Growth, Forever

You're watching the news, babe. Of course you are. It's the last Thursday of the quarter and someone in a blazer is saying the number like it's a verdict. Growth is up 2.4 percent. The anchor nods. The graphics pulse green. Somewhere, a politician is already drafting a tweet.

And you feel it, don't you? That little lift. That exhale. The Number went up. It sounds like we're okay. It sounds like the ship is still floating, like the engine is still running, like whatever you were worried about — the rent, the layoffs, the creeping sense that something is wrong — maybe it was all in your head. The Number says we're fine.

I get it. I really do.

There's something almost beautiful about it. This collective ritual we perform every ninety days. The breathless release. The commentary. The markets responding like a nervous system. We gather around The Number and ask it the question we can't answer ourselves: Are we winning?

The hope embedded in that number is real. The desire to know — to have someone, something, just tell you that it's going to be okay. That's not stupidity, sweetheart. That's being human.

But here's the thing about The Number. Here's the thing you already know but don't want to say out loud.

It's lying to you.

Not maliciously. Not even cleverly. Just... by design. By what it counts and what it doesn't. By what it sees and what it's blind to.

Let me show you.

When BP's Deepwater Horizon exploded in 2010 and released 3.¹⁹ million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico — according to NOAA's official estimate¹ — economists cite it as a classic broken window problem — billions in cleanup activity that GDP counted as growth while the region suffered real losses. The fishing industry collapsed, the ecosystems died, the coastal towns cratered — and the ledger said growth. Every lawyer billing hours, every hazmat crew deployed, every hotel room booked for the recovery effort. All of it counting as economic activity. All of it making The Number go up.

When Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans and displaced hundreds of thousands of people, the total economic impact exceeded one hundred and fifty billion dollars. Census data shows the city had reached only seventy-six percent of its pre-disaster population by July 2012.² On paper, The Number recovered beautifully. In reality, people never came home.

Car accidents in America cost three hundred and forty billion dollars a year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.³ Every ambulance call, every surgery, every insurance claim, every tow truck — The Number goes up. Every divorce — and industry analysts estimate the American divorce industry at roughly fifty billion annually⁴ — registers as economic expansion. Lawyers get paid. Therapists get paid. Second apartments get rented. The disintegration of a family is, technically, productive growth.

You see the shape of it now. The formula.

GDP counts activity. It doesn't count meaning. It counts transactions. It doesn't count cost. It counts what happens in markets. It is blind to everything else.

Which means The Number doesn't count your mother.

I mean that literally, darling. The woman who raised you, who might right now be caring for a grandchild or an aging parent, who cooks and cleans and manages and tends and holds it all together — her labour is invisible. Economists call it "unpaid care work." The National Partnership for Women & Families values it at over one trillion dollars annually in America alone.⁵ Women perform about two-thirds of it. It keeps the entire economy functioning. And because no one writes a check for it, it doesn't exist. It doesn't move The Number.

When someone pays a stranger to watch their children, GDP goes up. When a mother watches her own children, nothing happens. The work is the same. The only difference is whether money changed hands. And if money didn't change hands, it wasn't real. It didn't count.

The entire value of the world's ecosystems — the forests that filter our air, the wetlands that clean our water, the pollinators that make food possible — adds up to somewhere between thirty-three and fifty-four trillion dollars annually, as estimated in a landmark Nature study by Robert Costanza and colleagues.⁶ Roughly twice global GDP. The Number that tells us how we're doing ignores half of everything keeping us alive.

This isn't a revelation, babe. This isn't news.

We've known this for ninety years.

In 1934, a man named Simon Kuznets stood before Congress and presented the first comprehensive estimate of national income. He was brilliant. He was meticulous. And he included a warning.

"The welfare of a nation," Kuznets wrote, "can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income as defined above."⁷

Scarcely be inferred. The man who invented The Number told us — in writing, in the very document that launched the measure — that it couldn't tell us what we wanted to know. He said economic welfare cannot be measured without knowing how income is distributed. He said it ignores "the reverse side of income," the intensity and unpleasantness of the effort required to earn it. He said it leaves out the vast value of goods and services produced within households and communities.

