More of what
I become uneasy when growth is spoken about as if the word already contains its purpose. More production can mean more housing, better treatment, useful infrastructure, a less precarious life. It can also mean more activity that people would have preferred never to need. The quantity matters, but the composition matters too.
I am not interested in romanticizing scarcity. Material resources give people choices, and a comfortable person’s dismissal of growth can sound suspiciously like a request that everyone else become content with less. My objection is to treating an aggregate increase as the end of the conversation about whether life is improving.
Respect the measure
GDP measures economic production. The Bureau of Economic Analysis itself distinguishes that task from measuring the full range of things people care about, including environmental and societal well being. This is not an obscure criticism smuggled in by people who dislike economics. It is a boundary around what the statistic is intended to describe.
A measure becomes less useful when we ask it to answer questions it was not built to answer. I would not criticize a thermometer for failing to describe a friendship. I would criticize the decision to organize every friendship around maximizing the thermometer reading. The error is in the authority we grant the number.
Distribution also changes the meaning of an aggregate gain. I want to know who receives it, what it costs them, and whether the things they need become more accessible. Those questions require additional evidence. They cannot be answered merely by repeating that the total increased.
A dashboard with a purpose
My preference is for a public conversation that can hold several measures at once. Production, health, housing security, environmental conditions, time, and distribution can point in different directions. That is inconvenient. It is also an honest description of a society with more than one objective.
There will be tradeoffs. A policy may improve one condition while worsening another. I would rather argue about those tradeoffs explicitly than hide them inside a single number and call the resulting choice inevitable. Measurement should make disagreement clearer, not make value judgments disappear.
A useful measure should remain a measure, not become a destination. I want growth when it expands the possibility of a decent life. I want to know what kind, for whom, and at what cost. If those questions sound less tidy than a celebratory headline, good. A society is an untidy thing. Its progress deserves more than one way of being seen.