limits to growth

How can we link monetary systems to the natural world?

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Money may not grow on trees, but it does grow at a much faster rate – particularly when created by banks as interest-bearing debt. In modern economies, nearly all money is created in this way. To maintain a stable money supply, debtors must repay both the initial loan and the interest on the loan. This means we need either economic growth at a rate in line with the interest on the debt and/or inflation, both of which we’ve had a great deal of in the past century. But back in the real, natural world, there are limits to growth. The ultimate limit is energy, something all production requires. Humans require food to survive and re-produce. To create this food we need energy, energy that comes, ultimately, from the sun.

System Innovation and a New ‘Great Transformation’: Re-embedding Economic Life in the Context of ‘De-Growth’

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Abstract: The political-economic limits to system innovation are explored through the Polanyian concepts of disembedding and the ‘double movement’. The Keynesian Welfare State is examined as the final outcome of a much broader ‘counter movement for societal protection.’ In place of reciprocity and autarchy, the Keynesian social compact involved the establishment of new, top-down circuits of redistribution, designed to facilitate continuing processes of capitalist modernization. Where social innovation is directed at the broad dynamics of marketization and the commodification of goods and services, this growth imperative continues to present an insuperable obstacle to system-level change. But as ecological capital at the level of the biosphere becomes a critical focus for a new protective ‘counter-movement’ and ‘degrowth’ becomes the de facto context for social innovation, systemic transformation becomes more thinkable. Hodgson’s ‘evotopia’ is recommended as a heuristic for a provisional, experimental and incremental exploration of the ‘adjacent possible.’