He handed Congress a tool and told them what it couldn't do. And then he watched, for the next thirty years, as they used it for exactly that.

By 1962, Kuznets was still trying. "Distinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth," he wrote, "between its costs and return, and between the short and the long term. Goals for more growth should specify more growth of what and for what."

No one listened.

No one wanted to listen.

Because by then, The Number had become something else. It had become the answer. During World War II, the measure was weaponized — used to calculate how much war production America could sustain while keeping consumer goods flowing. It worked. We won. And after the war, this thing designed to measure productive capacity became the thing expected to measure whether life was getting better.

You see what happened there? We took a wartime logistics tool and asked it to tell us if we were happy.

At Bretton Woods in 1944, where the IMF and World Bank were born, GDP became the official metric for comparing national economies. The standard. The score. America then contributed about thirty-five percent of global output — as the Bretton Woods Committee notes in its retrospective⁸ — and American measurement became the world's measurement. And once everyone agreed to use The Number, it became almost impossible to use anything else.

You know how this works, sweetheart. It's the same reason we're all stuck with QWERTY keyboards even though better layouts exist. The same reason every electrical outlet in your house hasn't changed in a century. Once a standard takes hold, it's not enough for an alternative to be better. It has to be so much better that it's worth everyone switching at once. And in practice, that almost never happens.

We're tired. We're busy. The thing we have already works. Sort of.

Here's what kills me.

Since 1970, researchers have proposed two hundred and thirty-two alternatives to GDP — a count documented in research published in Ecological Economics.⁹ Two hundred and thirty-two. The Genuine Progress Indicator. The Human Development Index. Bhutan's Gross National Happiness. Dashboards and indices and composite measures of every conceivable design.

Seventy-seven of them emerged in just six years, between the 2009 Stiglitz report and the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals. A whole generation of economists and activists and well-meaning policy people, working overtime to build a better measure.

And here we are. Still watching The Number. Still letting it tell us how we're doing.

Do you know why the alternatives failed?

They got complicated.

GDP is a single number. A grade. A score. The alternatives — trying to capture everything GDP missed — incorporated anywhere from four to four hundred and seventy-two separate indicators. They became dashboards. They became reports. They became the homework you meant to read but never opened.

And our brains, sweetheart, our poor overloaded primate brains, they can hold maybe three or four things in working memory at once. A handful. A dashboard with 472 indicators isn't a tool. It's a reason to close the tab and check The Number that at least pretends to give you an answer.

We don't want nuance. We want to know if we're winning.

Even when we're not.

Here's what winning looked like after 2008. The financial system collapsed. The government bailed out the banks. And then, over the next few years, The Number recovered. The economy grew. The charts went up. Politicians took victory laps.

Economist Emmanuel Saez at UC Berkeley calculated that ninety-one percent of the income gains between 2009 and 2012 went to the top one percent.¹⁰

Ninety-one percent. The economy "recovered," and almost all of the recovery went to people who were already rich. The typical worker saw almost nothing. But The Number said growth. The Number said we were okay.

The Economic Policy Institute tracks a stark divergence: since 1979, productivity in America has risen about sixty percent, while wages for typical workers have risen about sixteen percent.¹¹ The gap between what workers produce and what they get paid has been growing for forty-five years. And every time someone complains, someone else points to The Number and says the economy is fine.

This is what Robert Kennedy meant.

In March of 1968, seventy-nine days before he was killed, Kennedy stood at the University of Kansas and said what Kuznets had been saying for thirty years.

"Our Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage," he said.¹² "It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl."

And then: "It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile."

Children's health, he said. The quality of their education. The joy of their play. The beauty of our poetry. The strength of our marriages. The intelligence of public debate. The integrity of public officials. Our wit, courage, wisdom, learning, compassion, devotion to country.

"Gross National Product measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, except that which makes life worthwhile."

He was assassinated seventy-nine days later.

Here's the part where I'm supposed to turn on you, sweetheart. The part where I say we were tricked. The part where I point to politicians, to corporations, to some shadowy them who pulled the wool over our eyes.

