Sara Hsu asks if All Growth is Good? The Case of China.  Of course, not all growth is good. It makes little difference, whether it’s economic or human tissue growth. Edward Abbey famously wrote that “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”. Obesity is another form of high-growth, yet it hardly improves well-being or health.

Unfortunately, we economists have not (yet?) developed measures that help us or policy-makers distinguish between healthy growth and malignant growth.  The only real comprehensive measure of growth we have is growth of real GDP. We do know better, as Sara notes:

Since the seventies, with the assertion by Gunnar Myrdal that economic development should prioritize equality, economists have increasingly come to believe that not all types of growth are wholly “good.” Growth that ignores human well-being and equality are viewed as problematic.  Certainly growth that results in severe environmental destruction, as in the case of China over the past twenty years, cannot be classified as good, either, despite the country’s much-lauded successes during this period. Real-world views of growth depicted in the mainstream media do not fall in line, however, with the economic development literature. The focus on China’s growth in the news has distracted from a more balanced view of the looming inequality problems or polluting production methods in the world’s most populous nation.  As China’s growth has slowed, headlines have read, “China’s Economic Growth at Stake,” “China’s Economic Growth Slows,” and “China’s Second Quarter Growth Slows.” –

Yes, China’s real GDP growth rate has been spectacular for several decades now. That growth has lifted literally hundreds of millions of people into better lives. Yet, in strange case of the metaphor becoming real, that economic growth has literally brought cancer with it. Specifically, many “cancer villages” along the Huaihe River.

China’s economy illustrates the problem of growth measured in numbers versus measured in real economic change. The surge in fixed asset investment carried out post-global crisis resulted in an inflation of growth figures, despite the creation of uninhabited apartment buildings, or even entire cities. This is socially unproductive growth, wasteful production, “bad” or false growth. Although the distinction between “good” and “bad” growth exists only in theory, it is essential to clarify the difference to the public in order to move along the path of long-term development.

Admittedly, it may be overambitious to request that a more comprehensive view of growth penetrate the media. However, it would benefit our understanding of China’s economic performance; reconceiving growth would increase competition to generate “good” growth and discourage the race to build businesses that produce “bad” growth.

Yes, I agree. It is indeed an ambitious project, the idea that we could create more comprehensive measures of growth that help us to separate healthy improvement in well-being from cancerous, destructive economic growth. But it seems to me no more an ambitious goal than the vision less than 100 years ago to create the national accounts systems and begin collecting the data (from whence we get GDP measures).