[thu2111]

This is a pretty common confusion. Economic growth is a growth in what economists call "wealth" (the goods and services around us that add up to our modern lifestyle). The closest approximate metric for this is real-terms GDP, i.e. the value of all goods and services sold added up and then adjusted for inflation. It's not about raw prices, which are distorted by government money creation (these days normally called quantitative easing but it goes via many names).

Progress and wealth creation actually occur when prices fall, not when they rise, even though it may not feel like it if you happen to be the owner of a fixed asset whose price is falling i.e. a house. In a static system if money is printed via the issuance of loans, and that causes house prices to rise whilst the prices of everything else remain stable, then all that's doing is reallocating wealth from non-home owners to homeowners and banks. But it's not actually increasing wealth.

For wealth to increase everyone would need to find it easier to buy things, and the only way to do that is for things to become cheaper in real terms. For instance the smartphone industry has created enormous wealth in the past 20 years. Smartphones got massively cheaper so everyone can have one, and they got massively better. This is what economists mean by wealth creation.