It is desirable bacause it means we are producing more which can be sold and help spread money around through greater tax receipts etc. The growth we are seeing is at present just making up for previous contraction and there is untapped capacity in the market still. Growth leads to higher employment and eventually a reduction in our overall deficit, or it should anyway.

"RTFQ" as an instructor of mine would write on the board, it roughly translates as 'read the question'. In any event I know of few people who have been affected by the slump or the so-called recovery, to the majority it is all talk and meaningless numbers. Their lives have not changed in any way.
I maintain that the 'growth' we see is only proportional to an increasing population and therefore artificial. Deliberately everincreasing population in order to sell goods has led to overcrowding, poverty and crime, yet we believe growth(greed by any other name) is good.
This quest for growth has put us where we are today, longing for an uncrowding desert island and dreading the muggers knife, nothing good about that. The new government has made a token effort to reduce benifits and therefore immigration but this is still treasure island to all the wrong people.

Pensions Manager - what a myopic view of the world. You may be right in the narrow sense but in the wider view of the world huudi is clearly making sense.
In simple terms we need growth to make people more weathly. This is clearly desireable in a world where the availability of the resources consumed to make that wealth is not an issue. However that is no longer the case. That leaves the problem that we still need growth to raise the poorest out of very real and abject poverty. This will continue as long as there is such an uneven distribution of wealth, a growing world population and the continuing trend to equate material possession and consumption with human happiness.
One point of disagreement with huudi is that, overall, immigration brings economic benefit to the UK despite what the cheap tabloid headlines might lead us to think.

PensionsManager is surely incorrect - growth is an increase in the 'value' of economic activity, not just of volume, although the two usually go hand-in-hand.

I'm no economist, but I suspect the reason why growth is good is that its opposite will - in the long run - be the ruin of us all.

Hi Huudi, Robert,

I'll be putting up a piece tomorrow that digs a little bit deeper into the how growth is measured question.