Growth is a funny thing. Without growth, that is without change, we are, by definition, dead. As such, for most of human history, growth has been considered to be a good thing – growth and flourishing were synonymous. Politicians promised it, citizens demanded it, economies and investment bankers grew fat on it, and living standards for most of the world improved on the back of it (in real, if not in relative terms). However, unchecked, and worst of all, growth in one direction without parallel symbiotic growth in all the other dimensions is equally disastrous. In fact, we have a name for unchecked, mono-culture growth: cancer. Unchecked, unbalanced growth without guardrails destroys as much as it creates. We only have to look at our uncomfortable shifting climates, overfilling landfills and accumulating space junk to understand that. Likewise, unbalanced growth is responsible for one of the biggest plagues of our global economy: inequality. Of course, as one of the most unequal societies, if not the most unequal society in the world, South Africans know all too well the evils of inequality – from obvious crime to less obvious, but just as dangerous, resentment. These undeniable challenges to the idea of ‘growth is good’ have led to the equally dangerous idea of ‘degrowth’ as a solution to the excesses of our overgrown, unbalanced global economy. We South Africans, who go to bed knowing that there are children in our communities who go to bed hungry, know intuitively that degrowth won’t fill hungry bellies and that we cannot shrink our way out of our challenges. At the same time, we can challenge our very idea of what growth is and what it could and should look like to be both sustainable and equitable going ahead. To that end, we should interrogate the fallible proxies and oversimplified numbers we use to measure ‘growth’ rather than discarding the concept of growth itself, which is GOOD, indeed, essential.
After all, what gets measured, gets managed, gets maximised, gets manipulated.
(I unpack this question further in my book, Rescuing Our Republic)