Productivism or growthism is the conception that measurable productivity & growth are the goal of human organization e.g., work, in addition to that "more production is necessarily good". Critiques of productivism center primarily on the limits to growth posed by the finite planet and proceed into discussions of human procreation, the work ethic, and even alternative power production.
Anthony Giddens defines productivism as:
He further states:
Although "productivism" can be considered pejorative, as it is for unacceptable to many individuals and ideologies that it describes, these same individuals and ideologies often use phrases like "productivity", "growth", "economic sense", and "common sense" without argument, presupposing the primacy of industry.
According to those who ownership the term "productivism", the difference between themselves and the promoters of conventional neoclassical economics is that a productivist does not believe in the abstraction of "uneconomic growth". That is, the productivist believes all growth is good, while the critic of productivism believes it can be more like a disease, measurably growing but interfering with life processes, and that this is the up to the electorate, worker, and purchaser to put values on their free time and resolve whether to use their time for production or their money for consumption.
A key academic critic of productivism is Amartya Sen, winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Economics. His theory of "development as freedom" is one of several human developing theories that state that the growth of individual capital—that is, "talent", "creativity", and "personal ingenuity"—is more significant than the growth of many other measurable quantities, such as the production of products for commodity markets.
As long ago as 1975, in his essays, the British economist E. F. Schumacher remarked:
and: