A deep dive into an economy answerable to life. This episode asks whether progress should be measured by GDP and money-value growth — or by life capacity, ecological repair, democratic provisioning, and the protection of the shared conditions that make life possible. Read More
The contemporary Beyond GDP agenda marks a significant opening in global development thought. It recognizes that gross domestic product cannot adequately measure well-being, equity, ecological sustainability, social resilience, or future viability. The 2026 United Nations report Counting What Counts: A Compass of Progress for People and Planet proposes a globally applicable dashboard of 31 indicators designed to complement GDP by tracking well-being outcomes, equity and inclusion, environmental sustainability, and the forms of capital that support future well-being. It also emphasizes that indicators should inform planning, budgeting, and policy rather than merely describe outcomes (United Nations, 2026).
Yet better measurement alone cannot explain why the world economy continues to generate ecological overshoot alongside widespread deprivation. Jason Hickel’s 2026 IDS Annual Lecture, “Capitalism, Imperialism and Ecology,” provides the missing political-economic layer. Hickel argues that the central contradiction of the present world system is not scarcity in the aggregate, but misallocation: vast productive capacities are organized around capital accumulation rather than human needs, ecological repair, and democratic provisioning. He frames the global crisis as a double failure: planetary boundaries are being exceeded while billions remain deprived of decent living standards (Hickel, 2026).
This white paper develops a life-coherent synthesis of the Beyond GDP agenda and Hickel’s political economy. It argues that progress must be redefined not as output expansion, but as the democratic organization of production, distribution, finance, trade, technology, and governance around life-capacity, ecological integrity, structural repair, and future viability. Hickel’s analysis is interpreted alongside McMurtry’s life-value onto-axiology, Galtung’s theory of structural violence, and Maturana and Varela’s account of autopoiesis and world-bringing. The resulting framework reframes development as life-coherent provisioning: the creation of social, ecological, institutional, and economic conditions through which all people can live dignified lives within planetary boundaries, without externalizing harm onto other peoples, species, ecosystems, or generations.
In this lecture, Professor Jason Hickel examines the global ecological crisis and mass human deprivation as systemic consequences of capitalist and imperialist production. He argues that the world’s resources are currently misallocated to maximize private accumulation rather than meeting universal human needs through a democratic law of value. By utilizing data on unequal exchange, Hickel demonstrates how wealth and energy in the Global North rely on the net appropriation of labor and materials from the Global South. He suggests that achieving sustainability requires the imperial core to scale down unnecessary industries while the South reclaims economic sovereignty through de-linking from capitalist exploitation. Ultimately, the talk advocates for an ecosocialist transformation that prioritizes decent living standards for all within planetary boundaries.
This white paper offers a comprehensive critique of five major international institutions — the United Nations (UN), International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, World Trade Organization (WTO), and World Health Organization (WHO) — through the lens of Life-Value Onto-Axiology (LVOA). By applying the Primary Axiom of Value, which defines value as that which enables the universalizable development of life capacities without depriving others of the same, the paper exposes the systemic life-incoherence embedded in institutional logics. It identifies five recurring meta-patterns of dysfunction — money-value supremacy, elite governance, siloization, epistemic reductionism, and crisis management without transformation — across all institutions examined. The paper then proposes a bold and necessary re-grounding of global governance based on regenerative principles, participatory sovereignty, and life-coherent metrics. A new global architecture is outlined, including the formation of a Regenerative Global Commons Council and the adoption of institutional life-value metrics. The work serves as both a rigorous philosophical critique and a practical framework for those seeking to co-create a civilization where life, not abstraction, is the measure of all value.
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…So the bottom line becomes basically we should seek to organise the economy around meeting human needs rather than around servicing elite consumption and capital accumulation. And that requires a pretty dramatic shift from sort of the status quo of our economic system…
… we have to bring in concepts from like the literature on rationing, like a rationing framework is maybe more powerful here and more just, you know, first ensure that everyone has access to what they need, and then tax additional unnecessary consumption..
Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is getting a lot of attention these days, thanks in large part to the excellent work of Stephanie Kelton and Nathan Tankus, two of the movement’s most effective communicators. Over the past few weeks a number of people inspired by their work have asked me whether there is scope for thinking about degrowth from a MMT perspective. My answer: definitely. In fact, the two belong together.
As the climate crisis worsens and the carbon budgets set out by the Paris Agreement shrink, climate scientists and ecologists have increasingly come to highlight economic growth as a matter of concern. Growth drives energy demand up and makes it significantly more difficult – and likely infeasible – for nations to transition to clean energy quickly enough to prevent potentially catastrophic levels of global warming. In recent years, IPCC scientists have argued that the only feasible way to meet the Paris Agreement targets is to actively scale down the material throughput of the global economy. Reducing material throughput reduces energy demand, which makes it easier to accomplish the transition to clean energy.
Ecological economists acknowledge that this approach, known as degrowth, is likely to entail reducing aggregate economic activity as presently measured by GDP. While such a turn might seem inimical to human development, and indeed threaten to trigger a range of negative social consequences, proponents of degrowth argue that a planned reduction of throughput can be accomplished in high-income nations while at the same time maintaining and even improving people’s standards of living. Policy proposals focus on redistributing existing income, shortening the working week, and introducing a job guarantee and a living wage, while expanding access to public goods.
As debates unfold around what these policies might look like and how to implement them, here I step back to consider the deeper economic logic of degrowth theory. On the surface, degrowth sounds like an economics of scarcity, as many on both the right and left have been quick to allege. But in fact exactly the opposite is true. A long view of the history of capitalism reveals that growth has always depended on enclosure. The Lauderdale Paradox first articulated by James Maitland holds that an increase in “private riches” is achieved by choking off “public wealth”. This is done not only in order to acquire free value from the commons but also, I argue, in order to create an “artificial scarcity” that generates pressures for competitive productivity.
Degrowth seeks to invert the Lauderdale Paradox. By calling for a fairer distribution of existing resources and the expansion of public goods, degrowth demands not scarcity but rather abundance (see Sahlins, 1976; Galbraith, 1998; Latouche, 2014; D’Alisa et al., 2014). I build on this insight to show that such an approach not only embodies an alternative to a growth-oriented economy, but in fact offers an antidote to the driving mechanism of growth itself, thus releasing both humans and ecosystems from its grip. By advancing a theory of abundance, degrowth provides a feasible political pathway toward an ecological economy fit for the Anthropocene.
