The Economics of Silence: Why Degrowth Might Be Capitalism’s Final Stage

By Adam Li Sep. 17, 2025

For two centuries, growth has been the world’s religion. Every budget, every election, every metric of national pride begins with one sacred question: How fast are we growing? But what if growth — once the measure of success — has become the symptom of decay?

The planet is overheating, debt is compounding, and productivity is stagnating. The World Bank (2024) forecasts that global GDP growth will average just 2.2 percent per year this decade, the lowest sustained rate since the 1930s. Yet even as growth slows, economies demand more energy, more labor, more consumption to sustain balance sheets inflated by expectation. The system is running faster to stay in place — the Red Queen economy.

A new idea once dismissed as heresy is gaining traction among economists, ecologists, and even investors: degrowth. The belief that prosperity may no longer depend on expansion — that survival might require deliberate slowdown.

The Myth of Infinite Expansion

Classical economics rests on a simple faith: that productivity gains can outpace resource limits. But this assumption has begun to crack. Despite technological leaps in AI, automation, and logistics, global resource extraction hit 100 billion tons per year in 2023 — more than triple 1970 levels (UN International Resource Panel, 2024). Recycling offsets only 9 percent.

At the same time, the correlation between GDP and well-being has fractured. In high-income countries, life satisfaction has plateaued even as consumption rises. The OECD Better Life Index (2024) finds that the United States and Japan — both growth economies — rank below smaller, slower nations like Finland and Denmark in well-being metrics. Growth now feeds inequality more than it feeds prosperity.

Yet the political system remains addicted to expansion. Without it, tax revenues fall, unemployment rises, and debt spirals. Economists call this the “growth trap”: a system where stability depends on the very process that undermines it.

The Physics of the Market

The economy is a physical system disguised as a mathematical one. It converts energy into value, resources into profit, and entropy into pollution. As physicist-economist Tim Garrett notes, there is an immutable link between global GDP and energy consumption: roughly 7 milliwatts per 2010 US dollar of output. Efficiency improvements may slow growth’s energy appetite, but cannot sever it.

This means every unit of GDP carries a thermodynamic footprint. The “green economy” — electric cars, cloud computing, AI training — still runs on fossil infrastructure. The IEA Global Energy Review (2024) found that data centers alone now consume 3.5 percent of global electricity, a figure expected to double by 2028. Green growth, in practice, is growth that pollutes more slowly.

The problem isn’t moral — it’s mathematical. You can’t have infinite compounding in a finite system.

The Corporate Paradox: Profits Without Purpose

Corporations, too, are beginning to confront the limits of their own scale. The McKinsey Global Growth Report (2024) notes that the largest 1 percent of companies now capture over 60 percent of global corporate profits — yet their revenue growth has halved since 2010. Market concentration delivers stability, not innovation.

Tech giants hoard cash not to invest, but to buy time. When growth stalls, they expand horizontally into symbolic markets — subscriptions, ads, financial services — rather than create new value. Profit becomes extraction, not creation.

The logic of the modern firm mirrors that of the global economy: expansion as self-preservation. Growth continues not because it is efficient, but because the alternative is collapse.

Degrowth Misunderstood

“Degrowth” is not economic suicide, as critics suggest. It does not mean abandoning innovation or returning to scarcity. It means redefining enough. It challenges the assumption that human welfare scales with production.

The Post-Growth Institute (2023) frames it not as contraction but as “economic design for equilibrium.” Degrowth proposes a shift from throughput to outcome — measuring economies by health, education, and ecological balance rather than raw output. It means shrinking sectors that destroy value (fossil fuels, speculative finance, planned obsolescence) while expanding those that sustain it (care work, renewable infrastructure, local production).

Countries like New Zealand, Bhutan, and Iceland have experimented with alternative indicators such as the Wellbeing Budget and Gross National Happiness Index — imperfect, but revolutionary. These frameworks replace growth with balance as the objective of governance.

Financial Resistance to Stillness

The greatest barrier to degrowth is not ideology but debt. Global public and private debt reached US$313 trillion in 2024 (Institute of International Finance, 2024), roughly 336 percent of global GDP. The financial system assumes perpetual expansion — the ability to repay tomorrow with interest generated by growth today.

A degrowth economy breaks that logic. Without expansion, debt becomes unserviceable. Hence, financial capitalism cannot decelerate voluntarily; it must either transform or crash. The question is whether governments can engineer an orderly slowdown before markets enforce a chaotic one.

One proposed solution is debt redesign: linking repayment schedules to ecological and social performance rather than GDP. The European Green Debt Framework (2024) experiments with “sustainability-indexed bonds” whose interest rates fall when emissions or inequality targets improve. Degrowth finance will not eliminate debt — it will redefine what counts as repayment.

A Culture Addicted to Acceleration

The psychology of growth runs deeper than economics. Progress, in the modern imagination, is indistinguishable from speed. To slow down feels regressive, even immoral. Yet the fetish of acceleration has created a generation of exhausted workers and anxious consumers.

The WHO Global Mental Health Atlas (2024) reports that anxiety disorders have increased by 25 percent worldwide since 2010, correlating strongly with long working hours and financial insecurity. Time poverty, not material poverty, now drives dissatisfaction in high-income societies.

Degrowth is not merely a macroeconomic correction; it is a cultural therapy — a rejection of constant motion as the metric of worth.

Toward a Post-Growth Civilization

If growth built capitalism, can capitalism survive without it? Perhaps the answer lies not in replacement but in evolution. Post-growth economies could still use markets, competition, and innovation — but as means, not ends.

A “steady-state capitalism” might feature universal basic services instead of consumer subsidies, limited workweeks supported by automation dividends, and investment indexed to ecological regeneration. Profit would be permissible — but only within planetary boundaries.

The transition will be brutal. Economies optimized for motion cannot idle gracefully. But neither can they sustain perpetual acceleration without burnout. The question is not whether we slow down — but whether we do so by design or disaster.

In the long arc of economic history, growth was never destiny; it was a phase. And like all phases of expansion, it ends not in collapse, but in equilibrium.

The future of prosperity may not be louder, faster, or bigger. It may, at last, be silent.

Works Cited

“Global Economic Prospects 2024.” World Bank, 2024, www.worldbank.org.

 “Global Resource Outlook 2024.” United Nations International Resource Panel (IRP), 2024, www.resourcepanel.org.

 “Better Life Index 2024.” Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2024, www.oecd.org.

 “World Energy Review 2024.” International Energy Agency (IEA), 2024, www.iea.org.

 “Global Debt Monitor 2024.” Institute of International Finance (IIF), 2024, www.iif.com.

 “Global Mental Health Atlas 2024.” World Health Organization (WHO), 2024, www.who.int.

 “Corporate Profitability and Growth Report.” McKinsey Global Institute, 2024, www.mckinsey.com.

 “Post-Growth Policy Framework 2023.” Post-Growth Institute, 2023, www.postgrowth.org.