{"id":7497,"date":"2015-04-23T06:10:05","date_gmt":"2015-04-23T11:10:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=7497"},"modified":"2015-04-23T06:10:05","modified_gmt":"2015-04-23T11:10:05","slug":"a-field-guide-to-negative-progress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=7497","title":{"rendered":"A Field Guide to Negative Progress"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Field Guide to Negative Progress<\/a><\/h3>\n

I’ve commented before in these posts that writing is always partly a social activity. What Mortimer Adler used to call the Great Conversation, the dance of ideas down the corridors of the centuries, shapes every word in a writer\u2019s toolkit; you can hardly write a page in English without drawing on a shade of meaning that Geoffrey Chaucer, say, or William Shakespeare, or Jane Austen first put into the language. That said, there\u2019s also a more immediate sense in which any writer who interacts with his or her readers is part of a social activity, and one of the benefits came my way just after last week\u2019s post.<\/p>\n

That post began with a discussion of the increasingly surreal quality of America\u2019s collective life these days, and one of my readers\u2014tip of the archdruidical hat to Anton Mett\u2014had a fine example to offer. He\u2019d listened to an economic report on the media, and the talking heads were going on and on about the US economy\u2019s current condition of, ahem, \u201cnegative growth.\u201d Negative growth? Why yes, that\u2019s the opposite of growth, and it\u2019s apparently quite a common bit of jargon in economics just now.<\/p>\n

Of course the English language, as used by the authors named earlier among many others, has no shortage of perfectly clear words for the opposite of growth. \u201cDecline\u201d comes to mind; so does \u201cdecrease,\u201d and so does \u201ccontraction.\u201d Would it have been so very hard for the talking heads in that program, or their many equivalents in our economic life generally, to draw in a deep breath and actually come right out and say \u201cThe US economy has contracted,\u201d or \u201cGDP has decreased,\u201d or even \u201cwe\u2019re currently in a state of economic decline\u201d? Come on, economists, you can do it!<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Field Guide to Negative Progress I’ve commented before in these posts that writing is always partly a social activity. What Mortimer Adler used to call the Great Conversation, the dance of ideas down the corridors of the centuries, shapes every word in a writer\u2019s toolkit; you can hardly write a page in English without […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[196,1752,4898,353,1758,4897],"class_list":["post-7497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-decline","tag-economic-contraction","tag-economic-demise","tag-gdp","tag-john-michael-greer","tag-negative-growth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7497"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7497\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7498,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7497\/revisions\/7498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}