Framework for a Deep Economy: A Future Beyond Growth

For more than a century, economic stability has been organized around gross expansion of output. Growth has functioned not merely as an economic outcome but as a governing principle: sustaining employment, legitimising financial obligations, moderating inequality, and underwriting political authority. Yet this system has always depended on a foundational illusion — that indiscriminate economic activity can expand without ecological limit. By equating prosperity with GDP expansion, modern economies institutionalised a flawed model of stability predicated on infinite growth within a finite world. Today, ecological thresholds, technological transformation, and rising concentration of wealth expose this contradiction and call for a different basis of prosperity.

Economist Thomas Piketty warns that when the return on capital outpaces the growth of the economy (r > g), wealth concentrates in elitist centres over time, threatening social stability and legitimacy in the wider economy. Meanwhile, Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics frames clear boundaries for economic activity: we must stay between a social floor, ensuring everyone has access to essentials, and an ecological ceiling, protecting the planet’s life-support systems.

John Maynard Keynes reminds that aggregate demand drives economic stability, and governments can manage demand to prevent crises and maintain cohesion. Joseph Schumpeter highlights the role of innovation and creative destruction in driving progress, showing that even in a post-growth society, technological and organizational change can renew economic capabilities without expanding scale.

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Depth Over Growth

In a post-growth, depth-oriented economy, the goal isn’t to make the economy bigger, but to make it resilient, fair, and sustainable. Prosperity is measured by depth and a stable root system— the ability to maintain and distribute essential resources, social security, and ecological integrity — rather than by output alone.

Key insights:

• Financial stability: Align debt and fiscal interventions to societal and ecological capacity¹.

• Redistribution: Maintain social floors and eradicate inequality².

• Innovation: Renew sectors within ecological and social boundaries⁴.

• Governance: Embed polycentric, participatory systems that enhance legitimacy⁸.

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Finance and Debt

Debt and financial instruments are no longer about extracting future growth. Instead, obligations-flex based on what society can sustainably support. Investments prioritize public infrastructure, renewable energy, and projects that strengthen social and ecological resilience. Wealth accumulation is tolerated only if it reinforces stability and equity. Keynesian tools stabilize demand while respecting ecological limits¹.

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Taxation and Redistribution

Taxes maintain fairness and guarantee access to essentials. Progressive taxation, inheritance moderation, and public ownership stakes prevent wealth from undermining social and ecological stability. Tax receipts are channeled into housing, healthcare, education, energy, and digital access².

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Social Provisioning

Guaranteed access to life’s essentials forms the foundation of legitimacy. Inequality ceilings prevent disparities, while collective management ensures ecological limits are regulated and respected. Keynesian demand management maintains full employment or fair universal wage.³

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Innovation and Technology

Innovation is mission-driven, focused on resilience, accessibility, and ecological impact, rather than market expansion. AI, automation, and scientific research support circular economies, sustainable energy, and climate adaptation. Schumpeterian creative destruction allows sectors to renew within ecological and social boundaries.

Governance of innovation follows Ostrom-inspired principles:

• Participatory decision-making

• Distributed accountability

• Polycentric coordination

This ensures technological advances reinforce societal resilience and equitable access⁴.

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Business and Industrial Design in a Circular Economy

Business and industrial systems are redesigned to minimize waste, maximize resource efficiency, and extend product lifecycles. Products and industrial processes follow circular economy principles: materials are reused, remanufactured, or recycled, and systems are designed to remain within ecological limits.

Key elements:

• Closed-loop production systems

• Resource recovery and reuse

• Integration with renewable energy and sustainable supply chains

This aligns industrial strategy with ecological primacy and social goals, while allowing Schumpeterian innovation and worker participation to thrive. Circular design also supports demilitarization efforts, as industrial capacity is redirected toward sustainable production⁶.

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Employment, AI, and Worker Governance

AI and automation alter not only how goods and services are produced, but how economic participation itself is organized. As productive capacity becomes increasingly decoupled from human labor input, the linkage between employment and livelihood weakens structurally rather than cyclically. A depth-oriented economy responds by securing material security as a social guarantee rather than a by-product of expansion. Universal basic income, guaranteed wages, or equivalent provisioning mechanisms maintain the social floor, while polycentric worker governance directs technological capability toward shared resilience, ecological compliance, and equitable distribution⁵.

New industrial and worker governance models, guided by Ostrom principles, implement:

• Participatory councils

• Cooperative decision-making

• Shared accountability mechanisms

This ensures creative destruction benefits society as a whole rather than concentrating power. Schumpeterian innovation continues, but directed toward resilience, sustainability, and social legitimacy. AI and automation enhance collective well-being while reinforcing ecological limits and social equity⁵.

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Demilitarization and Green Industry

A deep economy transforms the military-industrial complex into a driver of green infrastructure and climate resilience. Defense industries and global military investments are redirected toward renewable energy, sustainable infrastructure, and climate adaptation projects. Polycentric governance ensures that these resources are repurposed collaboratively.

Impacts:

• Reduces global tensions and armed conflict⁶

• Channels industrial capacity toward ecological and social priorities

• Aligns technological, labor, and innovation capabilities with societal needs

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Ecological Primacy

The natural world is the primary societal asset. Soil, water, biodiversity, and climate are foundational capital. Financial, technological, and social systems are organized to maintain ecological ceilings, ensuring all activities respect planetary limits⁷.

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Classical Socialist Insights: Marx, Engels, and Lenin

Classical socialist theory enriches the depth economy framework by highlighting labor, industrial, and global power dynamics:

• Marx: Concerned with labor exploitation and alienation; addressed here through universal basic income, worker councils, and polycentric governance⁵.

• Engels: Focused on industrialisation’s social consequences; addressed through social provisioning, redistribution, and circular industrial design²³.

• Lenin: Critiqued imperialism and militarised production; addressed through demilitaridation, global cooperation, and green industrial repurposing⁶.

These insights are updated for a post-growth, ecological context, balancing worker control, innovation, and planetary stewardship while preserving social and ecological legitimacy.

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Legitimacy and Governance

Economic equality is not only a distributive concern but a structural condition for social stability. Comparative evidence shows that societies with lower income inequality exhibit higher levels of trust, better health outcomes, stronger social mobility, and greater institutional legitimacy. Reducing inequality therefore strengthens the depth of social systems by improving resilience, cohesion, and collective capacity. Policies that compress excessive disparities are not merely redistributive interventions but foundational investments in societal stability and wellbeing.⁹

Authority is earned through stewardship, fairness, and continuity. Governance is:

• Transparent, participatory, and polycentric

• Nested across local, regional, and global levels

• Measured by wellbeing, equity, ecological stability, and accountability⁸

Citizens consent to collective governance because it:

• Protects the natural world

• Ensures fair access to essentials

• Embeds Ostrom-style accountability

• Redirects militarized power toward constructive societal ends

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Integrated Depth Economy Governance

In a post-growth society, we see:

• Financial obligations aligned with social and ecological capacity¹

• Redistribution maintaining social floors²

• Social provisioning guaranteeing essential access³

• Innovation strengthening resilience and renewing sectors⁴

• Circular business and industrial design minimizing waste and aligning with ecological limits

• AI and automation enhancing collective well-being⁵

• Worker and industrial governance embedded in polycentric, participatory structures⁵

• Military-industrial resources redirected to green infrastructure⁶

• Ecological primacy recognized as the foundation of societal wealth⁷

• Classical socialist insights informing labor, industrial, and global power structures

• Legitimacy derived from sustaining depth rather than growth⁸

Prosperity is measured by how well society stays within the doughnut, balancing ecological ceilings and social floors to ensure continuity, equity, and resilience for future generations.

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References

Costanza, R., et al. (1997). The value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital. Nature, 387(6630), 253–260.

Jackson, T. (2017). Prosperity without Growth. 2nd edition. Routledge.

Keynes, J.M. (1936). The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Macmillan.

Marx, K. (1867). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. I. Penguin Classics.

