The Growth Delusion

World over, one of the foremost issues extensively and intensively discussed is economy and development. That is followed by issues such as environment, war and peace, human development, global governance, etc. Development, be it economic, political and social, is widely presupposed to be the meaning of growth; economic growth gets preeminence, while all the other aspects of development gets pushed on the back burner. Growth, essentially perpetual quantitative growth, is considered as the keystone of the prevailing notion of quantitative growth by almost all – the economists, policy makers and even lay public. The need to account for the national income, especially during the post World War I, brought in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), i.e. the value of all goods and services minus the wear and trear. GDP was formulated by Simon Kuznets, a Belarusian émigré, way back in 1934 for a US Congress report. Kuznets himself was not pleased with the method of its computation; he had rightly warned that the index cannot be used as a means of measuring welfare. However, GDP became the mainstay, the tapeline for discussion in the due course on development. He also argued that wars do not contribute to the welfare of people and hence should not be part of the growth measure. It is known that many a times, the measure is ironic; even damaging actions add up to the GDP. If one buys a car it adds to the GDP; if he crashes it getting seriously injured, this also adds to the GDP; however, the latter does not reflect welfare or development or growth in the real sense.