What comes after growth?

In 1893, John Stuart Mill imagined something no economist before him had seriously considered: an economy that stops growing on purpose. Not because it failed, not because resources ran out, but because a society mature enough in its social and cultural aspirations would choose stability over expansion. He called it a stationary economy. Mill did not see this as decline. He saw it as arrival. A society that no longer needed to grow could turn its attention to the quality of life rather than the quantity of output, to education, culture, and the equitable distribution of what it already had.

The idea was ignored for nearly a century.

The steady state

Herman Daly brought it back in 1974, reframing it as a steady-state economy: regulated growth, stable population, a preserved stock of capital. Daly’s challenge was as much rhetorical as theoretical. He had to separate the concept from stagnation, which is what most economists heard when someone suggested that growth might not be the point. The conflation was deliberate. Within the dominant economic tradition, an economy that is not growing is by definition failing. Daly had to dismantle that assumption before he could propose an alternative.

His argument was that a steady-state economy is not the absence of activity but the presence of intention. Production and consumption continue, but within boundaries set by what the ecosystem can sustain and what the population actually needs. Capital stock is maintained, not expanded. Resources flow through the system at a rate it can regenerate. A steady-state economy is not an economy that has failed to grow. It is an economy that has decided what enough looks like.

Beyond stabilization

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen pushed further. His argument, rooted in the thermodynamic limits explored in his earlier work, was that the problem required more than stabilization. It required a change of values. In developed countries, this meant abandoning what he called “growthmania,” the compulsive pursuit of material accumulation that produces gadgets nobody needs. The appetite for novelty, for the next version, for accumulation as identity, these are not natural laws. They are habits, and habits can be changed. In developing countries, the challenge is different: confronting population growth as a structural constraint while recognizing that the countries demanding contraction are the ones whose consumption created the crisis in the first place.

Georgescu-Roegen was not diplomatic about this. He was also not wrong that a solution to ecological limits requires something deeper than policy adjustments. If the system that created the problem is the same system we expect to solve it, the first thing that has to change is how we define success.

Degrowth and a-growth

From these foundations, two distinct approaches have emerged. Degrowth proposes a planned, controlled reduction of economic output, a deliberate contraction designed to bring human activity within ecological boundaries. This is not austerity imposed by crisis. It is a conscious decision about where to direct resources, reducing production in areas of excess while protecting and strengthening the systems that meet actual needs: healthcare, education, food security, housing. The transition is the difficult part, which is why O’Neill and others have worked on measurement frameworks that can track whether a degrowth transition is actually achieving equity and wellbeing rather than simply shrinking the economy.

A-growth takes a different path: rather than arguing for shrinking the economy, it argues for ignoring economic output as a metric altogether and redirecting attention to social and environmental indicators instead. Van den Bergh and Kallis make the case that the growth debate itself is a distraction, that what matters is not whether GDP goes up or down but whether the indicators we actually care about (health, ecological integrity, social cohesion, material security) are moving in the right direction. The two approaches are complementary. Degrowth names the transition. A-growth names what we measure once we arrive. Neither is simple. Both require letting go of a metric that has organized economic policy for generations, and replacing it with something that is harder to count but closer to what people actually experience.

What firms are for

The shift these approaches demand is not only institutional. It reaches into what firms are for and what entrepreneurs do. If the purpose of a business is not exclusively to create financial value, if innovation is measured by its contribution to sustainable development rather than by the returns it generates, then the role of the firm changes: a manufacturer designs for repair rather than replacement, a consultancy caps its client load to do the work well rather than scaling to do more of it. The role of the person running it changes too. Success is no longer measured by how fast the business grows or how large it becomes, but by whether it does what it set out to do and whether the people it touches are better off for it.

What I actually believe

This is where I stop writing about economics and start writing about what I actually believe.

We cannot talk about ethical business, ethical marketing, or ethical technology without confronting their relationship to productivism and consumerism. The connection is direct. Marketing exists, in its current form, to create demand. Demand drives production. Production drives growth. If growth is the problem, then the machinery of demand creation is part of it, and anyone working in that space has a responsibility to reckon with what they are building and for whom.

Two and a half centuries of economic thought established unlimited growth as the default setting, building the assumption so thoroughly into how we think about economies that questioning it still feels radical.

It should not. The evidence is clear. An economy that must grow indefinitely on a finite planet is a contradiction. And the contradiction is not abstract. It shows up in the gap between what the economy produces and what people actually need: in communities where GDP rises while quality of life falls, in industries that manufacture desire rather than meeting demand, in a global system where the countries least responsible for ecological damage bear the worst of its consequences.

The question is how we provide financial and social security for ourselves, our families, and the billions of people whose basic needs remain unmet, without exceeding the boundaries of our planet and of ourselves: our attention, our health, our capacity to live well.

There are no simple answers. But there are real ones. Degrowth offers a framework for controlled reduction. A-growth redirects the measurement itself, toward what actually matters. And at the individual level, the question becomes personal: what kind of work do I want to do, and what kind of business do I want it to live inside?

I have known for a while that my answer is not the biggest company, not hundreds of employees and thousands of clients, not millions of euros. I want a business that lets me and my family thrive. That provides for our needs. That gives back to the communities that shaped who I am. That serves the people it touches rather than extracting from them. A business where the work itself is worth doing, not just a vehicle for revenue that justifies its own expansion. That makes a difference.

Not however small. Just: a difference.

References

• Ayers, R. U., & Warr, B. (2009). The economic growth engine: How energy and work drive material prosperity. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781848445956
• Daly, H. E. (1974). The economics of the steady state. The American Economic Review, 64(2), 15–21.
• Daly, H. E. (2008). Ecological economics and sustainable development: Selected essays. New York, NY, USA: Edward Elgar.
• Edwards, Mark G. (2021). The growth paradox, sustainable development, and business strategy. Business Strategy and the Environment, 30(7), 3079–3094.
• Georgescu-Roegen, N. (1971). The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. Harvard Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Georgescu-Roegen, N. (2011a). The steady state and ecological salvation (1977) A thermodynamic analysis. In Mauro Bonaiuti (Ed.), From bioeconomics to degrowth: Georgescu-roegen’s ‘new economics’ in eight essays. Taylor & Francis Group.
• Georgescu-Roegen, N. (2011b). Inequality, limits and growth from a bioeconomic viewpoint (1978). In Mauro Bonaiuti (Ed.), From bioeconomics to degrowth: Georgescu-roegen’s ‘new economics’ in eight essays. Taylor & Francis Group.
• Heilbroner, R. (1999). The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers. Revised 7th Edition. A Touchstone Book Published by Simon & Shuster Inc.
• O’Neill, D. W. (2012). Measuring progress in the degrowth transition to a steady state economy. Ecological Economics, 84, 221–231.
• Perkins, P. E. E. (2019). Climate justice, commons, and degrowth. Ecological Economics, 160, 183–190.
• Schumpeter, J. (1934). A Theory of Economic Development: An Inquiry into Profits, Capital, Credit, Interest and the Business Cycle. Translated from the German by Redvers Opie, New Brunswick (U.S.A) and London (U.K.): Transaction Publishers.
• van den Bergh, J. C. J. M., & Kallis, G. (2012). Growth, A-growth or degrowth to stay within planetary boundaries? Journal of Economic Issues, 46(4), 909–920.