Growth of what? New narratives for the creative economy, beyond GDP

Abstract

How do we know when creative economies are doing well? There has been a groundswell of critique of GDP as the primary measure of socio-economic success. Yet GDP maintains a dominant influence over public policy - including creative economy policy, where success is often framed in terms of contribution to ‘growth'. Why is this the case? The enduring power of GDP derives partly from its capacity to establish a simple narrative framework: coordinates against which to tell a story of collective progress. With this statistic, the immense complexity of economies can be aggregated to one figure, and if that number increases, we know that we are headed in the right direction. In this chapter, I show that understanding this powerful capacity of GDP to set the terms for storytelling has a role to play in expanding possibilities for creative economy policy - inviting consideration of alternative narrative frameworks for creative economy success.