“Growth,” according to my old copy of Webster’s Comprehensive Dictionary, refers to: “The process of growing.” This is not a difficult concept to grasp: preschoolers understand it intuitively every time a parent measures their height against a wall. 

Yet when it comes to the economic metric of GDP, many highly-literate commentators, journalists, economists and politicians fail to get a grip on the meaning of the word growth. References abound to “negative growth” or “growth being in negative territory”. In the face of the Covid-19 outbreak, this trend has become a pandemic itself and needs to be locked down. 

Step back and think about what is being said. If someone is losing weight, they do not say they are experiencing “negative weight growth”. They are losing or shedding weight, or dropping kilos or pounds. If someone actually said their “weight growth was negative”, you would look at them like they had two heads. It’s the kind of stupid remark one might expect Donald Trump to make. 

GDP itself is a fairly simple concept. It is a measure of the value of all goods and services produced in an economy over a period of time. The GDP of a country either grows, remains the same size (flatlining is often used here, which is fine), or it shrinks. And if it is growing, no one says it is experiencing a “positive contraction”. That would sound absolutely idiotic. But that is the opposite of negative growth, which is an equally absurd thing to say. Both are contradictions in terms, finish and klaar. 

I suspect this stems from the relentless focus on growth when it comes to GDP. Many critics have noted the measure itself does not account for environmental damage, or fails to capture the economic contribution made by unpaid work (mostly done by women), or misses modes of production such as subsistence agriculture and hunting or those sorts of things. 

Others will point out that a shrinking GDP, or one that does not keep pace with population growth, means we are all poorer on paper. Most economists will say meaningful job creation is not possible without economic or GDP growth.  

All of these points have validity, and my point here is not to deal with their merits or drawbacks. It is simply to point out that the emphasis on GDP is always on growth. When an economy contracts for a prolonged period of time, it is said to be in “recession”, or if the shrinkage is huge, even a “depression”. These terms clearly have negative connotations. So I suppose one could say “GDP is in negative territory”. But GDP growth cannot be. To repeat, an economy is either growing, flatlining, or getting smaller. 

GDP has also assumed such political and economic importance that the concept almost seems to have magical properties, so perhaps it is no surprise that it gives rise to a magical terminology. 

It’s rather like a “technical” recession. If you have just lost your job in a recession, there is nothing technical about it. There is a touch of embarrassment about speaking the honest truth, so people try to soften it by saying the recession is “technical” when really, a recession is a recession.

Like many such abuses of the English language, negative growth also obscures what is going on here. It suggests that there is growth – “the process of growing” – when there is none. So let’s finally dispense with this term once and for all, for the sake of accuracy, if nothing else. DM/BM