What is economic growth for, and what should it not be asked to do?
Output per person has risen in much of the world, and governments, firms and families measure success by it. What is growth meant to serve, and what can it not supply?
The picture
What the numbers show, read from the Data library each time the page opens.
How to read the chart above, and the words it uses (for growth of output).
How to read the data
The figure is the yearly change in the volume of goods and services produced, after allowing for price changes. It says how fast output is rising, not who receives it or what it costs the earth.
Key terms
GDP
The value of all goods and services produced in a country in a year.
Real growth
Growth after the effect of rising prices has been removed.
Recession
A period in which output falls for a sustained time.
Who has a stake
Each interest, then readings from the Catholic library and the Classics library that bear on it, oldest first. Choose a group to read.
To have enough for a decent life and a way out of want, which in many places depends on output rising.
To be rewarded for effort and risk and to have stable work, without being driven to make more and more the measure of a life.
To inherit a world whose resources and ways of living have not been used up for the sake of faster growth.
To raise the means of the common good while keeping to its ends: the whole person and every person, and not output alone.
For discussion
When output rises, what should count as success: more goods, more people raised above want, or something else, and who decides?
If growth lifts the poor but also strains the earth, how should the claims of those who need more and of those who come after be weighed?
Mill thought a better distribution could matter more than more output in rich countries, and Paul VI that growth alone is not development. What would each ask us to look at beside the figures?
