Perhaps you’ve heard the cliché that the economy is a pie we must grow rather than slice. It is hard to know where to begin with what this image gets wrong, because it gets almost nothing right. If you somehow grew a blueberry pie, you’d get more blueberry pie. But economic growth is not an addition of sameness. The difference between an economy that grows and an economy that stagnates is change. When you grow an economy, you hasten a future that is different. The more growth there is, the more radically the future diverges from the past. We have settled on a metaphor for growth that erases
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