Definition
The growth imperative is the requirement, built into modern capitalist economies, that aggregate output keep expanding year over year. Without growth, the system cannot honour its accumulated promises: loans go unrepaid, pensions go unfunded, expected returns fail to materialise, and confidence — the substrate of credit — drains away.
Harari highlights this imperative as one of modernity's defining structural features. Pre-modern economies could and did stagnate for centuries without crisis. A capitalist economy that stops growing enters recession by definition, and a recession that runs long enough threatens the credit machinery on which the entire arrangement depends.
Why it matters
How it works
The cycle begins with credit. Lenders advance money against expected future returns, which fund investment in productive capacity, which generates output that pays back the loans with interest. As long as new credit keeps flowing and the productivity engine keeps turning, the system runs smoothly. Stop either, and the gap between promised repayments and available output opens up — that gap is what a financial crisis feels like from the inside.
The Scientific Revolution provides the long-run productivity floor that makes the whole arrangement plausible. Without ongoing technological progress, growth would saturate and the credit system would unwind. Science and capitalism are therefore not separate phenomena but two sides of the same modernity.