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The system of national accounts that countries use to measure their quarterly change in gross domestic product is so dominant it's hard to think of a time when it didn't exist.
There's a great book on the topic called "The Hegemony of Growth: The OECD and the Making of the Economic Growth Paradigm," that explains how we got here.
It contains this chart.
It shows the percentage of all articles published per year in all academic journals in the JSTOR database that contain the term “economic growth,” by discipline, 1930–2010.
What we call "macro-economics" didn't exist before John Maynard Keynes came along, but after his death in 1946 his framework for thinking about national economies came to dominate, as it was pushed by new international organisations like the United Nations.
It's a fascinating history, and I guarantee it will answer some questions you've been wondering about for years.
In modern society, economic growth is considered to be the primary goal pursued through policymaking.
But when and how did this perception become widely adopted among social scientists, politicians and the general public?
Focusing on the OECD, one of the least understood international organisations, Matthias Schmelzer offers the first transnational study to chart the history of growth discourses.
He reveals how the pursuit of GDP growth emerged as a societal goal and the ways in which the methods employed to measure, model and prescribe growth resulted in statistical standards, international policy frameworks and widely accepted norms.
Setting his analysis within the context of capitalist development, post-war reconstruction, the Cold War, decolonization, and industrial crisis, The Hegemony of Growth sheds new light on the continuous reshaping of the growth paradigm up to the neoliberal age and adds historical depth to current debates on climate change, inequality and the limits to growth.