Four decades of neoliberalism and neoliberal propaganda and most people seem to have forgotten (or spent their whole life never hearing about) the "small detail" that, unlike the way politicians spin it, The Economy is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

The objective is to have people in general have a better life, not to increase a grand-total when either it doesn't even reflect economic improvement for people in average (for example, GDP goes up but population goes up faster, so it's actually down per-capita), the improvement in the aggregated amount is so ill-distributed in practice that most people see none of it (or are even worse off) and only a few gain or it comes at a cost for other things which are more important for quality of life (for example, quality of life goes down due to Polution or increased insecurity).

A government that governs for The Good Of The Economy is not governing for the good of most people, it's governing for some other group than "most people", most likely those whose income comes from the ownership of Assets, since Asset values roughly go up with broad Economic growth whilst things like salaries do not.