The pursuit of growth is an obsession for politicians the world over. Olaf Scholz thinks more growth would make him a more popular German chancellor. Xi Jinping sets growth targets in China and they are invariably met. Here in Britain, Rachel Reeves mentioned the word 58 times when she delivered the prestigious Mais lecture this week.
The almost fetishistic worship of gross domestic product as a measure of how well a country is doing is curious, because even the statisticians responsible for producing economic data accept it is an incomplete performance measure. GDP rises as a result of cleaning up after oil spills, but takes no account of the benefits of unpaid work. As a yardstick, it is clearly flawed.
