· 16 min read
I. The sacred curve
“When a line becomes a god, even its casualties must pray.”
There is something almost devotional in the way evening news anchors present quarterly GDP figures, their tones hovering between reverence and suspense. The ticker crawls, a pulse across the bottom of the screen, announcing our collective fate in one decimal place. We have trained ourselves (politicians, executives, journalists, ordinary citizens) to feel either relief or dread based on whether that curve tilts up or down. It is a civil-religious ritual whose liturgy is written in indices, whose incense smells faintly of photocopied spreadsheets.
This was not always so. In the mid-twentieth century, growth was still a pragmatic hope: a way to rebuild cities bombed flat, to electrify rural provinces, to mass-produce penicillin and polio vaccines. Growth, then, had a face: the engineer laying track, the nurse administering a new antibiotic, the factory worker assembling washing machines that freed hours of unseen domestic labor. In that era the curve meant hospitals, streetlights, full stomachs.
But curves have a way of outliving their contexts. What began as a humanitarian project hardened into an ideology, then ossified into a reflex. Somewhere between the first televised moon landing and the first iPhone keynote, the curve drifted free of purpose. It became a line that had to rise because rising lines are self-justifying. A stock that climbs is “performing.” An economy that expands is “healthy.” Never mind the widening lanes of precarity beneath it. Never mind the forests felled, the aquifers drained, the hours stolen from family and sleep. The upward tilt overwhelms all other metrics, the way cathedral spires once overwhelmed medieval skylines.
The irony is that modern economics, for all its mathematical sophistication, still struggles when asked a childlike question: “Why do we need more?” Ask an analyst and you will hear about debt servicing, demographic dependency ratios, fiscal space. Ask a corporate strategist and you will hear about shareholder value, competitive positioning, economies of scale. Ask the average voter and, if they feel safe enough to be honest, you will hear about fear: fear of layoffs, of healthcare bills, of losing status in zero-sum rat races. Growth is promised as the anxiolytic for all these anxieties.
And yet the anxieties deepen. Real wages stagnate; carbon parts per million climb. The curve soothes no one, because its ascendance is bought with invisible debits that pile up in planetary and psychic ledgers. A climate-fueled flood destroys a town: GDP rises with reconstruction contracts. An epidemic spreads: GDP rises with pharmaceutical sales. The more we repair self-inflicted wounds, the more the curve can brag of its own benevolence.
If a curve can become sacred, it can also become idolatrous. And idolatry, by definition, is worship granted to an unworthy thing. The first step toward iconoclasm is intellectual: to recognize that the curve is not divine decree but human artifact. The second step is moral: to decide what, if anything, should replace it as our organizing telos. That second step, choosing a different measure of collective success, is what the remainder of this essay undertakes.
II. The GDP mirage
"A number can only tell the truth it was trained to recognize.”
Gross Domestic Product is often praised for its simplicity, but simplicity can be treacherous. Like the bedside monitor that tracks a single vital sign while the patient’s organs fail quietly off-screen, GDP makes a population look vibrant even as its ecosystems hemorrhage. In the United States, wildfire seasons lengthen and infrastructure ages; in Britain, food-bank queues stretch round the block; yet a few tenths of a percent uptick can trigger front-page optimism.
The distortion is not accidental. During World War II, governments needed a quick, aggregate way to marshal resources. GDP fit the bill: a dashboard dial for wartime production. After the war, politicians discovered it made a powerful campaign prop. Over time, GDP became a moral narrative: higher GDP meant better lives, lower mortality, wider opportunity. In early decades that correlation held. Then came the turning point economists call the Great Decoupling (roughly the 1970s in high-income nations) when median wages flat-lined even as GDP continued its heroic climb. Productivity gains went to capital, not labor; externalized costs went to atmosphere and oceans.
Today, GDP rewards what some scholars label defensive expenditures; money spent to remediate harms growth itself has caused. Clean-up after oil spills, insurance payouts after hurricanes, private security in gated communities: all register as positives. Meanwhile, unpaid caregiving, subsistence farming, volunteer tutoring, and intact wetlands generate zero credit. The economy, in GDP’s optics, is healthier when a corporation sells sugary drinks and then a hospital treats diabetes than when communities have clean water and preventative nutrition.
Simon Kuznets, celebrated as an architect of national accounts, foresaw the trap. “Distinctions must be kept in mind,” he wrote in 1934, “between quantity and quality of growth, between costs and return.” He might as well have whispered into a void. The post-war boom drowned nuance in spreadsheets. By the time Robert Kennedy lamented in 1968 that GDP “measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile,” the metric was too entangled with political legitimacy to be dethroned.
