None of them actually argues growth is necessary today. They assume it. Wellbeing needs it, progress needs it, the argument barely pauses to say why. Burn-Murdoch runs a string of correlations, growth alongside falling poverty, growth alongside rising trust, and treats correlation as proof of necessity. Mokyr files degrowth under "loss-aversion-driven behaviour," next to populism and technophobia, before engaging with a single argument in favour of it.² Aghion's entire case against "negative growth" rests on equating it with the first Covid lockdown, a sudden and uncoordinated economic shock. He cites, exactly one book about degrowth, from 2009.³
The debate as staged
The theories that actually argue an economy shouldn't be organised around growth, degrowth, post-growth, wellbeing economics, propose something different from what these three are attacking. They propose shrinking fossil energy, aviation, industrial livestock, and shrinking the consumption of the top decile by wealth and income globally, while arguing for continued material growth at the bottom half of humanity.⁴ None of the three critics engaged that argument. They didn't need to. Growth's necessity was already the premise. Their refutation of degrowth is not so much a conclusion based on analysis as a declaration based on conviction.
Two separate questions are getting collapsed into one here: is growth good, and do our institutions depend on it? I want to answer both, in that order, because the second one is the argument that actually matters.
Is growth still good? Briefly, no. But it barely matters
I don't buy the growth-is-progress belief. The Enlightenment installed progress in our heads as the righteous goal three centuries ago. Somewhere along the way we made progress material, and material progress became growth. That belief has become the water we swim in, which is exactly why it rarely gets stated, let alone defended.
Both Nobel lectures share an underlying model in which individual utility is simply consumption, u(c) = c: you literally never have enough. That's a claim about the utility function, what people are assumed to want. A separate, equally load-bearing assumption sits in the production side of the same models: nothing ecological constrains what can be produced, so nothing can run out. Given those two starting definitions together, growth comes out good by construction. It isn't a conclusion. It's a precondition dressed up as one.
The practical effect is to make distribution unaskable. If more is definitionally good, you never have to ask more for whom, extracted from where, at whose expense. The richest top 1 percent of humanity owns capital responsible for 41 percent of global emissions linked to private capital ownership, nearly double the combined share of the entire bottom 90 percent. The poorest half of humanity accounts for 3 percent.⁵ The economy isn't just consumed unequally. It's owned unequally, and growth flows back disproportionately to the owners whose capital produced the emissions in the first place. GDP per capita is an average, by definition. It cannot see who is inside it, let alone who owns the machine generating the number.
But I don't need to win that argument for the rest of this piece to hold. Whether or not growth is still good, it's running into two constraints that have nothing to do with anyone's opinion on the matter.
Two pincers, closing from opposite directions
The first is ecological. Seven of nine planetary boundaries have now been breached, one more than the year before, ocean acidification being the newest addition.⁶ Some progress has been made: a growing share of the global economy has achieved absolute decoupling, growing while cutting emissions in absolute terms. But the pace falls short of what a 1.5-degree pathway requires by roughly a factor of ten in high-income countries specifically. At current rates, these countries would take over two centuries to cut emissions by 95 percent, while global emissions are still rising.⁷ The quickest way to respect planetary boundaries would be to reduce economic activity. Growth dependence makes that painful or impossible.
The second pincer is demographic, and has nothing to do with the first. Humanity is now likely below replacement-level fertility. That has never happened before, not through any war or pandemic on record.⁸ Rising education and labour-force participation among women, housing and childcare costs climbing faster than wages, a cultural shift away from large families tracked since the 1980s under the label of the second demographic transition: none of these reverse on their own.
The mechanics that follow are blunt. Aggregate GDP is, roughly, labour force times productivity. Shrink the labour force and aggregate growth falls. A country can keep raising GDP per capita even as its total labour force shrinks, if productivity rises fast enough. But a welfare state doesn't run on GDP per capita. It runs on the aggregate tax base, aggregate pension contributions, aggregate output available to service aggregate public debt. Some demand categories, like education, do shrink with a smaller population; pensions and elder care rise as it ages. On net, the aggregate burden grows, not shrinks.
Japan's growth rate since 1991, adjusted for its shrinking working-age population, isn't far behind that of the United States, a preview of where several advanced and increasingly middle-income economies are heading.⁹ No market mechanism pulls fertility back up. Policy, selection effects, shifting relative prices are the only forces that do any pulling at all, and none of them are likely to move fast enough to break the trend.
Two pincers, unrelated causes, same conclusion. Growth is a bet we can no longer safely make.
Growth dependence, defined
Which is why the question that actually decides anything isn't whether growth is good. It's whether our institutions require it to keep functioning. Even if you believe growth is progress, why would you want to build your pension system, your welfare state, your entire fiscal architecture on the assumption it continues forever?
A recent review calls this second thing welfare state growth dependence: the condition in which sustained GDP growth is required to avoid welfare state dysfunction.¹⁰ It's concrete. Employment is tied to welfare funding, so a stalling economy means stalling revenue. Debt-financed spending needs nominal growth to stay serviceable. Beyond those two, the same review flags rent extraction and financialisation creeping into care sectors, and population ageing raising demand for exactly the transfers that funding depends on growth to sustain.
