A seemingly unassailable concept is being repeated like a mantra by most government leaders around the world, especially since the financial crisis of 2008: “economic growth” is being touted by most as the only solution to empty government coffers, high unemployment and a receding standard of living in many Western countries. But some experts are now questioning the soundness of this assumption, pointing out that it may fail to deliver the needed remedies for global economy and that it may actually make things worse by giving people the clearly false expectation that development can be an open ended run.

Of course, economists and political leaders disagree on the means to achieve new economic growth. In the United States, still the largest economy in the world, President Obama resorted to several stimulus packages in the attempt to relaunch an economy prostrated by huge systemic failures (Lehman Brothers, AIG, Detroit being the most significant, albeit only the tip of the iceberg).

In Europe, Germany has been calling the shots: and Germany is historically afraid of inflationary pressures and sees the entire European Union project threatened by the mountains of debt run up by many of its members, especially those in the Euro zone. So it has made its financial help conditional on reducing budget deficits, slashing spending and raising taxes. Still, the aim remains to foster growth by reducing government waste and encouraging liberalization.

But what if both camps were wrong? What if growth at all costs were not the miracle cure for the economic and financial ills of our time? One is reminded of Aesop’s famous frog: wanting to become as big as an ox, it drank and drank, grew and grew and finally exploded. So some economists are beginning to cast doubts on the axiom that growth is necessary and desirable. Admittedly they are a small minority, but the fact that they are also linking forces with like-minded philosophers and social scientists gives more substance to their call for reflection, for debate, and perhaps for a radical rethinking of our priorities.

What they question is growth as the metaphor for the system as a whole–the system which has been responsible for the near implosion of the world financial and economic order in 2008, and earlier for globalization, for the pauperization of the middle class over the past 20-30 years, for increasing levels of income inequality, for greed and corruption in high places.

Their basic premise is that economics is not a “value-free” science. It, too, must be considered within a context–a context which ought to include apparently extraneous “values,” such as ethics, social and environmental considerations and sustainability. Prof. Alan Shipman, of The Open University, summarizes the problem by saying that “mainstream economists seek knowledge through numbers to stop the messy reality of people, processes and politics dirtying their invisible hands.”

Tomas Sedlacek, Chief Economist of the Czech bank CSOB and member of the Czech National Economic Council, belongs to this new generation of economists. The idea of economic growth, he says, was born with the industrial revolution: before that, the common perception of economic activity was cyclical, not teleological.

Hence, in the past century we, at least in the West, have become used to a concept of continuous progress, fueled by economic growth. And now, “when growth stops, our societies collapse,” both in terms of their economies and, at a deeper level, of their identities, bound as they have become to the notions of a constant accumulation of wealth and a constantly increasing standard of living, with each generation expecting more than the last. Progress and growth have come to be regarded as unalienable rights, but, according to Sedlacek, “they are not.”

It should be possible, the Czech economist muses, to “be satisfied with the collective standard of living we have achieved,” but that is not the case because “material progress has turned into a secular religion.” It follows that we measure our lives, and our status, on the basis of what we have and not of how we live. So much so that, as soap operas show us every day, a little depression can be overcome not by visiting the nearest church but by going on a shopping spree.

There are more radical views on growth than Sedlacek’s that have been emerging over the past couple of decades. One such movement is the “Post-autistic economic network” (PAEN), born in Paris in the year 2000 as a students’ revolt against mainstream (i.e., neoclassical) economics, with the demand that economics studies “introduce a plurality of approaches adapted to the complexity of objects analyzed” (quote from the founding manifesto). In terms of growth, PAEN’s views can be summarized as follows.

“Mainstream economics, and in consequence most policy dialogue, also conflates two very different meanings of economic growth that are in common usage, with GNP mistakenly taken to be a measure of both. There is quantitative growth, meaning an increase in the quantity of production and consumption, and there is qualitative growth, meaning an improvement in well-being. For example, an epidemic may lead to growth of medical expenditure and hence increase GNP but not well-being. Quantitative growth that causes negative qualitative growth can also be called uneconomic growth. This is both a reality and a concept with which policy-makers must come to terms, the sooner the better.” (Edward Fullbrook, “Post-Autistic Economics,” in Soundings, Spring 2005.)

More drastic yet is the economic theory known as “degrowth.” In simple terms, degrowth theorists believe that continuous growth leads to overconsumption and in turn to environmental disaster and social inequalities. While the idea germinated already in the 19th century, through the writings of Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau and John Ruskin among others, it has been refined and conceptualized more recently by a number of economists and social scientists such as Nicholas Georgescu, Serge Latouche and E. F. Schumacher. In the context of a serious critique of the neo-liberal economic model and especially of productivism, these thinkers argue the ultimate unsustainability of economic growth, pointing to the reduced availability of energy sources, the declining quality of the environment and the overbearing consumerism of the First World, achieved at the cost of the Third World. For them the solution lies in reinterpreting the idea of well-being, not in terms of economic growth but rather in a more holistic way, introducing into the calculation of well-being, or standard of living, non-quantitative values, such as relocalization, community, education, work-sharing.

Although these ideas are often derided as extreme and impractical and have not found their way in official economic policy–no country aims at zero growth or degrowth–nevertheless they are being increasingly utilized to define the meaning of “development,” as in the United Nations Human Development Index.

In the end the issue is philosophical and political more than economic. It is a matter of definitions and context. For instance, surviving on two dollars a day is feasible in a subsistence economy, where certain goods and services are not assigned a monetary value but are interwoven in the pattern of community relations. But it becomes impossible with the transition to a market economy, where everything has a price. Hence, for degrowth theorists, it is clear that poverty would increase–and furthermore assume the tone of a negative moral judgment–if and when subsistence economies are integrated into the market system.

For the relatively wealthy Western world the questions are different: if indeed the current system is perceived as unbalanced, in terms of sustainability, ethics, power and income distribution, un-employment, delocalization, environmental concerns, etc., can that system be tweaked to redirect its priorities from promoting qualitative instead of quantitative growth? Who could take on that challenge? And if tinkering is insufficient medicine, what then?