I'm not going to do that.

We weren't tricked. We chose this.

Not in some grand conspiracy. Not even consciously. But in a thousand small decisions, every time we checked The Number and felt the relief. Every time we let it stand in for something we knew it couldn't measure. Every time we chose the simple answer because the complex one was exhausting.

There's a name for this. Willful ignorance. Research published in the Psychological Bulletin found that forty percent of people, when given the option, will actively avoid information that would require them to do something hard.¹³ Not because they're stupid. Because knowing costs something. Because once you know, you have to act, or live with not acting, and both of those are harder than just... not knowing.

We do this with The Number every day.

We know it doesn't measure what matters. We know it counts destruction as growth and ignores the work that keeps us alive. We know the gains have been going to the top for decades while the rest of us tread water. We know.

And we check The Number anyway. We let it tell us whether we're okay.

Because the alternative — sitting with uncertainty, holding multiple measures at once, admitting that "winning" might not be reducible to a single score — that asks something of us. It asks us to tolerate not knowing. It asks us to make judgments without a grade. It asks us to trust our own experience even when it contradicts the official story.

That's hard, babe. That's really hard.

The Genuine Progress Indicator — one of those 232 alternatives — has been calculated going back to 1950. It tries to adjust GDP for the things Kuznets warned about: inequality, environmental degradation, the value of household work. You know what Costanza and colleagues found when they ran the numbers?⁹

Global GPI per capita peaked in 1978.

While The Number has tripled since then, this measure of actual welfare peaked when I was negative eight years old. We've been on a plateau — or a slow decline — for nearly fifty years, while The Number we worship has climbed ever higher.

We chose the graph that goes up. We chose the fog over clarity. Because at least fog lets you keep moving.

You know what? You do this too. Not just with GDP.

You check your step count, don't you? Even though you know fitness isn't ten thousand steps. Even though you know someone who walks that much every day and still has high blood pressure, still feels tired, still isn't what you'd call healthy. But the number goes up and you feel that little lift. I moved today. I did something.

You refresh your likes. Your follower count. Your engagement rate. Even though you know — god, you know — that popularity isn't validation, that numbers aren't connection, that the algorithm is designed to make you feel insufficient so you'll post more, engage more, perform more. But you check anyway. Because at least it's a score. At least it pretends to tell you if you matter.

You look at your bank balance and feel either relief or dread, even though you know wealth isn't security. You've seen rich people lose everything. You've seen poor people build lives of profound meaning. The number in your account doesn't measure safety or happiness or whether you'll be okay when you're old. But it's there. It's quantified. It gives you something to check.

Your GPA. Your performance review score. Your credit rating. Your BMI. Your screen time. Your productivity metrics. All of them insufficient. All of them checked anyway.

This is what I want you to see. Not just that the metrics are wrong. But what they do to us when we can't stop consulting them.

They capture us.

Metric capture. That's what this is. The psychological state of being held — cognitively, emotionally, behaviourally — by measures you know are incomplete. Where you can't stop consulting them even though you understand they're insufficient. Where the metric stops being a proxy and becomes the thing itself.

It's not the same as measurement. Measurement is neutral. You measure something to understand it. Metric capture is when the measurement takes over. When you can no longer distinguish between the metric and what it was supposed to represent. When GDP doesn't just measure economic activity, it becomes the definition of prosperity. When your follower count doesn't just indicate reach, it becomes your worth.

The metric was supposed to serve you. Now you serve it.

This is the trap, darling. Not that we're checking scores — that's just behaviour. The trap is that we're captured. We know the metric is insufficient and we check it anyway. We know it's not measuring what matters and we let it define whether we're winning. We know better and we can't stop.

You can see it in the compulsion. The refresh. The glance. The way your day shifts based on whether The Number went up or down, even when you know — intellectually, consciously, obviously — that the number is incomplete.

That's metric capture. The state of being unable to not consult a measure you know doesn't measure the thing.

And once you see it, you see it everywhere.

