Growth
No One Is Anti-Growth : What a Ten-Year-Old’s Question Revealed About the Economy
A boy asked his mother why the economy always has to grow. Couldn’t it just… stay good? She gave him the answer adults give when they don’t have one. I think he deserves a better one.
A mother was in the chair on Tuesday, telling me about her ten-year-old’s homework — something about reading the news for a school project. Apparently he had looked up from the laptop with the particular frown children reserve for questions adults have quietly stopped asking themselves.
“Mom,” he said, “why does it always say the economy needs to grow? Can’t it just… stay good? Like, if it’s already fine, why does it have to keep getting bigger?”
She told him something along the lines of “that’s just how it works,” which is the answer adults give when they don’t have one and are hoping the conversation will end before anyone notices.
“He’s not wrong, though,” I said.
She looked at me in the mirror the way people look at you when they suspect the haircut is about to take longer than the appointment allows.
“Go on,” she said. So I did.
[Switches to serious face.] No one is anti growth. Let’s be clear about that from the start, because the conversation tends to go sideways the moment someone suspects otherwise. Growth is good. Babies should grow. Crops should grow. Muscles should grow. Even savings accounts deserve a little ambition.
The problem starts when growth stops being a healthy process and becomes the supreme deity of economic life.
7 of 9 planetary boundaries now breached (Stockholm Resilience Centre)
1.5°C global warming threshold already crossed
6 of 9 boundaries breached at the previous assessment — the “growth” in question
1 planet currently available for this experiment
Convenient Theology
Our system treats growth as the answer to everything. Growth will create jobs. Growth will reduce poverty. Growth will fund innovation. Growth will save us from the problems caused by… previous growth.
Convenient theology.
The awkward question nobody likes to ask is a simple one: how exactly do you pursue infinite growth on a finite planet without eventually looking ridiculous?
The standard reply arrives right on cue. Technology will save us.
Of course it will.
The Balloon Problem
Yes, technology matters. But technology is not sorcery.
Every innovation requires energy, materials, labour, land, and extraction. You solve one constraint and often create another. Build more batteries, mine more lithium. Produce more solar panels, extract more rare earths. Increase efficiency, and consumption frequently rises elsewhere to absorb the savings — a pattern economists have observed for so long it has its own name, the Jevons paradox, first noted in the context of coal in the nineteenth century and rediscovered, with some surprise, in roughly every decade since.
Progress often behaves like squeezing a balloon. Pressure disappears in one spot and pops up somewhere else.
This was the warning from systems thinkers decades ago. In a closed system — and Earth is annoyingly closed — resources may feel abundant but remain finite. Every attempt to escape a limit consumes resources and generates new pressures of its own. The 1972 report The Limits to Growth, commissioned by the Club of Rome, modelled exactly this dynamic using the computing power of the era and was widely mocked for decades afterward for being too pessimistic. The uncomfortable detail, revisited by several research teams since, is that its central trajectories have tracked reality more closely than almost anyone wanted to admit.
“Progress often behaves like squeezing a balloon. Pressure disappears in one spot and pops up somewhere else.” — The sentence that ended the “technology will save us” portion of the conversation.
When Disasters Hold Hands
And the cruel part: constraints do not arrive one by one like polite guests. They arrive faster over time, and each one costs more to manage than the last.
At some point, the problem is no longer running out of water, clean air, fertile soil, or stable climate. The real problem is running out of our ability to cope.
That is what “polycrisis” means. Not one disaster. Several disasters holding hands.
Each crisis amplifies the others until society spends all its energy firefighting and none preventing the next fire.
Apocalypse, in reality, may be disappointingly boring. No asteroid. No zombies. No dramatic soundtrack. Just spreadsheets, heatwaves, insurance collapse, supply chain failures, political dysfunction, and everyone insisting the market will self-correct.
A system built on endless growth cannot continue forever. Physics does not negotiate, and unlike economists, it does not revise assumptions after quarterly earnings.
The framework comes from researchers at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, who identified nine processes that regulate the stability of the entire planet — climate change, biodiversity loss, freshwater use, land system change, and others most people have never been taught to name, despite living entirely within their limits. The framework is not activism. It is closer to an instruction manual that arrived after the warranty had already been quietly voided.
Photos: Unsplash
Can We Live Well Within the Lines ?
Can humanity live well within planetary boundaries? Yes.
Can we do it while preserving a system in which a tiny group accumulates extraordinary wealth through endless extraction? That is harder to defend.
And yes — I say giving back. Because much of extreme wealth came from the commons.
From natural resources no billionaire created.
From public infrastructure they did not personally build.
From collective knowledge developed across generations.
From the data all of us generate daily, which gets harvested, packaged, and sold back to us with subscription pricing. Remarkable business model, really.
The Invoice
First, privatise the commons.
Then monetise it.
Then call yourself self-made.
Somewhere along the way, society started applauding this.
That wealth came from all of us. The commons built it. A handful simply got very good at sending the invoice. According to Oxfam’s wealth research, the share of global wealth held by the richest fraction of the population has continued climbing even through years when ordinary incomes stagnated or fell — a pattern that is difficult to explain through talent or effort alone, and considerably easier to explain through ownership of things that were, not so long ago, simply held in common.
Back to the Chair
By the time I had finished, the mother was holding her phone with the screen dark, which is usually a good sign. “So what do I tell him?” she asked. “He’s ten. I can’t exactly explain the Jevons paradox over breakfast.”
“Tell him his question was the right one,” I said. “That’s usually rarer than the answer.”
I touched a related thread in our piece on how Norway chose to manage a resource it could have simply sold — the same underlying question, really, just answered the other way around. Norway looked at a windfall and asked who it actually belonged to. The answer, eventually, was: people who hadn’t been born yet. That is not a complicated idea. It is just an unfashionable one, in a system built to treat tomorrow as a competitor to today rather than a stakeholder in it.
I come from a place where the relationship between a small number of people and a great deal of extracted wealth was not subtle, not disguised, and not generally described using the word “growth.” Which may be why, from here, the modern version — with its quarterly reports and its self-made men and its planetary boundaries quietly ticking past seven of nine — looks less like a new story than an old one wearing a nicer suit.
The boy’s question is still sitting there, unanswered in any way a ten-year-old would find satisfying. Can’t it just stay good?
It can. That would just require treating “good” as the destination, rather than the thing you pass on the way to more.
The Salon California Journal is a space for ideas, culture, and conversation from my chair in Brasschaat, Belgium. I write about beauty, technology, society, and the intersections between them.
