Not just a metric. A whole theory of what counts as progress, with GDP as its preferred ruler.
Econometric Growth (EG) is one of three distinct pathways to prosperity: EG, which measures success through monetary output and job creation; Holistic Prosperity, which weighs wellbeing and social belonging alongside the economic; and Universal Prosperity, which places both under a moral and divine framework rather than treating either as the final word. EG is the dominant framework across both public and private institutions worldwide — the default lens bureaucracies use to evaluate whether a policy or a society is succeeding.
The paradigm’s structural flaw is that it counts all monetary activity as positive, with no distinction for what generated it. Under EG, a natural disaster’s cleanup spend, the legal costs of a divorce, and the sale of a genuinely useful product all register identically as growth, because the metric measures transaction volume, not human or ecological outcome. That’s what makes disasters “acceptable for the economy” under this epistemology: the framework has no native way to subtract destruction from the ledger, only to count the money that changed hands afterward.