On The Subject of Growth

From Tom Lines part of the Occupy Economic Working Group. Growth has multifarious aspects, some of which are substantially un-resource related. But resources almost always come into it somewhere. Let’s have a look at it. Growth generally refers to increases in gross domestic product (GDP), the great talisman of economic policy, and it all derives from what goes into that statistic. You will have heard of businesses trying to achieve more ‘value-added’: every time they do so they increase GDP a little bit because the market value of production is what GDP measures. It can come from many sources because, in…