Growth for Whom?
Article by Ayman Fouad Abdelgawad
Economic growth is indispensable to many hopes. Without greater productivity, improving public services becomes a permanent argument over redistribution. Growing economies can create work, finance discovery and give political compromise more room. Poverty reduction on a large scale has rarely been achieved by good intentions alone.
But a national total cannot tell us who received the increase, what was depleted to produce it or whether the activity improved life. A luxury tower and the repair of a leaking school both add to output. So may the treatment of an illness caused by pollution. Gross domestic product records economic activity with discipline; it does not issue a moral verdict on that activity.
The distribution matters because gains compound. Ownership of land, shares and intellectual property can rise faster than wages. People without assets pay more to enter markets whose appreciation has enriched those already inside. Eventually the promise that growth will lift everyone becomes less credible than the observation that it has lifted the ladder.
There is nevertheless danger in making growth the enemy. Stagnation rarely disciplines the powerful first. It hardens conflict over a fixed pool and leaves governments with fewer resources to correct inequality. The task is not to choose between growth and justice, but to design ownership, taxation, competition and public investment so that growth changes more lives than balance sheets.
My reflection
I want to know whether prosperity can be recognised from the pavement. Are people less frightened of one unexpected bill? Can a young adult imagine a stable future? Do essential workers share in the value they create? Growth remains necessary, but its most persuasive evidence is not a percentage. It is the enlargement of ordinary possibility.