Engels, F. (1845). The Condition of the Working Class in England. Penguin Classics.

Lenin, V.I. (1917). Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Progress Publishers.

Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press.

Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Raworth, K. (2017). Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. Chelsea Green.

Schumpeter, J.A. (1942). Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. Harper & Brothers.

Wilkinson, R., & Pickett, K. (2009). The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. Allen Lane.

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Footnotes

1. Debt is capacity-aligned, ensuring obligations do not compromise social or ecological limits, with Keynesian fiscal tools supporting stability.

2. Redistribution funds essentials to maintain the social floor.

3. Social provisioning balances inequality ceilings and ecological limits, supported by demand management principles.

4. Innovation is mission-driven and doughnut-compliant, with creative destruction renewing economic sectors within ecological boundaries, governed by participatory, polycentric structures.

5. Employment models and AI integration follow Ostrom-inspired polycentric governance, ensuring equitable distribution of labor, participation in decision-making, and societal benefit from technological change; this also addresses Marxian concerns about labor exploitation.

6. Military-industrial capacity is redirected toward green industry and climate infrastructure, reducing global conflict potential and aligning industrial resources with ecological and social priorities; this incorporates Leninian critique of imperialism.

7. Ecological primacy treats nature as foundational capital, enforcing the doughnut ceiling.

8. Governance metrics reflect wellbeing, resilience, ecological compliance, and polycentric accountability rather than GDP.

9. Social outcomes of inequality

Enclosures: Paths to perdition

Enclosure refers to the transformation of collectively governed resources — land, labour, knowledge, energy, or ecological capacity — into alienable property controlled by a narrow set of actors. It entails legal, political, and coercive mechanisms that restrict access, commodify use, and concentrate wealth and power.¹ It is the essence of what is now known as neo-liberal economics.

Enclosure is not a neutral process. It is the deliberate act by powerful individuals to turn what belongs to everyone — land, labour, water, knowledge, and even ecological capacity — into private property under their control.¹ It was not civilisational necessity; it was human greed, enforced through law, violence, and coercion. This process was never merely a technical response to alleged public-sector “inefficiency.” Instead, enclosure has historically been a political project — one that systematically reallocated communal resources into the control of elites. The rhetorical claim that markets are efficient and public systems are inherently inefficient serves this project by legitimising dispossession in the language of productivity and progress.

Long before capitalist modernity, human societies governed material and social life through commons-based systems that were durable, rule-bound, and relational. In early medieval England, Saxon village councils administered communal fields, floodplain pastures, woodlands, and waterworks through customary law and collective enforcement.² In the Alpine regions of northern Italy and Switzerland, cooperative management of pastures and irrigation sustained mountain communities over generations.³ Indigenous societies in North America — such as the Haudenosaunee Confederacy — regulated hunting territories, fisheries, and forests through complex protocols that balanced use with regeneration.⁴ Across sub-Saharan Africa, groups like the Tiv and Maasai organised grazing, water access, and seasonal migrations through oral jurisprudence and community councils. In Southeast Asia, the Ifugao rice terraces of the Philippines and the subak irrigation networks of Bali combined ritual practice with ecological knowledge to govern water and labour collectively, long predating colonial intervention.⁵

These arrangements were not benign or egalitarian in any utopian sense, but they were functional governance systems capable of managing scarcity, coordinating risk, and reproducing social and ecological life. Survival depended on social norms of mutual obligation rather than abstract market competition. This configuration is what scholars refer to as a moral economy: economic life constrained by shared expectations of fairness, subsistence security, and collective responsibility.⁶

The rise of elites did not occur because commons-based governance “failed.” It occurred because it worked, constraining unmediated accumulation and embedding resources within social relations. Enclosure emerged when early barons, church estates, and military elites succeeded in exempting themselves from reciprocal obligations, using newly centralised legal and military powers to redefine access rights. Law, religion, and violence were not external to economy; they were instruments in transforming communal systems into privately controlled domains.⁷

The Norman Conquest of England (1066) marks one of the earliest, well‑documented shifts in this direction. Pre‑Conquest Anglo-Saxon England featured village courts and customary tenure systems that regulated shared access to land and forest.⁸ Norman rule introduced feudal tenure, centralised taxation, and legal mechanisms — such as forest law and manorial courts — that repositioned these commons under Norman control.⁹ Monastic estates and aristocratic landholders were among the first systematic enclosers, fencing off fields and woodlands, codifying private access through charters, and reframing common rights as conditional privileges.¹⁰ Over the early modern period, these practices culminated in Parliamentary Enclosure Acts that formalised wide‑scale privatization of open fields and commons.

