Economic growth
Economic growth
Bear in mind that GDP is far more than a technical tool for measuring economic activity. It generates a whole grammar that not only shapes economics but also structures shared ideas of the world - above all, through its close connection to the growth paradigm. So, while economic growth is a highly ambivalent and elusive concept, its semantic core is statistically fixed: it is defined as the annual increase in GDP or per capita GDP and is usually expressed in percentages.
The growth paradigm
The growth paradigm
The international standardization of statistical measurements of the economy was central to making growth a policy objective. Only through this universalized concept of 'the economy', commensurable over time and space, did it become conceivable to measure what was to grow: the sum of market transactions within national borders. Only then did the idea that long-term, stable, and unlimited growth was at all possible and desirable become established.
In fact, in the political discussions of the early post-war period, the idea of economic growth was conspicuously absent. Rather, the central themes were full employment, stability, and reconstruction. Before nineteen fifty, there was almost no interest at all in economic growth as a policy goal in political statements or economic literature. In the following years, however, growth was catapulted to the top of the hierarchy of political goals. At the time, movements for decolonization were arising in former colonies around the world, the Cold War was in full swing, and it became imperative to pacify class struggles in both the Global North and South. Something needed to be done to stabilize Western economic dominance and capitalist class relations. There needed to be a way to show conclusively the progress of capitalist economies. First declared the goal of national economic policy by the chairman of the US Council of Economic Advisers in nineteen forty-nine, it became the globally accepted measure of progress from the mid nineteen fifties onwards. The sociological modernization theories developed by North American and
European white men were framed as an irreversible and unilinear process of economic growth. Cold War competition further fuelled the race for growth, through which governments could show their economic dominance. Growth became the yardstick for comparing the productivity of capitalist and socialist economies. Emblematic of this crucial phase of the development of the growth paradigm is a nineteen fifty-eight statement by Nikita Khrushchev, chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union: 'Growth of industrial and agricultural production is the battering ram with which we will smash the capitalist system.' Nation-states thus entered into competition not for equality, emancipation, or jobs, but for the rising quantity of goods and services they could produce. By the late nineteen fifties, growth had become a central goal of economic policy and the most important indicator, tying growth and welfare together and equating them with the continuous expansion of market transactions. In this constellation, GDP became the first and general indicator of the modernity, prosperity, standard of living, development, and prestige of countries.
The hegemony of growth fundamentally transformed the state's tasks, purpose, and legitimacy, all of which became linked to growth and thus to the economy. This process occurred much earlier than is usually believed. Wendy Brown, for example, situates the threefold economization of the state in the nineteen eighties and links it to the rise of neoliberalism:
The state secures, advances, and props the economy; the state's purpose is to facilitate the economy, and the state's legitimacy is linked to the growth of the economy - as an overt actor on behalf of the economy. State action, state purpose, and state legitimacy: each is economized by neoliberalism.