I cannot get rid of the feeling that all who talk about the end of growth or the need for growth either never had a single lesson of economy at school or university or that they never understood, what was said there (I am willing to accept the apology that one had only leftist teachers who only knew propaganda, not facts).

So let’s make it easy for everybody: For every sector of the economy growing, there is one shrinking. Cars did away with horse-coaches, telegrams did away with the pony express which is now probably ChatApps.

No matter if you attack or defend “growth”: You battle about an illusion!

What we consider growth is inflation. That’s why we struggle these days, because progress more and more often leads to deflation within the overall economy. Not that sectoral deflation wouldn’t have always been there as a consequence of change. But shrinking time-to-market cycles, higher frequencies of product improvements and non-ending valuation of fresh market offerings (it’s the fresh iPhone, not the new iPhone) lead to more sectors operating under deflation than inflation.

The world’s most advanced economy, Japan, “struggles” with deflation in the eyes of the rest of the world, while Japanese workers have seen more increase in wealth than their US counterparts.

Sure, being a leader under deflation is hard! Your numbers just do not rise with inflation or cost-cutting. To be successful under deflation, one has to be imaginative, transformative and decisive about when to change organisational and operational patterns, when to adjust business-models. This exactly the kind of work C-level managers, and managers in general avoid for every step endangers their careers!

That’s why America, which is almost paralyzed by managements’ shortfalls in all sectors, is so obsessed with the entrepreneur these days. The entrepreneur stands for everything the manager does not dare to be, especially not in a market economy, turned capitalist and falling into a state predicted over 100 years ago by Marx, where capital will no longer complement production but return on capital will dictate production.

While I believe that good managers are a better answer to the problems facing our economies in transition than mediocre entrepreneurs, supplying solutions to markets which are independent of capital dictatorship but cater to humble capital and humble investors is also nothing new or fresh or innovative. It is the norm within every functioning market economy, which I shall define for this moment as one which has contestable markets!

For as long as markets are contestable — and the solutions provided nowadays make more and more markets contestable, which have suffered from baddies of entry for long — change will be possible and thus “the economy” will change and transform. In that respect Bitcoin is nothing new either! It is just a fresher way of selling people the belief in a data set — like some printed paper — having an economical value within transactions.

That means that the power of central banks or the Fed is not the result of bad monarchs and bad bankers occupying currency supply. It’s just that the more convertible currency which can be more seamlessly used in transaction of all kind, anytime, anywhere, at transparent costs and in a stable value set, is the one which in contestable markets for currency does best and drives out the others, much like the US-Dollar had out-competed all other currencies in global trade.

As long as the economy remains flexible and is not taken hostage by rules hindering the contesting of markets, for that long all change can and will happen based on market acceptance.

If you call for market acceptance of more change than there has been in the past or than there currently is, do you by the way know, what you are calling for? You call for a growth in the rate of change. Which makes you — after all — a growth advocate of old-style thinking, in a battle over an illusion, or rather the angle of view one should have towards the illusion.

My suggestion is to chose the angle where the illusion of growth disappears to have a free, non-political look at “the economy”.