If growth is a direction and not only a number, what should grow, shrink and regenerate?
A door in (a seed): A family moves to the big city. In one year the salary slip nearly doubles, and so does the cough.
ReGrowth is this book’s answer to two stories. Degrowth is right about the fire; the chapter asks whether it offers a pragmatist any way out. Acceleration spends the living planet to go faster. ReGrowth asks for restoration, regeneration and renewal: a higher quality of growth, not “more growth, but green”.
The chapter treats growth as a vector: what grows, what contracts, what circulates, what regenerates; for whom; at whose cost; under which obligations. The technology can be the same; the substrate, ecological, social and economic, is the variable.
A line it may earn (a seed): Renew, don’t demolish: mend the old house one room at a time while you live in it, the worst crack first.
Sections planned so far
- Right about the fire
- Growth is a vector
- The substrate is the variable
- Restore, regenerate, renew
The image it turns on: the lotus born of mud. The mud is the past, the waterline the present, the bloom what deserves to grow.
This chapter might instead be called The Substrate Is the Variable.
A seed, sketched with AI from the author’s notes and the studio’s reading: the question and the direction, not yet the argument.
Leans on Sutra of the Sāmatvārtha Mandala. Leads to India Is Not a Download, and to the false choices of Laffer Chirality.