John Stuart Mill, in Book 4, Chapter 6 of his Principles of Political  
Economy evidently sides with E. F. Schumacher's view that economic  
growth per se doesn't necessarily contribute to happiness or well  
being. Says Mill: "I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by  
those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of  
struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and  
treading on each other's heels, which form the existing type of social  
life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but the  
disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress."

Mill questioned  "why it should be a matter of congratulations that  
persons who are already richer than one needs to be, should have  
doubled their means of consuming things which give little or no  
pleasure except as representative of wealth; or that numbers of  
individuals should pass over, every year, from the middle classes into  
a richer class. " On the contrary, Mill argues that "the best state  
for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one  
desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back by  
the efforts of others to push themselves forward."

Unlike Smith and Ricardo, Mill welcomed the advent of the classical  
stationary state where growth ceases. Mill states that after the zero- 
growth stationary state is reached what "is economically needed" to  
further boost aggregate well being is not "increased production" but  
rather "a better distribution."