Just minutes after my last post about the changing/flexible meanings of words I got this in an email from
burpee.com. Burpee is a seed/plant/garden supply company, so getting this type of thing from them was very strange. That aside, it was good and related to my last post. Interesting. Wonder if it was some rouge employee sending to the whole mailing list. If legit, I wounder what led who ever sent it from the Burpee team to send it?
Growing Concern
Let me be frank. I
oppose “growth” and object to the “growing economy,” I take exception to
“growing” companies. These terms—used chronically and uncritically by
politicians and pundits—leave me vexed and perplexed. Why? Because I am
convinced that “growing” is precisely what economies don’t do. They
might increase or expand, but they grow not.
At some point in the 20th
century, “growth” grew into shorthand for an increase or expansion in
the amount of goods and services produced by the economy. “Grow” is now
used as a transitive verb, as in Paul Hawken’s manifesto, “Growing a
Business.”
Even as a metaphor, “growth” has
its limits, soon apparent in the absurd, oxymoronic terms “flat growth”
and “negative growth”. A governor of a large state recently declared he
wanted to “grow” the size of his economy’s “pie”. Block that metaphor!
I hear your protests. “Grow” is a
figure of speech, a metaphor, Mr. Ball! Why put this harmless butterfly
of a phrase upon a syntactical wheel?
My animus derives partly from my
role as the head of a “growing business,” a 136-year-old firm
specializing in plants and seeds, things that really grow. Our long-term
motto, “Burpee seeds grow,” is not a metaphor, but a statement of fact.
The indiscriminate use of “grow”
and “growth” has profound implications for how we view our economy. The
anthropomorphism of the “growth” term, endowing business and financial
statistics with animate, living qualities, is imprecise to the point of
being delusional. The notion of a “growing economy,” I suppose, puts
color in the cheeks of pale, sexless numbers.
The use of “grow” or “growing”
as a synonym for expand, increase, develop and enlarge is largely a 20th
century creation, or growth, one that should be pruned from the English
language.
Adam Smith, in his Wealth of Nations (1776),
makes multiple references to “growing” and “growth”, but he is
referring to seed (of all things!) grain, fleece or timber, not
economies. Thomas Malthus, the unheeded prophet of the limits of growth,
in his An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) , likewise applies the terms to, simply, things that grow.
TheOxford Dictionary of English Etymology
defines growth as “Show[ing] the development characteristic of living
things.” The word “grow”, I might add, derives from the Indo-European
term word for “grass”. Tell me, is the economy growing like grass?
“Grow” is one of many terms that
have migrated from agriculture into business. We speak of “seed money”,
“hedge funds”, “yields”, and “plants.” “Share”, as in stocks derives
from the “shearing” of sheep and, thus, a unit of raw wool. No surprise
that the rise of agriculture back in 8,000 B.C., give or take a
millennium, brought economies into being.
Not so many centuries ago,
agriculture pretty much constituted the economy: economic growth and the
growth of plants and animals were inextricably bound. The ancient
Mesopotamian currency, the shekel, introduced around 3,000 B.C., was
based on a weight of barley: 180 grains, to be precise. Seed capital,
you might say.
I fear one result of using our
“growing” terminology is that we ourselves cease to grow, because we've
stopped thinking. Try this thought experiment: if the economy is
growing, is the hidden hand of the market growing with it?
Talk of the “growing economy” is a
pathetic fallacy: projecting our wishes and feelings onto external
phenomena, resulting in angry skies, brooding mountains and roses that
art sick. The effect belongs in poetry, not the economy nor in
economics, that properly dismal science.
The notion of economic “growth”
is pure magic realism. It’s as if we imagine that cheek-puffing zephyrs
propel clouds, autumn leaves gaily cartwheel across the lawn, and water
sprites dance in our water glass.
The economy represents and
involves numbers and statistics—and precision. Innumeracy is a now
serious issue in this country. The myopic, hazy, lazy thinking behind
our talk of “growth” appears to be shared by our children, whose math
skills are perilously close to those of their peers in debt-ridden
Spain, Portugal and Greece. Unless we start taking our economic numbers
seriously, the problem, not the economy, will only grow.