The executive is metric-captured by quarterly earnings. She knows company culture matters, knows long-term trust matters, knows employee wellbeing matters. But the earnings report comes out and nothing else exists. The metric has her.

The student is metric-captured by GPA. He knows learning matters more than grades. He knows curiosity and depth and intellectual risk-taking are the actual point. But he optimizes for the score anyway because the score is what gets measured, what gets rewarded, what gets compared. The metric has him.

The parent is metric-captured by quality time minutes. She knows connection isn't countable, knows presence isn't quantifiable, knows her child either feels seen or doesn't. But she tracks the minutes anyway, feels virtuous when the number is high, guilty when it's low. The metric has her.

The creative is metric-captured by output metrics. She knows the best work comes from depth, not volume. Knows quality isn't productivity. Knows the thing that matters can't be dashboarded. But she tracks her word count, her posting frequency, her consistency score. The metric has her.

The activist is metric-captured by petition signatures. He knows change isn't clicks. Knows movements aren't metrics. Knows the number going up doesn't mean the world is getting better. But he refreshes the count anyway, feels momentum when it climbs, despair when it stalls. The metric has him.

The country is metric-captured by GDP. We know prosperity isn't just economic activity. We know wellbeing isn't just transactions. We know the people — the actual living people — are tired, broke, running out of hope. But The Number goes up and we exhale. We let it tell us we're okay. The metric has us.

This is metric capture. Not the measurement itself. The state of being held by it. The inability to stop consulting it even though you know it's not the thing.

And here's what makes it so insidious, sweetheart. Metric capture doesn't just fail to measure what matters. It changes what we think matters. It rewrites our goals. It redefines success. It makes us forget what we were measuring for in the first place.

The student forgets he wanted to learn. He wanted to understand, to be challenged, to discover what he's capable of. But after four years of being metric-captured by GPA, he's forgotten that. The grade is the goal. The metric is the mission. The proxy has replaced the purpose.

The creative forgets she wanted to make something that resonates. She wanted to say something true, to connect, to make work that matters to people. But after years of being metric-captured by engagement rates, she's forgotten that. The performance is the point. The metric is the meaning. The reach has replaced the resonance.

The economy forgets we wanted prosperity. We wanted people to be secure, healthy, able to build meaningful lives without constant fear. But after eighty years of being metric-captured by GDP, we've forgotten that. Growth is the goal. The metric is the mission. The activity has replaced the outcome.

This is what metric capture does. It doesn't just distort measurement. It distorts desire. It makes us want the wrong things. It makes us optimize for the metric instead of the meaning. It makes us serve the measure instead of the purpose.

And the worst part? We know. God, we know. That's what makes it capture instead of just confusion. We're not fooled. We're trapped. We understand the metric is insufficient and we can't stop treating it as sufficient. We see the game is rigged and we keep playing by the rigged rules.

Because what's the alternative?

Sitting with uncertainty. Trusting your own experience. Making judgments without a grade. Admitting that the things that matter most — love, meaning, security, health, prosperity, connection — cannot be reduced to a number.

That's terrifying, babe. That's genuinely hard.

So we stay captured. We refresh. We consult. We let the metric tell us if we're okay, even when our bodies and our relationships and our lived reality are screaming something different.

We stay captured because at least the metric is something. At least it's quantified. At least it pretends to give us an answer.

Even when the answer is wrong.

You know what kills me? There have been 232 attempts to build a better measure than GDP. 232. Brilliant people, good intentions, decades of work. And we're still captured by the insufficient one.

Not because the alternatives aren't better. They are. But because metric capture isn't about the quality of the metric. It's about the need for a metric. Any metric. A single number that tells us if we're winning.

We'd rather be captured by a bad measure than sit with no measure at all.

That's the compulsion. That's the trap. That's metric capture.

The Genuine Progress Indicator has been calculated back to 1950. It adjusts for the things GDP misses — inequality, environmental degradation, unpaid care work. You know what it shows?

We peaked in 1978.

While GDP has tripled, actual progress plateaued nearly fifty years ago. We've been treading water — or slowly sinking — while The Number we worship climbs higher and higher.