And yet cracks widen. New Zealand releases a Well-being Budget. Scotland, Iceland, and Wales form a Well-being Alliance. Costa Rica boasts higher life expectancy than the U.S. on one-quarter the GDP per capita. Each example chips at the mirage, revealing GDP’s image of prosperity to be a shimmering heat ghost above an asphalt road.
Still, mirages do not evaporate on their own. They require both intellectual rebuttal and institutional replacement. That replacement must account for ecological viability, distributive justice, and democratic legitimacy simultaneously. Enter a pair of thinkers, Kate Raworth and Ingrid Robeyns, whose frameworks illuminate complementary halves of that triad.
III. Neoliberalism & techno-feudalism: A two-act play
“First the market stole the commons; then the algorithm stole the market.”
Act I: Neoliberalism
What began with Friedrich Hayek’s suspicion of state planning matured into the Reagan-Thatcher crusade against “big government,” finally metastasizing into an era where public goods became private revenue streams. Water utilities were sold off; housing converted from shelter to asset class; universities rebranded students as customers. The state did not shrink so much as it changed mission: from guarantor of welfare to guarantor of capital discipline. Deregulation was preached as liberation but practiced as asymmetric exposure; privatize gains, socialize losses, from savings-and-loan bailouts in the 1980s to quantitative easing in 2008.
Under neoliberalism, the market became the de facto forum of moral arbitration. If a thing could fetch a price, it possessed value; if it could not, it receded into invisibility. Pollution and unpaid care, having no price tags, were treated as externalities. Tax cuts were justified as growth stimuli, never mind spiraling deficits or eroded public health capacity. The ideological brilliance of neoliberalism lay in recasting inequality as meritocracy’s necessary proof: winners deserved to win; losers, by implication, deserved to lose.
Act II: Techno-feudalism
Just as neoliberalism reached doctrinal exhaustion, unable to explain stagnating wages, opioid epidemics, or climatic shocks, a new regime stepped onto the stage. If neoliberalism hollowed the state, techno-feudalism colonized the void. Where markets once set prices, platforms now set terms. Amazon dictates logistics; Google curates epistemology; Meta structures social memory. Marx imagined capital owning the means of production; platform capital owns the means of social reproduction.
This ownership yields rents, not merely profits. Users generate unpaid data; algorithms refine it into behavioral predictions; advertisers purchase micro-seconds of manipulated attention. The platform becomes landlord, user becomes tenant; paying with time, identity, and consent. Growth in this paradigm does not mean producing more goods; it means capturing more moments, more signals, more desires.
Neither neoliberalism nor techno-feudalism tolerates boundaries well. Both depend on expansion—into new markets, new data niches, new frontiers of privatization. Yet both now run headlong into planetary and democratic limits. Heat domes over Europe, atmospheric rivers over California, unprecedented coral bleaching in tropical seas: these are signals the curve refuses to read.
The two-act play ends, predictably, in contradiction: a global economy addicted to extraction meets a planet whose capacity to absorb extraction is collapsing. It is here that Raworth’s doughnut and Robeyns’s limitarianism converge, not as incremental reforms, but as structural correctives.
IV. Raworth and Robeyns: Two lenses on limits
“One maps the room; the other decides which doors should stay locked.”
Kate Raworth likes to begin her workshops with a blank sheet of paper and a question: If economics is about provisioning for human well-being, what shape should that provisioning take? Invariably someone draws a circle, others add shading, and soon a doughnut-like ring appears—inner hole, outer rim. The visual simplicity disarms the skeptic long enough for a second, harder question: Where are we overshooting the rim, and where are we falling through the hole?
Raworth’s genius lies not in inventing new data but in reframing existing data, so the moral topology becomes impossible to ignore. CO₂ concentrations, nitrogen run-off, land-system change, each a spike puncturing the outer ring. Food security, gender equity, political voice, each a hollow in the inner ring. Her doughnut is less a diagram than an MRI scan: it shows systemic inflammation.
But if Raworth offers a diagnostic image, Ingrid Robeyns supplies the ethical protocol. Where Raworth asks how much overshoot? Robeyns asks how much over-ownership? Where Raworth maps biophysical ceilings, Robeyns codifies human-scale floors and caps: no one should live below capability sufficiency and no one should tower above democratic legitimacy.
Here limitarianism draws two crisp lines that classical liberalism refused to entertain:
-
Ethical Limit ( Lₑ ≈ €1 Million).
Wealth above this mark ceases to improve genuine opportunity and begins to inflate positional status. Robeyns frames it as a threshold for “fully flourishing life in the Global North.” -
Democratic Limit ( L𝒹 ≈ €10 Million).
Capital beyond this concentration purchases political leverage—think media empires, lobby shops, dark-money PACs. Such leverage corrodes representative government, rendering any talk of equal citizenship hollow.
