Every financial article I've read for years has taken as a given that we need growth, with one exception - Sam Brittain recently in the FT.
That got me thinking - why is growth necessary? Possible reasons:
1 - because we need to pull people out of poverty.2 - because to get into power, political parties have to promise to spend lots of taxpayers' money on services. This tends to cause inflation and also to devalue the currency. Because there's always a bit of inflation in the system, a bit of growth is needed to stop real living standards from falling.
With so few people truly poor these days, would it do any harm to have a few decades of zero growth?
Just wondering.