Growth

T he figure of growth has risen to prominence in economic thinking.Without going into the intricate genealogy of this "great derangement," we simply note that a powerful natural analogy is at work: if the process of growth is fundamental to biological flourishing, then it must be for economic life too. 1 In this way, it becomes hard to think about the economic outside of this framework, where only growing economies are considered healthy. 2 While it is common for societies to model their conventions on natural regularities, 3 there is something particularly perverse about the way metaphors of growth are used to imagine neoliberal accumulation.Even if economic imaginaries have been decoupled from any direct connection to natural processes, 4 thinking in terms of growth continues to naturalize an exploitative economic order that causes widespread environmental devastation.Ideas of growth understood as economic expansion are hard to jettison.Hence, calls for "green growth," which holds onto the idea of continued economic expansion, ostensibly in an environment-friendly way. 5 More radical critiques of the growth ideology give its naturalizing analogy a pathological twist: economic expansion is figured as cancerous, cancer cells having the capacity to grow exponentially until destroying host 1. Ghosh, Great Derangement; Murphy, Economization of Life.