Together the lenses converge on a single insight: Scale matters. Cross a planetary boundary and ecosystems cascade. Cross a distributive boundary and democracies warp. Either way, the economy forfeits legitimacy.
V. The moral premise of economy
“Distribution is not the aftermath of value; it is its definition.”
Conventional textbooks treat distribution as a second-order problem. First the economy “creates wealth,” then politics steps in to divvy it up. This sequencing hides a sleight of hand: the very act of valuing, what counts as productive, who holds bargaining power, which costs are external, already is distribution. There is no neutral pre-political pie; the recipe itself is ideological.
Robeyns brings the debate back to first principles: What do we owe one another? Her answer, framed through the capability approach, is deceptively modest: We owe each person the real freedom to pursue lives they have reason to value, so long as doing so keeps us within planetary and democratic bounds. That single sentence detonates three orthodoxies at once:
• Growth ≠ Prosperity. Real freedom depends on health, time, and ecological stability—none linear with GDP.
• Wealth ≠ Merit. Past a threshold, wealth is less evidence of virtue than of compounded advantage.
• Markets ≠ Neutral. Prices ignore unpaid labor, biospheric services, and future risks; they therefore encode partial truths.
Insert Robeyns’s limits into economic equations and the Kuznets Curve, which predicts inequality will eventually fall as nations grow, flattens into irrelevance. If GDP rises by slashing union power or strip-mining aquifers, ethical and political limits snap shut long before any hypothetical “trickle-down” arrives.
VI. Completing the function
“Functions are only neutral until you choose the boundaries.”
We are ready to formalize what the previous chapters implied:
economy = f( planet, people, politics )
economy := the fair + equitable allocation and distribution of resources
Annotated with Robeyns’s thresholds and Raworth’s ceiling/floor, the function becomes:
Here Lₑ denotes the ethical limit (€1M) and Ld the democratic limit (€10 M), following Robeyns’s limitarian thresholds.
Where
• planet carries Raworth’s ecological ceiling,
• people embed capability sufficiency, and
• politics ensures rules are set and revised democratically.
From this bounded economy flows a subordinate relation:
business = f (economy(just))
Business inherits every upstream constraint. Its KPIs must therefore shift: from maximizing shareholder returns to maximizing equitable capability expansion within planetary and democratic limits.
VII. Design, not default
“Institutions are remembered injustices wearing architectural masks.”
Critics will call these limits naïve. But the economy is already designed, quietly, by and for incumbents. Neutrality is camouflage for power; making limits explicit is how we expose that design and retake authorship. With this clarification, the charge of naïveté flips: pretending that markets are self-organizing is the true innocence.
Consider corporate limited liability: drafted into British law in 1855, it instantly socialized downside risk while privatizing upside gain. A century later, the 1944 Bretton Woods accords fixed the dollar to gold and positioned the U.S. as banker to the world, another deliberate sketch on the drafting table of post-war elites. Deregulation of telecoms in the 1980s, patent extensions for Big Pharma in the 1990s, safe-harbor clauses for digital platforms in the 2000s: all design choices. “Let the market decide” is simply a rhetorical veil drawn over these decisions after the ink dries.
The implication is radical: if design is inevitable, the only question is who gets to hold the pen. Raworth and Robeyns insist that pen be guided by biophysical science and moral philosophy, not quarterly earnings guidance. Designing within limits means re-writing:
• Tax architectures that reward long-term capability investments over short-term asset stripping;
• Corporate charters that embed fiduciary duty to planet and polity, not just shareholders;
• Digital governance that defines data as civic commons, not extractive feedstock.
Mariana Mazzucato’s public-value framework, doughnut city-portraits, climate citizens’ assemblies in France and Denmark: all examples of emergent design labs. None are perfect; all testify that the vacuum left by growth ideology is already being filled by institutional imagination. The task now is to scale imagination faster than the compound interest of ecological debt.
VIII. Beyond growth: Real-world examples
“Prototypes are the apologies theory owes to practice.”
Skeptics often sneer, “Where is post-growth working?” Answer: in fragments, the way early electricity lit single mills before it wired whole cities.
Amsterdam’s Doughnut City Portrait mapped 200 indicators, from nitrogen emissions to housing affordability, against Raworth’s rings. The exercise revealed stark overshoot on material footprint and glaring undershoot on income security. Municipal procurement was overhauled; social-housing retrofits got priority; circular-construction targets became tender prerequisites. Three years on, pilots for major infrastructure projects show a 32 % drop in virgin-material use.
Tomelilla, Sweden cancelled plans for a new energy-intensive ice rink after its citizen doughnut workshop flagged the build as an ecological overshoot masked by tourist revenue projections. The budget was redirected to refurbish existing community halls and to fund free bus passes for youth, cutting transport-sector emissions by a projected 12 % in the first year.
