A company comes out of nowhere, develops a vaccine in the pandemic and makes 17 billion euros in just one year.

An insane story - which, expressed in sober figures, brought the Federal Republic of Germany a whopping 0.5 percent growth last year.

Biontech has not only increased economic power, but also increased prosperity.

The gross domestic product – GDP for short – and its increase have captured this effect well.

The Federal Ministry of Economics has recently found it difficult to make such assessments.

Green householder Robert Habeck wants to publish his annual economic report on Wednesday. The draft that is circulating reads: "Overall economic growth, measured by growth in gross domestic product, is a necessary but by no means sufficient prerequisite for sustainable prosperity, employment, participation and social security. Habeck therefore wants to add around three dozen new indicators, many of which are climate-related.

In addition, the Vice-Chancellor swears that the Germans will refrain from consumption: the paper says that the investments to achieve the Paris climate goals can only be made if we limit ourselves.

Is it the economics minister or the waiver minister speaking?

Wealth measurement in the long-term criticism

The advance of the Minister of Economic Affairs irritated. However, Habeck's revolutionary efforts are not original. BIP inventor Simon Kuznets warned that one cannot “infer the well-being of a country” from the number. That was in 1934. The criticism never stopped. The “Club of Rome” was influential with its 1972 verdict that limitless growth and finite resources are by definition incompatible.

In times of criticism of capitalism and climate change, these old theses find new resonance.

There have been countless attempts to find a better measure of prosperity.

The OECD has been working on the “Better Life Index” for ten years, which is intended to add social and ecological dimensions to GDP.

Eight years ago in Germany, a commission of the Bundestag entitled “Growth, Prosperity, Quality of Life” wanted to get the GDP under control.

Meanwhile, the “degrowth” movement continues to promote degrowth or active shrinkage.

But none of this has caught on.

And for good reasons.

Growth improves living conditions

After all, increasing gross domestic product also has something to do with a better life.

In countries with a larger gross domestic product, for example, people also live longer.

In China, economic growth has lifted more than 600 million people out of poverty in just four decades.

700 million people around the world still live below the poverty line.

What should help them other than growth?

In the black-and-white debate, it is easy to overlook the fact that "growth above all else" is not the prevailing commandment anyway.

Anyone who claims otherwise is doing stupid propaganda.

Of course it is bad when a country generates more and more, but only a small group benefits from the growing prosperity.

And, of course, the environment cannot cope when Volkswagen and Daimler sell more and more cars around the world until China and India reach the same car density as Western Europe.

At least not with the pollutant emissions of past decades.

What serious economist or politician would ever doubt that?

Resource consumption has even slowed down in recent decades, even though global economic growth has increased massively.

This was made possible by technological development.

The fact that we are able to produce more from less today would hardly have been possible without growth.

The key to future prosperity lies in further decoupling growth from resource use through innovation.

The government must create an environment that facilitates this task for companies and ensures stable political conditions, both at home and abroad.

A bouquet of all sorts of prosperity indicators will not make the difference.