Capitalism itself doesn't require growth dependence. Dependence tracks specific configurations of accumulation and power. Where profit gets redistributed rather than accumulated, the growth imperative weakens. It's a property of design, and policy can lower it: working-time reduction, so fewer hours worked doesn't mean fewer people employed; wealth and environmental taxes, revenue that doesn't need aggregate expansion to hold up; restrictions on rent-seeking and financialisation within care provision, so costs don't inflate faster than the services they buy; predistribution, raising revenue before the growth question even comes up; and shifting tax bases from what needs to grow, income, profit, toward what is either detrimental, like carbon and waste, or simply unnecessary, like extreme wealth.
Sufficiency, on its own merits
If growth can't be assumed, something has to replace it as an organising principle.
Harry Frankfurt supplied half of it in 1987. What matters morally isn't sameness. It's whether everyone has enough. A floor, distinct from an equal share. He stopped there, and explicitly rejected the idea that anyone having more than enough is a problem by itself, so long as others also have enough.¹¹ Ingrid Robeyns supplies the other half. Extreme wealth doesn't sit quietly beside poverty. It captures political influence, inflates asset prices, eats a disproportionate share of a finite ecological budget. A ceiling, held alongside the floor.¹²
Pair a floor with a ceiling and it gives the policy menu above its shape: predistribution and wealth taxation hold the ceiling down; needs-based, decommodified provisioning of health, care and housing hold the floor up. And if we accept that we have a problem with institutional growth dependence that is eating up our planet and can't be sustained given demographics, pursuing that pair is simply the sensible thing to do.
Institutions that chose differently
brings it back to the start, and the assumption nobody in that debate stated out loud. Three economists defended whether growth is good. None of them asked whether we've built institutions that require it to keep working. Those are different questions, and answering the first one, however you answer it, doesn't get you out of answering the second. We do not need growth in any biophysical sense. Our institutions need growth because we assumed there always would be more of it. It's time to accept that we won't have that, and reorganise accordingly.
Financial institutions can actually make that decision. Triodos Bank made that decision already, in 2024, the first bank to do so publicly.¹³ Not a position paper sitting apart from the balance sheet, but two structural facts. First, the sectors that need to shrink or disappear, fossil fuels, mining, cement, fast fashion, livestock farming, are the sectors Triodos doesn't finance. That's not a stance adopted on top of the loan book. It is the loan book. Second, the floor side of Frankfurt's sufficiency isn't just argued for. It's funded. Elderly care, education, renewable energy, circular manufacturing: these need to grow, sometimes massively, precisely because they raise wellbeing without driving ecological overshoot. That's the floor showing up on the asset side of the balance sheet, not as a caveat, as the actual financing strategy.
Growth dependence was assumed by three Nobel-adjacent voices this summer, without ever being named as an assumption. One institution decided, two years earlier, not to make it. That's the whole argument, really. A design choice. Some have already chosen differently.
End notes
- Burn-Murdoch, J. (2026, June 26). The shrinking arguments for degrowth. Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/5bc6b000-83c5-462b-a368-093f23759043
- Mokyr (2026), section 4, "Threats to Future Progress."
- Aghion (2026), discussion of negative growth, citing Latouche, S. (2009). Farewell to growth. Polity Press.
- Kallis G, Hickel J, O’Neill D et al. (2025). Post-growth: the science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries. The Lancet Planetary Health, 9, e62-e78.
- Chancel, L., Gómez-Carrera, R., Moshrif, R., & Piketty, T. (Eds.). (2026). World Inequality Report 2026. World Inequality Lab. Chapter 6, "Climate Inequality."
- Sakschewski, B., Rockström, J., et al. (2025). Planetary Health Check 2025: A Scientific Assessment of the State of the Planet. Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). https://doi.org/10.48485/pik.2025.017
- Vogel, J., & Hickel, J. (2023). Is green growth happening? An empirical analysis of achieved versus Paris-compliant CO₂–GDP decoupling in high-income countries. Lancet Planetary Health.
- Fernández-Villaverde, J., & Norrick, P. (2026). Terra incognita: The economics of a shrinking world. Annual Review of Economics, forthcoming.
- Fernández-Villaverde & Norrick (2026), Table 1 and Section 6.2.
- Büchs, M., Hirvilammi, T., Webb, T., & Leoni, D. (2026). Growth dependence of welfare states: a semi-systematic review of drivers and policy responses. Lancet Planetary Health. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lanplh.2026.101491
- Frankfurt, H. (1987). Equality as a moral ideal. Ethics, 98(1), 21–43. https://doi.org/10.1086/292913
- Robeyns, I. (2024). Limitarianism: The case against extreme wealth. Astra House.
- Triodos Bank (2024, July 2). Triodos Bank on post-growth. Position paper. https://www.triodos.com/en/articles/2024/triodos-bank-is-the-first-bank-to-publicly-support-the-call-for-a-post-growth-transition