New Zealand’s Well-being Budget re-sorted line items: mental-health funding increased 40 %, domestic-violence services 30 %, while some highway expansions were deferred. Critics claimed GDP would slump. It didn’t; but youth-suicide rates, long among the OECD’s worst, fell modestly for the first time in a decade.
Costa Rica demonstrates another vector: decarbonization without de-industrialization. Powered by 99 % renewable electricity, the nation’s per-capita ecological footprint is half that of the U.S., yet its life expectancy exceeds America’s by more than a year. The government’s Payments for Environmental Services program, essentially a biodiversity basic income for landholders, shows how capability sufficiency can align with forest regrowth.
Finally, wealth-tax debates in Spain, Norway, and even parts of the U.S. (California’s proposed exit tax on billionaires) echo Robeyns’s limitarian logic. While thresholds differ, the principle that democracy cannot coexist with extreme concentration has entered mainstream legislation.
These prototypes are not panaceas. They are proof-of-possibility; living arguments that post-growth is not a philosophy seminar but a policy workshop already underway.
IX. The shape of a bounded economy
“Enough is not a ceiling; it is the ground on which freedom stands.”
Stand on any downtown rooftop and scan the skyline: office towers plated in mirrored glass, cranes feeding them stories, digital billboards gauging your gaze. From that height it can appear the city’s purpose is to pile ever higher: square footage, throughput, transaction volume. But walk three blocks to a public library where an immigrant is learning the host language for free, or to a riverside wetland restored by community volunteers, and the city acquires another geometry, one measured in capability, not concrete.
A bounded economy must reconcile those geometries. It must be abundant enough to furnish libraries, clinics, and renewable grids yet disciplined enough to keep wetlands, soil microbes, covenantal trust. In functional terms:
Graph it and you get a layer cake of limits. The planetary layer sets the oven size; the democratic layer ensures no slice grows so thick it crushes the rest; the ethical layer guarantees a minimum crumb for every plate. Anything beyond that height is surplus without mandate, a spillover that must be taxed, redirected, or simply never baked.
Critics insist such bounding will dampen innovation. Evidence suggests the opposite. Scandinavian wealth taxes did not stifle Ericsson, Spotify, or Ørsted. What they did suppress was rent-seeking: fortunes built on speculative land banks or digital enclosures. Limitarian design prunes the parasitic branches so the inventive ones may flourish.
In practice, capability sufficiency demands universal basic services (healthcare, internet, transit) because life-chances depend more on infrastructural floorboards than on individual ladders. Democratic sufficiency demands progressive governance of capital; antitrust with teeth, campaign-finance firewalls, technocratic central banks yoked to citizen assemblies.
Is such an economy utopian? Only if you define utopia as organized realism. The wetlands in the heart of London, the free childcare in Helsinki, the 400-mile cycling superhighway network in Bogotá, all testify that rebalancing toward sufficiency is not a thought experiment; it is municipal budget science. Enough is not an end of ambition; it is the coordinate grid where ambition is obliged to serve life.
X. Conclusion: The ethics of economic design
“An economy is ethical only when its limits are visible and its purposes confessed.”
We began with a curve, worshiped like a deity, and end with a function, scrutinized like a contract. The shift is seismic: from reverence to responsibility.
economy := the fair and equitable allocation and distribution of resources
economy = f(planet, people, politics)
These are not slogans; they are operating instructions. They embed the biosphere as boundary, human capability as purpose, and democratic process as method. They downgrade business to a subfunction:
No corporation may plead neutrality. To profit is to draw from a commons; to draw from a commons is to incur obligations defined by planetary, ethical, and democratic limits. Profit becomes justified only insofar as it expands collective capability without breaching biophysical ceilings or democratic thresholds. “Maximizing shareholder value” survives, if at all, as a servant metric, never the goal.
What remains is work: rewriting tax codes, overhauling accounting standards to internalize carbon and care, converting data monopolies into public trusts, weaponizing procurement budgets for circular supply chains. Hard policy, not mood lighting.
Yet the deeper work is psychic. It asks each of us to retire a myth that has ruled our imaginations for seventy years: that salvation lies in a steeper slope. We replace that myth with a more demanding creed: that salvation lies in stewardship, measured by the health of water tables and the laughter of schoolchildren whose afternoons are free, not by the size of an end-of-quarter bar graph.
The old religion of growth extracted promise from the future and called it present wealth. The new covenant of enough extracts wisdom from limits and calls it present dignity. If that sounds austere, recall an older word for dignity: worth. An economy that knows its limits is one that remembers what is worthy of being limitless; affection, creativity, learning, the soft promise of a night sky still dark enough for stars.
Growth was never the ultimate aim. Life is. And life, in its highest ethical design, is not bigger; it is shared, intergenerationally-sustained, and accountable to the shape of the world that holds it.
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