The British Isles demonstrate how enclosure took different but related forms across regions. In England, the consolidation of open fields into hedged holdings by the 18th and early 19th centuries displaced smallholders and eroded customary rights. Scotland experienced the Highland Clearances, in which landlord-driven eviction and “improvement” rhetoric dismantled clan-based commons, forcing mass migration to industrial cities or overseas.¹¹ In Wales, upland grazing commons and shared pastures were enclosed under estate management, disrupting village subsistence.¹² Ireland represents perhaps the starkest example: centuries of plantation policy, absentee landlordism, and legal expropriation eroded centuries-old communal tenures. The Great Famine (1845–1852) starkly illustrated the prioritisation of property rights over survival, as enclosed English grain exports continued amidst mass starvation of Irish people.¹³

These patterns were exported globally through European conquest and colonialism. In the Americas, Indigenous confederacies and agricultural states were dismantled; land was seized and repurposed for plantation economies dependent on coerced labour.¹⁴ In the Caribbean and American South, land enclosure went hand‑in‑hand with the transatlantic slave trade, supplying enslaved Africans to plantation regimes that generated enormous surplus for European markets.¹⁵ Australia’s Aboriginal lands were declared terra nullius; in New Zealand, the Treaty of Waitangi facilitated large‑scale land transfers from Māori to settlers; and in Africa and Southeast Asia, pastoral and agrarian commons were overlaid with colonial property regimes tied to export markets.¹⁶ These transformations were justified through narratives of civilisation, productivity, or waste — but in substance they were systematic dispossession.

Where enclosure typically separates people from land or resources, slavery enclosed the human being itself — body, labour, and future rendered as property. From the 16th century onward, European and later American wealth was built less on innovation than on the systematic appropriation of labour and land. Enslaved labour on sugar, cotton, and tobacco plantations supplied the capital for industrial expansion, shipping networks,  personal fortunes and financial sectors in Europe and North America.¹⁷ Far from a marginal anomaly, slavery was a foundational mechanism in early capitalist accumulation, steeped in brutality and the torture of fellow human beings, for profit.

When formal slavery became politically untenable, enclosure did not disappear; it adapted. Colonial regimes reorganised land, labour, and nature on a planetary scale: forests became timber reserves, rivers transport corridors, soils monocultural plantations, and mineral deposits colonial assets.¹⁸ In the contemporary era, fossil fuel extraction marks a decisive escalation of these dynamics. Fossil carbon stored over geological time was captured, commodified, and combusted in the span of a century, producing unprecedented surplus while externalising ecological costs across space and time.¹⁹ States underwrite exploration risk, subsidise production, and guarantee corporate returns, while local populations often endure environmental degradation, loss of livelihoods, and displacement.²⁰

In this process, the biosphere itself has become enclosed. Carbon sinks, water cycles, and atmospheric capacity — once understood as shared ecological commons — are treated as unpriced inputs for corporate profit. This enclosure has not emerged from market efficiency; it depends on the political backing of neo-liberal state institutions and legal frameworks that disentangle economic value from social and ecological cost.

Neoliberalism intensifies these tendencies rather than reversing them. Public goods and services — water, energy, transport, health — have been subject to privatisation or contractual outsourcing. Rail franchises in the UK, built with infrastructure subsidised by public funds, pay dividends to private shareholders while long‑term fiscal liabilities often remain socialised.²¹ Scotland’s publicly owned water utilities demonstrate that access and, in many cases, investment outcomes can be comparable or superior without private profit extraction.²² Digital platforms monetise data generated collectively on infrastructures rooted in public research, turning shared knowledge into corporate surplus.

