What do we mean when we talk about growth?
I’ve always love the film Birdman. One truly 21st century masterpiece. It’s a movie about the making of a play. Very Meta. The play is an adaptation of a short story of the same name, What We Mean When We Talk About Love. And for quite a while now I’ve held a certain line in this play in a film very close to my heart, and the quote goes, “What do we mean when we talk about love?” It turns out, after looking at quotes on IMDb and skipping around the movie… that’s not even a line. Somehow I extrapolated from the name of the short-story-turned-play-in-a-movie this question when the name of said short-story-turned-etc. is declarative, not inquisitive.
it is via this origin story that I find myself faced with this, at first thought derivative but now seemly quite original, question. What do we mean when we talk about growth? Yes, this question may have a similar “meta” quality to its (not) source material, but it is at least one of two magnitudes less meta.
When I pose this question I do not ponder on what we mean by personal growth, the type of growth we consider to entail taking up jogging or working towards that promotion or going out to a singles night. Such growth is of course wondrous as well as paradoxical, much like what we might mean when we talk of that thing love.
“Self improvement is masturbation,” says the infamous Tyler Durden in the film “Fight Club,” another fairly meta ordeal. It may have came out in 1999, but I’m going to count it as a 21st century masterpiece. That line, incidentally, like the line I imagined was delivered by the character Riggan in Birdman, was spoken to the actor Edward Norton’s on screen persona. Is that meta enough?
All Is all one in love, or so it’s said, and the same logic loosely follows in Fight Club *wink* *wink*.
Growth is quite weird. Wherever you see growth you see too, in time, a perhaps simultaneously, decay. That whole equation of self improvement to masturbation I’m not sure about it, but then again its obviously a poetic gesture. It’s fun to not understand things fully.
Tyler’s, if I may, absurd notion does point us in the direction I hope to take us. This idea of betterment as impotence, as hamster wheeling, as beating meat, brings us to sadly to a far too meta field of concern. Let’s try to keep our feet on the ground as best we can.
Economics; it’s considered a science. Supplies and demands at equilibrium, seed investments blossoming into full grown corporations with numerous branches, and the tilling of prospect sheets for the sake of reaping a harvest abundant in new clientele. There does seem to be a balancing of religiosity at play here in the paradigm of economics. There’s the mystery of the silent hand, the answered or otherwise prayers for angel donors, and the assumed omnipotence of the market.
It is the koan of economic growth that I here hope to present. Is growth defined as a third car, or is it simply a matter of GDP corrected for inflation? It seems when deeply codified it’s easy to say what’s growth and what’s not growth. It’s easy to assume based on an entrenched western metric how well a western country is performing economically, especially when things are generally good. And look, maybe it’s alright to use these metrics for some general sense of establishing where we’ve been and where we’re going.
It’s one those “if aliens came down” things where an extraterrestrial, when presented with the language of Davos people as they speak about growth in the past decade and the the future of the ai driven growth that they would I wager ponder, what is it they’re growing? Are they constantly adding stories to buildings? Are they tracking the number of trees being planted? (No.) Are these humans getting taller with each generation? Are they setting a metric to their happiness?
What’s funny is that the most reasonable question an alien would be likely to ask about “growth” is, “is it a metric of material wellbeing?”, and even that is not what it is.
What is it? I could not tell you but it is bad bad bad language. It’s infuriating language. It’s borderline propaganda designed to pacify. It’s a bunch of baloney.
What is it trying to get at, though? It’s trying to get at the sense of, I believe, improvement, innovation, a reason to get up in the morning, something to “give em things to do,” as is expressed in the Eagles song “The Last Resort.”
Maybe it’s useful when a country is on its way to industrialization, if they want it. It’s good language when talking about growth of market share perhaps, or the growth in proliferation of new environmentally conscious technologies, but as a catch all, as something needed, as something assumed as being part of what economic or societal success is, it’s useless.
“Somebody laid the mountains low, while the town got high.” Another quote from the Eagles song. Is that what defines growth? You tear down the mountain but then your Tower of Babel is taller than the mountain ever was to begin with?
Congrats.
J.W. 