Abstract The debate about the relationship between economic growth and environmental sustainability triggers a range of associations. Here we analyze open-ended textual responses of citizens and scientists concerning their associations with the terms “economic growth” and “green growth”. We derive from the responses a number of topics and examine how associations differ across distinct opinion segments of people, namely supporters of Green growth, Agrowth and Degrowth. The results indicate that the general public is more critical of the notion of economic growth than academic researchers. Citizens stress problems of corruption, social inequality, unemployment and poverty, with less variation among the three opinion segments compared to scientists. The latter more strongly emphasize the environmental consequences of economic growth. Concerning associations of scientists with the term “green growth”, we find topics questioning its feasibility to be more likely expressed by Degrowth supporters, while topics stressing the possibility of sustainable economic growth by Green growth supporters. We find that topic polarization is stronger for scientists than citizens. Our results provide further validation for opinion clusters identified in previous studies and uncover additional insights about related views on growth and sustainability.

中文翻译：

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公民和科学家与经济和绿色增长的自由联系：计算语言学分析

摘要 关于经济增长与环境可持续性之间关系的争论引发了一系列关联。在这里，我们分析了公民和科学家关于他们与术语“经济增长”和“绿色增长”的关联的开放式文本回应。我们从答复中得出了许多主题，并研究了不同意见群体之间的关联如何不同，即绿色增长、增长和退化的支持者。结果表明，与学术研究人员相比，公众对经济增长的概念更为挑剔。公民强调腐败、社会不平等、失业和贫困等问题，与科学家相比，三个观点之间的差异较小。后者更加强调经济增长对环境的影响。关于科学家与“绿色增长”一词的联系，我们发现，Degrowth 支持者更有可能表达质疑其可行性的主题，而绿色增长支持者则强调可持续经济增长的可能性。我们发现科学家的话题极化比公民更强。我们的结果为先前研究中确定的意见集群提供了进一步验证，并揭示了有关增长和可持续性相关观点的更多见解。