Growth is a funny sort of concept. For example, our GNP increases every time we build a prison. Well, okay, it's growth in a sense.
The entire socioeconomic system is based on production for profit and a growth imperative that cannot be sustained.
In Europe there's an dangerous growth of ultra xenophobia which is pretty threatening to any one who remembers the history of Europe... and an attack on the remnants of the welfare state. It's hard to interpret the austerity-in-the-midst-of-recession policy as anything other than attack on the social contract.
In the major state capitalists economies, Europe and the US, it's low growth and stagnation and a very sharp income differentiation a shift - a striking shift - from production to financialization.
Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.
Through much of its history, the US did not have high inequality as compared with Europe. Less so, in fact. That began to change in the industrial age, reaching a peak in 1928, after the forceful destruction of the labor movement and crushing of independent thought. Largely as a result of labor mobilization, inequality declined during the Great Depression, a tendency continuing through the great growth period of regulated capitalism in the early postwar decades.
There is either a crisis or a return to the norm of stagnation. One view is the norm is stagnation and occasionally you get out of it. The other is that the norm is growth and occasionally you can get into stagnation. You can debate that but it's a period of close to global stagnation.
