How can an entire economy have a growth rate? Is it not measuring how much "new money" was put into the system?
So if you need a haircut but can't afford one, and I give you a new £10 note to get a haircut, and the barber works the extra 10 minutes to do that haircut and earn that £10 there's no new pie there.
Looks like 10 minutes more output to me.
"Printing more money" does make more pie. That's exactly what happens every time a loan is taken out, or government hires somebody who would otherwise be unemployed.
"Printing more money" leads to "shredding more money" via loan repayments and increased tax take, all via increases in the utilisation of existing resources.
That because "printing more money" is about buying something. That something has to at least potentially exist or more money will not be printed and circulated in the first place.
The example was a barber. There is no difference between transferring an existing credit to the barber and generating a new credit for the barber. The result is the same - an additional haircut is performed.
In the case of a new credit that is an additional haircut that wouldn't otherwise have been performed because the person wanting it has desire, not demand (desire backed by the ability to pay).
So I disagree. We have a monetary economy. Since the whole point of the game is to 'make money' people will create more output if you offer them money in exchange for doing that.
The 'loan' as you call it drives the new production, as any loan does since all loans are, necessarily, new money.
Wealth is possession of real assets, natural resources, real estate, valuable companies, in classical econ terms, any scarce resource. Money is not a scarce resource, for nearly marginal cost we could create a near infinite amount of it (and in the digital age of banking we often do create large amounts of it with no direct cost). You can't create more oil, land, houses etc without incurring considerable costs, whether it be in the form of effort, time or etc and that's what makes those resources scarce. Money is scarce if you look at it on a personal level, you can't just create more money for yourself, but that doesn't make it scarce on a global level.
What might create some confusion is that wealth is often measured in money, but that doesn't make it the same thing. Wealth is real resources and money is the means we use to decide who gets how much of those real resources.
Almost like you are completely wrong.
Not everybody is enamoured with shiny yellow metal.
The wealthy are not interested in hoarding stuff. The wealthy are interested in the flow of money that lets them do stuff - primarily by freeing up their time.
It's control of the annual pie that's the key, not a sitting on a pile of gold like Smaug.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/How-Get-Rich-Greatest-Entrepreneurs/d...
and also not evenly distributing those slices according to previous ownership %.
Edit: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/21582440177360...
But over very long periods of time, it does seem to mostly be connected to population.
Increasingly we see a problem of people who add nothing to the pile getting large wads of money and taking more than their fair share from the pile. This is a problem.
If lots of people are doing a lot of work powered by a lot of energy and productive technology equipment, the (material) economy is good.
I would argue that under a centrally planned economy, you could have the same number of people working, using the same tech/equipments and energy, but not be a good economy because the output isn't what those individual participants in the economy wants to consume.
Basically, i am arguing that for productivity to be 'useful', it must be privately useful. Therefore, an economy must be producing something that an individual decided they want, rather than something that is commanded by an authority (such as a top-down command economy).
After all, the gov't authority might consider it useful to have holes dug by shovel, in order to occupy people and prevent them from doing other things.