archive/so478

[...] As soon as the fiction of GDP is abandoned as the criterion of affluence, we have to admit that growth neither takes us further from, nor brings us closer to, affluence. It is logically separated from it by the whole social structure which is, here, the determining instance. A certain type of social relations and social contradictions, a certain type of `inequality', which used to perpetuate itself in the absence of economic progress, is today reproduced in and through growth.