Empirical research finds that privatisation rarely produces consistent or universal efficiency gains; outcomes depend heavily on governance, regulation, and institutional design.²³ Energy markets in the US and Europe show that consumer prices can rise after privatisation, while underinvestment in grid resilience and renewable integration is offset by the reliance on public subsidies and risk guarantees.²⁴ Any apparent productivity gains are frequently overwhelmed by contractual complexity and the socialisation of risk.

Responses to enclosure have also shaped history. Labour unions, welfare states, and public services emerged as defensive institutions, institutionalising fragments of earlier moral economies within hostile systems, collectivising bargaining, regulating access to work, and enforcing social norms.²⁵ Yet they remain constrained, continually undermined by the same forces that drive enclosure.

Civilisation now confronts the terminal form of enclosure. What was once land and labour has expanded to ecosystems, knowledge systems, climate stability, and the very conditions of habitable life. The question is no longer whether public or private systems are more efficient; it is whether the foundational conditions that sustain life are to be collectively governed or appropriated for private extraction.

History suggests that enclosure is interrupted not by technical fixes or managerial reforms, but by collective refusal at scale — through strikes, mass mobilisation, and coordinated non‑cooperation. If enclosure is global, resistance must also be global; if dispossession is systemic, responses cannot be individualised.

Today, the impacts of mass enclosure are visible everywhere: in aristocratic estates still controlling land titles; in multinational corporations dominating energy, food, and data markets; in tax systems that favour capital over labour; and in legal regimes that protect private property above all else. These privileges are built on systemic dispossession — of commons, of labour, of technologies, of ecosystems — across continents and centuries. Efficiency arguments, technicalism, or incremental reform will not dismantle this structural capture.

The future of civilisation depends on whether populations reassert the older, dangerous principle that the conditions of life should not belong to elites alone. Whether through organised labour, ecological alliances, Indigenous sovereignty, or new forms of democratic governance, the possibility of reclaiming shared governance remains open — but it will not be granted. It must be taken.

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Footnotes

1. Polanyi, Karl. 1944. The Great Transformation. Beacon Press; Harvey, David. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford University Press.

2. Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons. Cambridge University Press.

3. Fleming, Robin. 1991. Kings and Lords in Conquest England. Cambridge University Press.

4. Bartlett, Robert. 2000. England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075–1225. Oxford University Press.

5. Mann, Charles. 2005. 1491. Vintage.

6. Thompson, E.P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class. Vintage.

7. Banner, Stuart. 2005. Possession and Conquest: The Legal History of the Territorial Frontier. Cambridge University Press.

8. Fleming, Robin. 1991. Kings and Lords in Conquest England.

9. Bartlett, Robert. 2000. England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings.

10. Ibid.

11. Devine, T.M. 2018. The Scottish Clearances. Penguin.

12. Jenkins, Geraint H. 1992. The Foundations of Modern Wales. Oxford University Press.

13. Mokyr, Joel. 1983. Why Ireland Starved. Routledge; Ó Gráda, Cormac. 1999. Black ’47 and Beyond. Princeton University Press.

14. Mann, Charles. 2005. 1491.

15. Williams, Eric. 1944. Capitalism and Slavery. University of North Carolina Press.

16. Scott, James C. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed. Yale University Press.

17. Baptist, Edward E. 2014. The Half Has Never Been Told. Basic Books.

18. Harvey, David. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford University Press; Bridge, Gavin, et al. 2013. “The Third Carbon Age.” Environment and Planning A 45(8): 1905–1927.

19. Newell, Peter & Daniel Peterson. 2019. “The Political Economy of the Carbon Transition.” Review of International Political Economy 26(4): 699–728.

20. Bebbington, Anthony, et al. 2018. “Resource Extraction and Infrastructure Threaten Forest Cover and Community Rights.” PNAS 115(52): 13164–13173.

21. Estache, Antonio, Stephane Perelman & Luis Trujillo. 2005. “Infrastructure Performance and Reform.” Policy and Society 27(3): 221–248.

