Good, Natural, Malignant: Five Ways People Frame Economic Growth
The way financial growth is framed determines everything from how we address poverty and inequality to how we deal with climate change.
Growth is good. We need growth for wealth, for jobs, to help the poor – without it society will collapse. Or, at least, that’s the message we’re surrounded by, even though logic tells us growth can’t go on for ever on a planet with finite resources.
Growth is so strongly framed as good and necessary that rational or technical arguments – pointing to the damage to our planetary life-support systems, for example – go in one ear and out the other. Such messages are worth examining. So how is growth framed?
1. Growth is good news
“The UK economy is performing well. UK growth is solid” – Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, speech at the University of Sheffield, 12 March 2015
The predominant frame is simply that growth is good. Most news stories take this for granted and reinforce it with the language they use. Growth attracts positive words like strong, buoyant and good; in its absence look for weak, stagnant and bad.
When a frame becomes universally accepted and constantly reinforced, it can be hard to see it. Growth framing is now so inbuilt that, for many people, questioning it has become unthinkable and doing so seems misguided, unrealistic or even deranged.
2. Growth is natural
“Sainsbury sees ‘green shoots’ of recovery as sales beat forecasts” – Financial Times, 17 March 2015
Add to this that growth seems, well, natural. Trees grow, don’t they?
The framing of growth as a natural process uses medical metaphors too. People talk about the economy flatlining, as if in a coma. Or take the phrase economic recovery – this subtly equates lack of growth with an illness, something you recover from. If resumption of growth is called a recovery, it’s bound to be good. Isn’t it?
3. Growth is the way forward
“I think the biggest task for this government has been about getting the economy moving again” – David Cameron, speech at Unilever, 9 January 2015
There’s a widespread feeling that if growth stalls then we need to get the economy going again, but growth isn’t speed.
If the economy is like a factory with GDP measuring the rate of production, then economic growth is acceleration: how fast we’re increasing the speed of the production line. If you stop accelerating, you haven’t slowed down, let alone stalled. Yet curtailing growth is framed in terms of slowing down or even going backwards: no wonder we’re scared away from even thinking about it.
We’re wedded to progress, to an underlying human story of expansion without limits. But somewhere deep down we know this story is a trap, containing the seeds of its own – and our – destruction.
4. A malignant growth
“Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet” – Agent Smith in sci-fi film The Matrix
What about reframing growth as bad? After all, growth can get out of hand: unlimited growth is cancer. What if we called resumption of economic growth a relapse?
But this paints humanity as a disease. That’s appalling. We’re not evil; we want to be the heroes of our stories, not the villains.
The doom stories underlying so many environmental campaigns have the same problem – we’re the villains. These stories paralyse us. We can flip from doing nothing because there’s no problem to doing nothing because there’s no point. Doom stories are a trap too.
So are there any helpful, alternative frames?
5. Free from growth
“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things” – 1 Corinthians 13:11
Growth is fine for children, but adults stop growing when they reach maturity. Letting go of growth as we strive for a steady-state world isn’t scary or threatening, it’s growing up. Here’s a powerful story for our times: this is our coming of age, where we leave childhood behind and proceed to an adult future.
In this story, what of the business leaders, politicians and economists who are obsessed with endless growth? They’re acting like spoilt children in a playground, who don’t want to hear that playing with matches could burn down the school.
The maturity story can form an emotional frame giving us an orientation and an inspiring sense of purpose. It’s liberating and empowering; it gives us the space, permission and motivation to take a fresh look, to get stuck in and attack the practical issues.
Meanwhile humanity – and business – can still grow in experience, sophistication, knowledge, wisdom: the things an individual adult acquires throughout life without getting any taller. Now that would be grown-up growth.
Framespotting by Laurence and Alison Matthews is published by IFF Books. First published by TheGuardian.com.
