The Lead

What Counts as Growth?

by Jason Ross (EIRNS) — Oct. 13, 2026

The IMF’s World Economic Outlook, released today in Bangkok, claims that the world economy will grow 3.1% this year. It also reports that 32 countries now account for 95% of what it considers growth, while in April it was 54. The United States and China buy more than three-quarters of the world’s AI chips and related equipment, and that spending is a major driver of the growth, the IMF reports, while high oil prices and conflict inflict real physical-economic pain: Saudi Arabia’s economy is expected to shrink 3.3% this year, Iran’s 7.6%, Iraq’s 16%. The Fund’s chief economist calls the outlook “highly uneven” and says “resilience is reaching its limits"; the Fund’s advice is to “restore fiscal space.”

But what exactly are these numbers measuring? Are data centers “growth” while deferred maintenance is “savings”? What gives something economic value? The willingness of someone to pay for it? Or is it the ability to contribute to building a future that is better than the present?

The right thing to measure was described by Lyndon LaRouche in a 2005 essay where he discusses the Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky. What separates human society from every animal species, LaRouche wrote, is “the willful changes in behavior, in organization and use of power, by means of which mankind maintains and also increases our species’ potential relative population-density.” As Abraham Lincoln put it, “Beavers build houses, but they build them in nowise differently, or better now, than they did five thousand years ago.” A termite mound after a million years is a termite mound. But a power grid, a rail line, a water system, a school—these change over time. They are, in LaRouche’s words, “the necessary environment of production itself, and… the necessary environment of the population engaged in that production,” and the level of investment in them “is itself a multiplier of the productivity of labor” across the whole society, not only the firm that uses them. The generation raised in that environment uses its higher productive and scientific powers to lift the one after it to a yet higher platform. That is growth. The IMF’s measure, by contrast, rests on “the criteria of the cheapest price and highest rate of financial profit,” which LaRouche said “have not only failed, but have shown themselves the worst imaginable sort of threat to the future of the human species.”

The White House’s “New Golden Age” of science, announced last week, counts $6 billion, of which $2.4 billion is compute credits from Nvidia, AMD, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, vouchers for time on their own machines. While there are some useful proposals, on nuclear-powered spacecraft and a reactor on the Moon in particular, nuclear fusion—named a “national mission” in the announcement—has no line item.

Meanwhile, in Cape Town yesterday, ten African national oil companies, Sonatrach, Sonangol, Ghana’s GNPC, South Africa’s SANPC, and others, signed a declaration to trade crude and refined products directly with one another and to build domestic refining, with an Africa Energy Bank to finance it, so that Africa can stop importing its own fuel. Ghana’s energy minister reported that national crude output is up 30% after five years of decline. In France, where more than 6,000 high-school students have been arrested in a month and police grenades have taken a hand and an arm, the students’ demand, as Rémi Lebrun of Solidarité & Progrès told the International Peace Coalition, is not the sexual freedom of 1968 but “to be able to work, to truly study, and to find meaning in their work.” “Why work, why this society, and why education?” That is the right question for the human species, and a challenge to a government that instead prioritizes its war budget.

The American answer to that question was given once, in the middle of a civil war. In 1862 and 1863, with the Union’s survival in doubt, Abraham Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act, the Morrill Act creating the land-grant universities, the Homestead Act and the national banking acts, and financed the whole with greenbacks issued by the Treasury rather than borrowed from London. He did not wait for growth. Instead, he built the environment in which growth occurs, and the country grew to match its new conditions. Richard Freeman’s “Lincoln’s Economic Miracle” and LaRouche’s “Applying the Lessons of the Lincoln Administration To Win the War Against Oligarchy Today” will appear in Thursday’s EIR in-depth report. The IMF measures what people in 32 countries are willing to pay for. LaRouche and Lincoln measured what a people could become.

Contents

Strategic War Danger

LaRouche movement

Science and Technology

Collapsing Imperial System

History and Culture

Harley Schlanger Update

Watch The Daily Update with Harley Schlanger, a short video update available every weekday morning from The LaRouche Organization.

In-Depth