· 7 min read
Degrowth is a distraction: The real battle is for a new operating system
Two economists walking in the forest. One sees a pile of excrement and, on a dare, promises the other $100 to eat it. He does. A while later, the second economist, sickened and eager to recoup his loss, spots another pile and makes the same offer. The first economist reluctantly complies.
They continue walking — $100 has changed hands — but they are both poorer for the experience.
“My God,” one says, “we both just ate shit, and we're not a cent richer.”
“Oh, but we are!” the other replies. “Don't you see? We just created $200 of GDP.”
This parable is the perfect, brutal summary of the futile economic debate we are stuck in. We have two captains on a ship, one arguing we need more of this kind of “activity,” the other insisting we need less. Both are fixated on the throttle, debating the speed of an engine measured by how much waste it can process, while ignoring the destination and the fact the vessel itself is headed for the rocks.
This is the stale debate between “growth” and “degrowth.” Degrowth is not only a strategic distraction; it is also an intellectual exercise that fails to measure up against the scale of the crises we face. The real issue isn’t the velocity of our economy; it’s the design of its operating system. And while we argue about GDP targets, a new system is already being built — with or without us.
The GDP illusion: Navigating with a broken compass
At the heart of this debate lies a metric that is worse than useless — it is actively misleading. GDP measures activity, not value, health, or resilience. A traffic accident, an oil spill, or the overconsumption of disposable goods all increase GDP. A preserved forest, a stable community, or a perfectly circular industrial system does not.
This is why “degrowth” fails as a narrative. It defines itself by the very metric it rejects. Telling a CEO or policymaker to “shrink GDP” is like using a thermometer to steer a ship — it measures the wrong thing, but we still treat it as a guide. Degrowth sounds like regression and loss. By fighting on the terrain of GDP, reformers lose the narrative before the battle begins.
Our fixation on metrics doesn’t stop there. Recently, an EU commissioner celebrated a “success”: a funding call that attracted over 1,500 applications.
Let’s pause. Imagine you lead a European startup battling global competition. Would you invest dozens of precious hours — time stolen from R&D, customers, and strategy — on a bureaucratic application where your chance of success is statistically negligible, at less than 1%? A system that interprets this mass desperation as success measures its own activity, not its output. It has inverted its purpose: bureaucracy is mistaken for strategy.
We have confused the process of motion with the creation of value.
The ever-strengthening vetocracy
Where is the leadership to cut through this noise? Our political systems are trapped — managing the decay of the old system that made them and gave them legitimacy, rather than building the new one.
We live in what Francis Fukuyama called a vetocracy: a system where every group is strong enough to veto change, but none can build consensus for transformation. The result is paralysis.
This is not abstract. Eric Li describes it as the “elect and regret” cycle — democracies churning through governments, each “just as bad or worse” than the last, unable to deliver a long-term vision. We have become masterful at blocking, incapable of building.
Politics has devolved into headline management — reactive, tactical, and short-term. Leaders are adjusting throttles on a vessel that is no longer seaworthy. The question they refuse to ask is not how fast to go, but where to go, and with what kind of ship.
The binary trap: The boring movie of our age
Our obsession with the growth–degrowth binary is part of a broader mental failure: we flatten complex realities into cartoonish good-vs-evil scripts.
Global actors — from Russia to China to emerging economies — are recast as caricatures, while “we” are always the virtuous protagonists. This is intellectually lazy and strategically disastrous.
This debilitating binary choice would make for the most boring children’s movie, and it’s an even worse framework for global strategy.
This reductionism blinds us to nuance and complexity. It also reveals something deeper: our crisis of imagination. The point is not to defend or condemn particular nations, but to recognize a pathology: we project our internal confusion outward. We invent monsters to avoid confronting our own decay. The “Russian threat,” the “China shock,” the “AI apocalypse” — these are inkblots onto which we project our fear of losing control.
Our real problem is not the monsters we describe, but our inability to imagine what comes after them.
The new operating system is already live
While we argue about GDP and morality tales, the next operating system is already being coded.
The most significant macro-shift of the past decade is China’s rise up the value chain. It no longer competes on cheapness, but on quality and technological leadership. Chinese companies now produce the best cars, not just the cheapest cars. European automakers are rebranding in China because their products are seen as inferior.
This transformation of China was not an accident. It was a strategic systemic response to the U.S. tech embargoes of 2018. China mobilized both state and private capital away from some activities and toward technological sovereignty, directing its massive STEM workforce — larger than the rest of the world combined — to close critical gaps. The result is not central planning, but what Eric Li calls a “Vision + Market” symbiosis: strategic direction combined with entrepreneurial execution.
This transformation is not isolated. It signals the rise of a wider geoeconomic realignment — a system quietly forming around complementary advantages rather than ideological blocs.
This new system is coalescing into a powerful, alternative geoeconomic bloc built around the integration of a new “cheap” triad:
• Russia: the cheapest commodities and energy
• China: the cheapest capital goods and cost of capital, combined with leading technology
• India: the cheapest labor and demographic scale
Together, they are engineering a self-reinforcing ecosystem — resource-rich, talent-dense, and strategically coordinated.
The constraint of the next era is not computing power, but reliable, affordable energy — and in that race, Europe has already fallen behind.
From bureaucracy to vision
The current leaders will not lead this transformation. They are administrators of decline, not designers of renewal. Yet renewal still requires a clear political vision.
If strategy is as much about deciding what not to do as it is about what to do, then vision must also choose what to leave behind — the institutions, activities, narratives, and empty rituals that no longer serve purpose. We must have the courage to abandon the meaningless, not just to manage it.
That vision must inspire, not just manage expectations. It must describe a future people want to build — a civilization of competence, purpose, and progress.
And here, paradoxically, we can close the loop back to the degrowth debate. Even degrowth advocates recognize that some sectors must grow to achieve ecological sustainability and improve human well-being: education, public health, ecosystem restoration, and circular industries.
Let us build around that growth — the kind that restores, repairs, and regenerates.
What we need is not a slower engine, but a new destination — a system that turns human creativity into shared flourishing rather than exhaustion.
Let us craft a vision that can once again inspire people, align effort, and tangibly improve lives.
The question was never merely how fast we are going, but what we are building — and for whom.
illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.
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