22. Hall, David & Emanuele Lobina. 2006. “Water Privatisation and Restructuring in England and Wales.” International Journal of Water 2(1): 47–72.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid.

25. Thompson, E.P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class.

The Clash of Capitalisms: Keynes & Schumpeter Reclaim the Commons - Hayek & Friedman Crash and Burn

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From privatised water, rail, energy, and housing to AI-displaced labour, the neoliberal order falters — and emergence of Keynesian and Schumpeterian principles offer a new path to freedom, security, and dignity.

Keynes and Schumpeter understand something that Hayek and Friedman explicitly deny: capitalism is not morally neutral and cannot govern itself. For Keynes, markets do not self‑stabilise and unemployment is not a personal failing but a systemic outcome that destroys democratic legitimacy if left unauthorised; social provision is not charity but the currency of collective consent.¹ Schumpeter shows that innovation is not merely creative — it is destructive, permanently displacing workers and communities in a dynamic that economics must absorb, not celebrate.² Both locate economics within ethics and politics, asking not how efficient markets are, but whether they can sustain a society without tearing it apart.

Hayek and Friedman take the opposite view. They elevate markets from mechanisms of allocation to moral authorities, recasting suffering as natural outcome and inequality as virtuous signal. What Keynes and Schumpeter regard as political responsibilities, Hayek and Friedman treat as immutable natural facts demanding obedience. This is not academic nuance — it is a rupture in the moral framework of governance, where obedience to market outcomes replaces collective accountability as the criterion for legitimacy.

Under this view, work becomes a test of moral worth. Labour — any labour — is valorised. Hardship is taken as character discipline. Those pushed out by structural shifts are recast not as victims of systemic change but as personal failures. Neoliberalism sacrifices social responsibility to belief in markets as ethical arbiters.

This theology of markets cannot be democratically sustained in its pure form. In Chile under Pinochet, the Chicago School's neoliberal policy is imposed through authoritarian violence — wages crushed, unions destroyed, public sectors dismantled — because pure‑market rule cannot win consent on its own terms. This is not an aberration; it is a demonstration of what neoliberalism requires when it asserts markets as moral imperatives rather than tools of governance.

When the same logic arrives in Britain and the United States, it does not come with tanks but with policy. Thatcher and Reagan break unions, slash welfare, deregulate finance, and sell off public infrastructure. Water, rail, energy, and housing — the essential commons of collective life — are privatised, transferred from democratic stewardship into private profit streams. This is not reform. It is organised expropriation: public utilities built through collective investment turn into sites of monopolistic extraction where prices rise and investment lags, benefitting shareholders rather than users.³ Privatised water or energy companies in the UK, for example, have handed hundreds of billions to shareholders while families face higher bills and deteriorating services.⁴

This is enclosure in its modern form: the seizure of shared resources and their conversion into private revenue flows. Citizens become captive consumers paying for essentials that were once structured as rights, not profit centres. This is not market efficiency — it is organised extraction that erodes the very conditions of collective life.

The state does not retreat; it changes sides. Coercion morphs into bureaucracy. Workfare regimes, public/private partnerships, benefit sanctions, surveillance architectures, and moralised scarcity insist that survival still must be earned, even as the jobs that once anchored survival disappear.

At the heart of this order lies its defining injustice. It insists that dignity must be earned through labour, yet rewards ownership without labour. Owners of capital, landlords, rentiers, and financiers extract income detached from meaningful contribution while everyone else must fight for precarious work that is increasingly automated and insecure. Freedom flows upward; discipline flows downward. This is not hypocrisy. It is the system functioning exactly as it was designed.

Neoliberalism is not merely an economic doctrine; it is a political theology. Markets are omniscient; scarcity is sacred; failure is moral deficiency.

Artificial intelligence now lays this theology bare. AI decouples productivity from human labour; value is generated without jobs. Efficiency accelerates even as livelihoods evaporate — precisely the desert neoliberal theology never accounted for. The neoliberal response — harsher discipline, deeper exclusion — no longer even pretends to offer legitimacy. It can only punish despair with moral judgement.

