WITH China’s GDP growth slowing down to 7.4 percent in the first quarter, and forecasts of further moderate growth in the second quarter, there is whiff of unease in the air.

Depending on their brand of philosophy, economists — the modern equivalent of priests — are responding in different ways. Some are making the case for another round of stimulus measures — and “mini-stimuli” are already in place, though they are no longer known as “stimuli.”

Infrastructure investment is picking up. China Railways will begin construction this year on 48 projects, up from the 44 originally planned, according to the general manager of the company in an interview with the People’s Daily. In the next 20 years, investment will be focused on high-speed rail, light rail and metro construction.

Four provinces and municipalities have already announced investment projects totalling 7 trillion yuan (US$1.1 trillion).

On Monday, the Shanghai Airport Group announced that gigantic projects to expand city airports have already begun. They will increase the capacity to handle passengers to 110 to 120 million passengers a year by 2020.

One economist, Ye Tan, said the Chinese economy is at “dangerous crossroads.”

All this sound and fury has been triggered by the moderation of GDP, a metric some policy-makers have vowed not to make too much of.

As Diane Coyle explains in her “GDP: A brief but affectionate history,” “GDP is the way we measure and compare how well or badly countries are doing.”

If GDP is jargon that doesn’t actually mean much to the lay public, it means virtually everything to some economists.

Actually our ancestors, if resurrected, would be appalled at how their offspring piously prostrate themselves before a simple number.

In this enlightened age, in their enthusiasm to make a compelling case for growth, few economists feel the need to spell out the acronym.

As we know and as Coyle explains, GDP stands for Gross Domestic Product, a standard measure of the size of a country’s economy, and arguably, one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century.

It’s a made-up entity, an abstraction that adds up everything, including sodas, designer handbags, cars, private jets, and iPads. These are not goods of importance to human subsistence, survival or dignity, but otherwise quite respectable state leaders and policy-makers devote much of their energy justifying this stuff — in the form of GDP growth.

GDP-defined narrative

As this is a metric dating back only to the 1940s, shouldn’t we be surprised that our poor ancestors had actually managed to live so long without it?

Today in many progressive societies, the smallest dip in this metric can mean trouble for state leaders, or a change of government.

It is wonderful that we have managed to sum up the collective human experience in so simple a number.

For China, the past two decades have been a period of sustained, heady GDP growth.

That’s the standard, grand narrative.

But for most Chinese, these years also represented inflation, pollution, soaring asset prices, a widening income gap, and a culture that has learned to see wealth in a snobbish, rather than critical, light.

On Tuesday a Shanghai evening paper gave a front page tribute to private business aircraft, with the page dominated by a photo of the plush interior of a private jet.

When reporters casually mentioned the price range of 3 million to more than 300 million yuan, decorum and taste require us not to ask such stupid question as how any Chinese could possibly earn so much. Thirty years ago, virtually all of us were the proletariat.

It is in decidedly good taste, however, for the reporter to proudly announce that the private business aircraft market in China promises to be a trillion yuan business.

In the standard narrative, the pre-growth years were depressing, dreary, dull.

But it could also be a time of simple satisfactions, simple aspirations, and simple relationships.

I remember that in 1974, while a pre-schooler, I visited my uncle in a village in Jiangsu Province. One of my cousins kindly took me to a village co-op and bought me a piece of dried persimmon, for two fen. I still remember this piece of fruit as the most delicious food I have tasted in my entire life.

Now a fen coin, nominally still a monetary unit, is only accepted by the banks.

In the standard perception today, that time was a period politically charged, limited and repressive, a period of privations, poverty, and scarcity.

There was virtually no GDP to speak of then. Ironically, these “fallow” years led to a flowering of Chinese literature in the early 1980s.

There was TV, no internet, no mobile phones, and very few telephones. Today an average home can access 60 TV channels and choose from among more than 100 soft drinks.

People were connected then. They are only wired today.

When investment translates into GDP, it is all-justifying, all-redeeming. But how many deals can bear moral scrutiny?

The Beijing News newspaper reported on April 14 that three private enterprises have obtained rights to prospect for coal in 589 square kilometers in coal-rich northern Shaanxi Province, in violation of explicit state regulations prohibiting such exploration. Just selling the exploration rights earned the company owners tens of billions yuan.

Not captured in GDP

The shady deal would probably be just another glittering GDP-boosting project if it had not been brokered by a mysterious figure now widely speculated as the “big tiger,” according to the newspaper.

Residents of that coal-rich area have been living with an average annual income of less than 10,000 yuan, growing corn and sea buckthorns.

Will that GDP-boosting deal trickle down to these peasants? Or will it mean subsidence, dangerously smoggy air, a blackened landscape, and lost farmland?

These reflections raise uncomfortable questions about the purpose of business, and the GDP that sums them up.

For one thing, the metric serves to disguise the inequality and the hidden fractures in society.

Coyle dismisses “The Limits to Growth,” an influential report in 1972 that painted a gloomy picture of the costs of growth, calling it incorrect and concluding, “Voters were far more interested in getting GDP back on track to grow than in its intangible consequences for the environment.”

That is true, tragically.

She was talking more sense when claiming, “The most important amendment needed to the existing national accounts statistics is to take account of the balance between investment in new assets and the depletion or depreciation of existing assets.”

At a time when the country is resounding with clamor for stimulus, we hope our policy makers can still exercise their good judgment, and be able to see the reality beyond GDP.