That's rather wrong, though it's a common enough bit of nonsense slung at the degrowth movement.
In any reasonably modern use of the word, "growth" is defined as "exponential growth" - percent year over year growth. We expect companies to grow by N percent, every year - this is how expectations are phrased. And while it may be a small number, "1% growth, year over year," is still an exponential curve.
The first question that matters is, "Can exponential growth continue forever on a finite planet?" We do live on a finite planet. Pick whatever metric you want and continue exponentially, you will run into limits, eventually. Various physics bloggers have played with this rather extensively over the years. A trivially true statement we don't often consider is, "Anything that can't go on forever will stop at some point."
Combine those two, and exponential growth on a finite planet will stop at some point.
People try to argue around it via "decoupling" or "But asteroids" or various other methods, and some have some effects, but so far, they've either been "one time" sort of gains (various lighting or transportation efficiency gains), or "slowing the rate of the exponential growth" - but not fundamentally changing the problem of it being exponential.
Given that, if you agree with both, there are then two general categories of response to it. The first, and I'd argue the current default, is to kick the can, and assume that someone or something else will fix the problem (or, more practically, that you'll die before it becomes a problem you have to deal with). This means that the collisions with the end of growth will be uncontrolled and generally quite destructive (as "accelerating into the approaching cliff face" tends to be).
The alternative, which is what the degrowth movement argues for, is finding ways to terminate the exponential growth before we hit those walls. Under our current economic systems, that does imply something that looks like a recession/depression, but that's not the goal - that's just a transition from a "must grow" economy to a "steady state" sort of economy in action.
And there's a lot of debate what it looks like, but I'm not convinced it's worth going into the details of that here, now.
So... if you're going to criticize a movement, at least try to understand it first?
In any reasonably modern use of the word, "growth" is defined as "exponential growth" - percent year over year growth. We expect companies to grow by N percent, every year - this is how expectations are phrased. And while it may be a small number, "1% growth, year over year," is still an exponential curve.
The first question that matters is, "Can exponential growth continue forever on a finite planet?" We do live on a finite planet. Pick whatever metric you want and continue exponentially, you will run into limits, eventually. Various physics bloggers have played with this rather extensively over the years. A trivially true statement we don't often consider is, "Anything that can't go on forever will stop at some point."
Combine those two, and exponential growth on a finite planet will stop at some point.
People try to argue around it via "decoupling" or "But asteroids" or various other methods, and some have some effects, but so far, they've either been "one time" sort of gains (various lighting or transportation efficiency gains), or "slowing the rate of the exponential growth" - but not fundamentally changing the problem of it being exponential.
Given that, if you agree with both, there are then two general categories of response to it. The first, and I'd argue the current default, is to kick the can, and assume that someone or something else will fix the problem (or, more practically, that you'll die before it becomes a problem you have to deal with). This means that the collisions with the end of growth will be uncontrolled and generally quite destructive (as "accelerating into the approaching cliff face" tends to be).
The alternative, which is what the degrowth movement argues for, is finding ways to terminate the exponential growth before we hit those walls. Under our current economic systems, that does imply something that looks like a recession/depression, but that's not the goal - that's just a transition from a "must grow" economy to a "steady state" sort of economy in action.
And there's a lot of debate what it looks like, but I'm not convinced it's worth going into the details of that here, now.
So... if you're going to criticize a movement, at least try to understand it first?