Even rougher on him than I thought they'd be.
Redistributing wealth weakening growth? Maybe my perspective is colored by being involved in this, but it seems like growth tends to be driven by non-monetary things. My post on STEM jobs refers to five STEM booms, which seem to correlate with periods of growth in the United States: - Round one from the decade immediately following World War II, waning a decade later. - Round two following the Sputnik launches in 1957 but waning sharply by the late 1960s, leading to a bust of serious magnitude in the 1970s. - Round three from the 1980s Reagan defense buildup, alarming Federal reports such as “A Nation at Risk” (1983), and new Federal funding for the “war on cancer.” Most of these had waned by the late 1980s, contributing to an ensuing bust in the early 1990s. - Round four from the mid-1990s, driven by concurrent booms in several high-tech industries (e.g. information technology, internet, telecommunications, biotech), followed by concurrent busts beginning around 2001. - Round five from the rapid doubling of the National Institutes of Health budget between 1998 and 2003, followed by a bust when subsequent funding flattened. The first three of these were defense-motivated. The fourth one was an innovation explosion that was kind of self-created by the acceptance of the internet, the expansion of biotech (especially following the Human Genome Project), and related things. The fifth one was a kind of freak occurrence which probably shouldn't have been as huge an increase in funding. Redistributing wealth won't cripple growth. Growth isn't spurred by wealth, it seems.
One school of thought says absolutely nothing spurs growth except technological change. I wouldn't go that far but at the same time they're on to something. Ostry et al. found that redistribution has either a positive or at least a benign effect on growth, one of my favorite studies to drag out this year. Anyway, yes, that was one of the red flag phrases from the article. EDIT: some of your examples have to do with spending, which encourages growth, and which is also supposedly impacted by redistribution in various ways. Everything is a bit more unclear than Ostry makes it seem. I present only other people's opinions to avoid coming under fire...
I don't think it's limited to technological change, and technological change can certainly be the more proximate cause of growth that is itself caused by something like a war. Anyway, redistribution would theoretically churn out more money to more people to spend it. You can't have an economy if everybody's hoarding and not spending.