Economics Needs a Rethink

It’s really quite straightforward. Right now, the dominant assumption in economics is that all sectors of the economy must grow, all the time, regardless of whether or not we actually need them to. This is an irrational way to manage an economy at the best of times, but during an ecological emergency it is clearly dangerous. Instead, we should deci

One person who was willing to risk political suicide was the visionary systems thinker Donella Meadows – one of the lead authors of the 1972 Limits to Growth report – and she didn’t mince her words. ‘Growth is one of the stupidest purposes ever invented by any culture,’ she declared in the late 1990s; ‘we’ve got to have an enough.’ In response to t

If we want to have any chance of surviving the Anthropocene, we can’t just sit around and wait for growth to crash into some kind of external limit. We must choose to limit growth ourselves. We need to reorganise the economy so that it operates within planetary boundaries, to maintain the Earth’s life-supporting systems which we depend on for our e

A more holistic way of thinking about growth is to recognise that it is broadly equivalent to the rate at which our economy is metabolising the living world.