Yes, exactly. But modern economics isn't actually measuring that, and I think is in a certain amount of denial about it occurring at all. Economic growth is growth in GDP. GDP is calculated as function of price, and although it's adjusted for inflation, the vagaries of the monetary system mean that inflation is a very poor proxy for the actual growth in the money supply. [Which btw. is well known within Economics - better known there as the mystery of the 'monetary policy transmission mechanism'].
Go back 150 years, and production was measured as production (tons of coal, etc. You can see this in historical records like the German Statistical Yearbook's from the 1870's.) Today's economists make measurements using money, and ignore the very real problems of money as a unit of measurement.
For example, take the quantity theory of money (and note the word theory there), MV = PQ. V - velocity of circulation of money cancels - this was pointed out in the 1930's, but for some reason has never made it into the textbooks. We're left with P(prices) ~ M (quantity of money)/Q (quantity of transactions.
Now if this equation is valid (and it is mainstream economic theory, although the presence of a cancelling issue probably isn't a good sign there), then we have an inverse relationship between the quantity of money in the system, and the quantity of transactions (i.e. production), indicating that actual economic growth in the sense you're using it would cause decreasing prices, if M is held constant.
OTH, if that equation is wrong, then how can we measure anything with money, since we don't know what the relationship is between production and prices?
Generally speaking, the problem with Economic models is that they are mathematical models of a particular economic theorem or 'identity', as economists sometimes prefer to call them. When you dig into the scientific basis for those theorems however, it's often lacking. So saying that this isn't an economic model is quite correct - but that's actually a good thing, not a bad one. Economic models by and large have no scientific validity.
Although this isn't that useful by itself, it's a very nice way to get some basic intuition about how money behaves as a unit of exchange, in a system with a constant money supply. The reason why some commentators think that this isn't a realistic simulation of our actual monetary system is that in the current system, the quantity of money is more or less continuously expanding. But that doesn't imply that more 'wealth' is being created, it just means that more tokens are being created.
The problem is though that as a result the unit of measurement (money) is also expanding, and so you have a monetary system that appears superficially to obey rules of 'growth' as measured in other fields, but in fact is based on something that is quite different, as these experiments show. And you have economists merrily chasing their tails for the last 3 centuries over trying to determine what causes 'growth', when actually it's an illusion of measurement created by the day to day operations of the fractional reserve banking system.
Go back 150 years, and production was measured as production (tons of coal, etc. You can see this in historical records like the German Statistical Yearbook's from the 1870's.) Today's economists make measurements using money, and ignore the very real problems of money as a unit of measurement.
For example, take the quantity theory of money (and note the word theory there), MV = PQ. V - velocity of circulation of money cancels - this was pointed out in the 1930's, but for some reason has never made it into the textbooks. We're left with P(prices) ~ M (quantity of money)/Q (quantity of transactions.
Now if this equation is valid (and it is mainstream economic theory, although the presence of a cancelling issue probably isn't a good sign there), then we have an inverse relationship between the quantity of money in the system, and the quantity of transactions (i.e. production), indicating that actual economic growth in the sense you're using it would cause decreasing prices, if M is held constant.
OTH, if that equation is wrong, then how can we measure anything with money, since we don't know what the relationship is between production and prices?