It's Economics That's Stupid, Stupid...

Growth. What is 'growth', aside from being a gloriously Old English word in nature, with its qualifying noun suffix '...th' added to the verb 'grow'. Well, applied to ourselves and our offspring it can relate to both our physical and mental growth: we start out physically small and grow into adults before we start to shrink again somewhat as we get past a certain age. It relates to a our intellectual growth from childhood, through adolescence into adulthood. Any subsequent shrinkage obviously being subject to any number of factors, if at all: but ultimately one's ceasing will put a stop to that growth, either way. By definition, personal growth is limited by mortality; in itself variable, but generally limited to the low hundred-plus years at its upper bound.

As far as shared human knowledge is concerned, the limit to its growth is theoretically bound to the lifespan of our species, which is unknowable, but which is predictable statistically from within that collective body of knowledge as it stands to date and from our current understanding of the universe. Knowledge is comprised of storable data, which we have been storing and curating, either in generationally-passed-on oral culture or in physical form since hunter-gatherer days. As long as humans walk the Earth, we will find ways of recording what we've discovered and learned from our interaction with both our planet and its sundry other occupants, to our mutual benefit. The word mutual being key here. Unfortunately, when it comes to economics and where the abstracted world of money and commerce is concerned, we seem repeatedly to misunderstand the basics to the detriment of the bulk of the world's population, citing 'economic growth' at all costs as the principal driver of nations and their societies. 

The concept of unlimited growth when it comes to the world's economy as a whole is a shibboleth wielded as a 'factual' weapon of truth by those with money against the rest of society: unlimited refers simply and only to how they see their personal fortunes expanding, and not to the growth of society itself and the welfare of its population, who are the principal wealth creators for the few. The currently 'agreed' measure for assessing this growth is Gross Domestic Product or GDP: a concept dating back to the English Civil War, but given its modern voice as recently as 1944, although the coinage of the term was a decade old by then. Whatever, it is still a concept that holds sway over any discussion about the 'success' of national economies, despite deliberately ignoring any factors outside of overall production and consumption of 'goods', and deliberately ignoring inequality of opportunity, poverty or access to education, medicine and social services altogether, let alone the micro-economics of family life itself with all the unpaid work that that entails.

I was heartened to see in today's Financial Times a comment piece by Ehsan Masood which echoes the thoughts of so many commentators on both sides of the political spectrum that GDP stinks as a measure, and always has. The problem, particularly during the last fifty years of neo-liberalist political thinking, has been a laziness of thought by successive governments when dealing with economic issues, with one after another capitulating to this false orthodoxy for the sake of an easy passage through government, rather than actually seeking an alternative analysis which would actually be of benefit to the country as a whole and ultimately to themselves in governance. I've spent my entire life barking up this particular tree, as I suspect many, many thousands of others have likewise, but simply to see the seeds of economic change even hinted at in the press - particularly in the FT - is a glimmer of hope for the future and my dream of a truly mixed social economy...