: Alliances trump GDP or per-capita income.