On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 1:29 PM, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > raghu wrote: >> Why do you say the meaning of growth is unexamined? It seems to me that it >> has been beaten to death.< > > the problem is the knee-jerk tendency (seen among orthodox economists, > but not them alone) to equate "economic growth" with real GDP growth, > just as many equate "the economy" with "markets."
We have been through this before. You cannot win this argument until you produce an alternative variable to GDP growth. Like it or not, GDP consistently and effectively measures capitalist accumulation and has done so since the Industrial Revolution http://www.theworldeconomy.org/publications/worldeconomy/MaddisonTable1-3.pdf GDP, for all its flaws, measures objectively what it is supposed to measure. The real question is why do even progressives attach a disproportionate amount of importance to this number and why are we always obsessing about how to increase it? The various Gross National Happiness metrics are not satisfactory because they always have a degree of arbitrariness. Also these attempts give the misleading idea that the GDP growth idea is not fundamentally wrong, but merely needs a little fine-tuning. -raghu. -- milli-helen : The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
