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One of the vital national tasks of a columnist is to regularly scan a rich diversity of mostly liberal media in search of material that might be spun into a full blown sarcasm-filled column. But there is also a regular flow of material that on its own does not justify a full-blown conniption or is technically outside my regular beat but still deserves to be derisively noted. In recent weeks, five such minor but irritating items cropped up.

1. Growth is cancer.A recent commentary in The New Yorker’s book-review briefs contained the following sentence from author David Pilling from his new book, The Growth Delusion: “Only in economics is endless expansion seen as a virtue. In biology it is called cancer.”

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Now, critical assaults on policy-makers’ obsession with the statistical mess known as GDP have been circulating ever since the concept was implanted in economics by U.S. economist Simon Kuznets back in 1934. Even Kuznets said it would be folly to use GDP as a basis for measuring welfare and setting policy. But the economic-growth-equals-cancer equation is a little too much. Biology is not economics. People die. Peoplekind do not. Furthermore, focusing on growth is certainly a better alternative to the ideas touted by Pilling, which include pursing policies that will make us all “happy” and filled with a sense of “well being” rather than aiming for growth and letting people pursue their own happiness.