Universal Wage is not utopia. It is institutional necessity. It recognises what Keynes and Schumpeter both understood and neoliberalism worked to erase: displacement is structural and inevitable; it is not moral failure. Keynes saw unemployment as a systemic condition requiring social protection to sustain democracy;³ Schumpeter saw displacement as continuous, requiring institutions capable of absorbing capitalism’s own disruptions.⁴ Universal Wage unites these insights by recognising independent human life beyond compulsory employment as legitimate.

Under Universal Wage, those displaced by automation are not treated as deviant, idle, or deficient. They are recognised as full members of society — creating, caring, learning, organising, experimenting, living outside the labour market without punishment. This is not idleness. It is the formal recognition of human life beyond work.

Most crucially, Universal Wage generalises the freedom already monopolised by elites. The wealthy are not required to justify their existence through labour; they are free to explore, fail, withdraw, and create. Universal Wage extends that freedom downward instead of enclosing it behind capital ownership.

In this frame, AI’s productivity is socialised rather than captured. Economic security becomes foundational rather than conditional. Public support ceases to be emergency relief and becomes the infrastructure of autonomy, creativity, care, and ecological repair. Markets persist; innovation continues; but dignity no longer depends on employment.

Neoliberalism claims inevitability. In truth, it is a moral narrowing enforced through enclosure, discipline, and fear. Universal Wage is the real innovation — not because it abandons markets, but because it restores legitimacy where neoliberalism destroys it. Where Hayek and Friedman demand obedience to markets, Keynes and Schumpeter demand responsibility to society. Where neoliberalism sanctifies suffering, Universal Wage restores dignity as the precondition of democracy. And where neoliberalism encloses commons — water, rail, energy, housing — Universal Wage points toward a future where the economy exists to sustain life, not extract from it.

In a world where work no longer anchors worth or survival, the question is no longer whether this argument is radical.

It is whether democratic life can survive without acting on it.

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Footnotes

1. Keynes on legitimacy and unemployment: Keynes, J.M. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Macmillan, 1936), Chapters 2–3, 10–12 — argues that full employment cannot be left to spontaneous market forces and that unemployment is a macroeconomic problem requiring collective solutions.

2. Schumpeter on destruction as structural: Schumpeter, J.A. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (Harper & Row, 1942), Part II — articulates the concept of “creative destruction,” emphasising that innovation inherently disrupts existing social structures and labour.

3. Privatisation effects on utilities and shared resources: Bayliss, K., Fine, B., & Robertson, M. “Privatisation, Inequality and Poverty in the UK,” International Journal of Public Policy, 2018 — documents how privatised utilities often prioritise shareholder returns over public service quality and affordability.

4. Empirical evidence of privatisation transfers: Booth, R. & Kollewe, J., “UK public paid nearly £200bn to shareholders of key industries since privatisation, study finds,” The Guardian (2025) — shows how privatised sectors transfer significant wealth to investors while consumers face higher costs.

5. AI, labour, and decoupling of productivity: Ng, A. & Brynjolfsson, E., “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2025 — analyses how AI reduces reliance on human labour and challenges traditional social contracts around work.

The Grand Deception Policy: How GDP Hides Planetary Destruction in Plain Sight

 

Gross Domestic Product reporting (GDP) functions as the lingua franca of the global economy. States, multilateral institutions, and financial markets treat it as the primary indicator of economic performance. Fiscal policy, central bank mandates, sovereign credit assessments, and development assistance are routinely justified through GDP growth, while alternative indicators—such as the Human Development Index (HDI) or the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI)—remain marginal to decision-making processes. In practice, GDP dominates how governments, corporations, and investors define “growth,” even as it systematically records ecological destruction, social harm, and resource depletion as positive economic activity.¹

Despite its use today, GDP was never intended to measure economic 'success'. National income accounting emerged in the 1930s as a tool to track aggregate output during the Great Depression. Simon Kuznets, one of its principal architects, explicitly warned that “the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income.”² During the Second World War, statisticians working under John Maynard Keynes—including Richard Stone and Erwin Rothbarth — refined these accounting systems for purposes of mobilisation, planning, and resource allocation.³ Following the Bretton Woods conference, GDP was standardised as the global metric of economic performance and consolidated through the work of economists such as Colin Clark and Stone.⁴ What began as a limited accounting instrument gradually hardened into the dominant proxy for measuring prosperity itself.

