Strange Email From Burpee.

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.