“I have three priorities for our economy: growth, growth and growth.” Liz Truss’s pronouncement on the final day of the Conservative Party conference last week reverberated around the world. So, too, did her attacks on what she called an “anti-growth coalition”, a term designed to discredit all those – “Labour, the Lib Dems and the SNP, the militant unions, the vested interests dressed up as think tanks, the talking heads, the Brexit deniers and Extinction Rebellion” – that might prioritise social and ecological goals over neoliberal market reforms.
The Prime Minister’s focus on economic growth is politically misleading, economically wrong-headed and profoundly outdated. By putting growth at the centre of her political programme, she is invoking an economic ideology – the “growth paradigm” – that emerged during the 1950s, which made growth the master goal of all politics. Associated with thinkers and economists such as Paul Samuelson, Leon Keyserling and Walt W Rostow, it assumed that the statistical measure of gross domestic product (GDP), with all its inscribed reductions, assumptions and exclusions, adequately measures economic activity; that growth is a panacea for a multitude of shifting socioeconomic problems; that growth is unlimited, provided the correct policies are pursued; and that GDP-growth is a necessary means to achieve essential societal goals such as progress, well-being or national power.
Content from our partners