But we're captured by the one that goes up. We're captured by the graph that looks like winning. Because we need to feel like we're winning, even when we're not.

Especially when we're not.

Here's what I can't give you: a better metric. I'm not going to hand you a different number and tell you to watch that one instead. Because the problem isn't which metric we're consulting. The problem is being captured by metrics in the first place.

The problem is the hunger for a number to tell us we're okay. The problem is the inability to sit with complexity. The problem is that we'd rather be captured by a measure than sit with the unmeasurable.

And I don't have a fix for that, babe. I really don't.

What I have is this: a name for the trap. Metric capture. The state of being held by measures you know are insufficient. The compulsion to consult numbers you know don't measure the thing. The inability to stop checking even though you understand what you're checking is incomplete.

Maybe it helps to see it. To catch yourself mid-refresh and know what's happening. To notice the compulsion and name it. To feel the lift or the dread when The Number moves and remember: you're captured. The metric has you. And the metric isn't the thing.

To be metric-captured with your eyes open. To let the compulsion be a compulsion, not a truth.

I'm not going to stop being metric-captured. Neither are you. We're human. We're tired. We want to know if we're winning. And in the absence of certainty, we'll take a number. Even an insufficient number. Even a number we know is lying.

But maybe next time you refresh your likes or check The Number or glance at your step count, you'll pause. You'll notice. You'll think: I'm metric-captured again.

And maybe that recognition — that tiny moment of seeing the trap — makes space for something else. For questioning whether the metric is the mission. For remembering what you actually wanted before the measure took over. For trusting what your body and your life are telling you even when the number says otherwise.

The metrics aren't going away. The quarterly announcements. The dashboards. The compulsive refresh. None of that is going away.

But you'll hear it differently now. You'll see it clearly. You'll know what's happening when you feel the pull.

You'll catch yourself metric-captured and you'll remember: the number isn't the thing.

The number was never the thing.

We knew that, didn't we?

We've always known.

But now you have words for it. Now when you feel that compulsion to check, that need to know if you're winning, that hunger for a number to tell you you're okay — you can name what's happening. You can say: "I'm metric-captured again."

And maybe that's enough. Maybe naming the trap is the first step toward loosening its hold.

Or maybe not. Maybe metric capture is too deep, too human, too useful to ever fully escape. Maybe the need for numbers is wired into us. Maybe we'll always be at least a little bit captured.

But at least now we know what's happening.

At least now we can see the compulsion for what it is.

At least now, when The Number goes up and someone tells you we're winning, you can feel that little lift and simultaneously know: I'm captured. The metric has me. And the metric isn't measuring what I actually care about.

The real game is unmeasurable. The real game is your life, your relationships, your health, your meaning, your work, your love, your exhaustion, your hope.

The real game is everything the metric doesn't count.

And you were always playing that game, sweetheart. Even when you were metric-captured. Even when the numbers told you otherwise. Even when The Number said you were losing.

You were always playing the real game.

We all were.

Now we just know what to call it when the metric has us. When we can't stop consulting it even though we know it's insufficient. When we let the proxy replace the purpose. When we serve the measure instead of the meaning.

Metric capture.

The trap we can name but can't escape. The compulsion we can see but can't kill. The state of being held by numbers that don't measure what matters.

Maybe naming it loosens the hold.

Maybe seeing it clearly makes space for something else.

Maybe recognizing you're captured is the first step toward freedom.

Or maybe we stay captured forever. Maybe that's just what it means to be human in a world that demands quantification. Maybe metric capture is the price we pay for wanting to know if we're winning.

I don't know, babe.

What I know is this: you're captured. I'm captured. We're all captured. By GDP, by likes, by steps, by scores, by every insufficient measure that promises to tell us if we're okay.

The performance is collective. The trap is shared. So is the seeing.

At least now we can name it.

At least now we know.

And maybe — just maybe — that's the beginning of something different.

Or maybe it's just the beginning of being captured with our eyes open.

Either way, we're in this together.

The compulsion is collective. So is the recognition.

At least there's that.