Have you heard that ice cream causes murder or that global warming has led to an increase in piracy? Apparently in Maine, consuming more margarine leads to more divorces, while increased US spending on science, space and technology results in increases in suicides by hanging, strangulation and suffocation.  Actually, these are examples of spurious or false correlations – entirely unrelated things whose data appear to suggest a causal relationship.  And in these examples, the outcome is little more damaging than a few humorous media articles and a couple of books.

False correlations, however, run deep.  And some can have a pernicious impact on large numbers of us.  Consider for example, the well-worn neoliberal saying that “a rising tide raises all boats.”  It is based on two mistaken premises.  First, that employment is always a route from poverty to prosperity; and second, that an increase in overall employment must benefit everyone.  And it is for these reasons that continued economic growth is the altar upon which all else must be sacrificed.

The evidence for the benefits of economic growth for all is far more nuanced.  In pre-industrial economies where most people worked the land, there is little evidence that much growth occurred beyond that allowed by the ups and downs of the annual harvest.  Indeed, it took the economies of the British Isles until the eighteenth century to re-reach the technological level of the Roman Empire; so what economic growth their had been amounted to a catching up following a major economic collapse.  And even during that period of lethargic growth, various plagues and famines – including the catastrophic Black Death in the fourteenth century – rapidly threw economies into reverse.

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