This shift constitutes a profound conceptual error. A metric designed to measure the monetary value of market output has been elevated into the primary signifier of economic success, conferring legitimacy on policy while systematically obscuring social and ecological costs. The gross monetisation of a diminishing, finite asset base is recorded as “growth,” as though the biophysical foundations of economic activity were inexhaustible.

Nothing in the material world is exempt from limits—least of all natural systems subjected to continuous extraction. Nevertheless, mainstream growth economics treats the economy as if it operates independently of ecological constraints. This is not optimism; it is a category error. As ecological economists have long argued, the economy is a subsystem of the biosphere, not the reverse.⁵

GDP does not measure prosperity. It measures the aggregate market value of monetised transactions, irrespective of whether those transactions enhance or undermine human or ecological wellbeing.

Forests enter national accounts only when felled. Rivers register economically when dammed, or when polluted and commercially remediated. Human beings appear primarily as units of labour or consumption—productive when employed, valuable when sick enough to require treatment, visible when exhausted or repaired sufficiently to return to work. The value of oceans, lakes, soils, community cohesion, and ecological regeneration are not accounted for unless they are directly priced and sold.⁶

Under GDP accounting, a society can actively degrade its own life-support systems and still appear economically successful. War increases output through arms production and reconstruction. Oil spills generate cleanup contracts. Prison expansion boosts construction and employment. Chronic illness drives healthcare expenditure. Deforestation produces timber, pulp, and transport revenue while eliminating carbon sinks. Hurricanes, floods, and wildfires raise GDP through emergency response and rebuilding. This is not a misinterpretation of the data; it follows directly from the accounting logic of GDP.⁷

GDP tracks monetised flows, not depleted assets. A standing forest contributes nothing to national income; once destroyed, it generates measurable growth across extraction, processing, logistics, and finance. Resource exhaustion is treated as an “externality” until collapse forces recognition through crisis expenditure. In material terms, growth functions as liquidation.⁸

Karl Polanyi demonstrated that this outcome is structural rather than accidental. Growth depends on the dis-embedding of land, labour, and money from the social and ecological relations that sustain them. Land is reduced to property, labour to output, money to a self-reproducing abstraction. Once stripped of relational context, extraction proceeds with diminished moral and political visibility.⁹

Herman Daly removes any remaining ambiguity. Economies are physical systems governed by the laws of thermodynamics. Every increment of growth requires energy and material throughput and produces waste. When extraction exceeds regenerative capacity, growth becomes unequivocally destructive—regardless of what aggregate indicators report.¹⁰

Arturo Escobar identifies a further mechanism sustaining the growth paradigm: epistemic exclusion. Indigenous, subsistence, and care-based economies are marginalised not because they are inefficient, but because they reveal growth to be contingent rather than inevitable. These systems are neither utopian nor conflict-free, but they demonstrate that economies need not be organised around perpetual throughput and growth.¹¹

GDP persists because it concentrates power while exporting the costs of growth—onto extraction zones, racialised labour, degraded ecosystems, and future generations absent from national accounts. Growth appears clean only because its violence is spatially, socially, and temporally displaced.

If this is what prosperity looks like, the central danger is not collapse alone.
It is the continued misrecognition of destruction as success.

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Footnotes

1. Stiglitz, J. E., Sen, A., & Fitoussi, J.-P. (2009). Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress.

2. Kuznets, S. (1934). National Income, 1929–1932. U.S. Senate Document No. 124.

3. Stone, R. (1951). The Role of Measurement in Economics. Cambridge University Press.

4. Clark, C. (1940). The Conditions of Economic Progress. Macmillan.

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