Thread by @MGSchmelzer

I’ve written on how Liz Truss’ call for ‘growth’ reveals the economics of deception behind neoliberal growth politics in general. @NewStatesman

Since it’s paywalled, here’s the key argument 🧵
newstatesman.com/ideas/2022/10/…

“I have three priorities for our economy: growth, growth and growth.” Liz Truss’s pronouncement reverberated around the world. So, too, did her attacks on what she called an #antigrowthcoalition. @TheAntiGrowthC4

.@trussliz focus on economic growth is politically misleading, economically wrong-headed and profoundly outdated.

By putting growth at the centre of her political programme, she is invoking an economic ideology – the “growth paradigm” – that emerged during the 1950s

The growth paradigm became hegemonic by sustaining the idea that GDP growth is necessary as well as natural, inevitable and timeless.

So here's some details on that history, more in my book cambridge.org/de/academic/su…

The concept of growth has colonised our political imaginaries: it not only reinforces the dominance of economic thinking by rendering all political or social questions into economic problems (what could be called “economism”)…

… but it also strengthens the positions of technocrats within modern societies, ensuring the primacy of the economy over politics.

If growth makes for a good political soundbite – often articulated through tired metaphors like “rising tides” or “expanding pies” – a closer look reveals how disastrous its hegemony has been for modern societies.
newstatesman.com/ideas/2022/10/…

Truss’s argument that stagnating wages and dwindling funds for social services are due to low growth is a deception.

UK household wealth tripled 1995 to 2017. Yet most of that wealth has not trickled down, but was captured by the rich. economicsobservatory.com/uk-household-w…

Truss’s call for growth is concealing a radical agenda of austerity

As the campaign @eiecampaign rightly argued, following Truss’s statement:

https://twitter.com/eiecampaign/status/1577729653258817542?s=20&t=hy1r8eV0LMr3EQvaUXRZFQ

Under Truss, British politics in the 21st century is stuck in the 1950s.

The left should embrace the term “anti-growth coalition” by creating a new consensus around a politics that critiques the abstractions of the growth paradigm, ...

... that liberates economic thinking from the putative “iron grip” of markets, and formulates policies that focus on what actually matters to people – living a dignified life on a finely balanced planet.