What is the secret of growth? What is the evil that corrodes rich countries? And the key that allows some of them to still grow, despite everything? Ricolfi's book tries to answer through a tale that, at times, ends up taking on the contours of a detective story. A detective story whose protagonists are the economic theories and models developed by demographers and biologists to identify the laws that govern the evolution of populations and the life cycle of organisms, and which leads to an equation: the tendency to decline is an integral part of the metabolism of advanced societies and in this sense has something inescapable: the real enemy of economic growth is growth itself. - The enigma of growth, the press review