For decades, we have conflated national success with wealth, using GDP as the ultimate benchmark. But as geopolitical crises mount—from US interventions over oil to intensifying global competition for resources—this obsession with endless expansion is fuelling aggression and global instability. Ecological economist Tim Jackson argues we must abandon GDP as our primary measure of progress and redefine prosperity as health rather than wealth, building a more stable economy that actually serves society and the planet.
In the opening weeks of 2026, the relentless pursuit of economic growth reached new and ignominious heights. In doing so, it showed its true colors: an unseemly willingness to cross borders, redraw sovereignties and legitimize force in the name of prosperity.
Donald Trump’s “decapitation” of the Venezuelan government was accompanied by blunt demands for access to Venezuelan oil. Emboldened by success, the US President began to renew his territorial ambitions over Greenland—and its mineral wealth. Days later, he set up a spurious “Board of Peace” to reconstruct Gaza for the benefit of America and its allies.
All of this was presented as legitimate positioning in a new multipolar world. Eight decades of the so-called rules-based international order now counted for little. Wealth was paramount. Might was right. History would be written by the victors. This new political realism owed more to Machiavelli’s Prince than to any modern conception of global governance.
It was left to Mark Carney, Canada’s central banker turned premier, to point out (in a speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos) that this behavior is hardly unprecedented. Deceit and imperial ambition have accompanied US hegemony as reliably as its claims to defend democracy and civility. The West, Carney argued, should have cried foul decades ago.
What he did not say was that this hypocrisy rests on a deeply familiar logic. A logic that Davos itself has lionized for more than half a century. A logic whose core dynamic is endless growth in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
The mantra of growth
“Growth, growth, growth” is the most persistent political mantra of the post-war era. It is repeated so often it sometimes seems like the only fixed star in an otherwise chaotic economic firmament. The UK’s recent electoral history is a case in point. From the supply-side fantasies of Liz Truss’s short-lived reign to the demand-side prudence of the Starmer government, the call for growth at all costs has cast its spell across the entire political spectrum.
Growth in the GDP is framed as the foundation for success, the prerequisite for jobs, investment and fiscal stability. Only growth, we are told, can fix climate change, pay down public debt and secure sovereign power in an unstable world. In pursuit of growth, we’ve ditched our climate commitments, reneged on our overseas aid and handed essential services to equity financiers who suppress wages, offshore profits and erode quality.
Still the glittering prize remains elusive. Calling for growth is clearly not the same thing as delivering it. Truss’s tax giveaway crashed the markets she believed would save us. Rachel Reeves’ hike in employer national insurance undermined the livelihoods she pledged to protect. Labor productivity growth—the engine of the GDP—has hovered around zero for most of the last two decades. Fiscal headroom shrinks for each successive government, and the UK economy remains trapped somewhere between austerity and instability.
Repeating the mantra in different political accents doesn’t change the outcome. Nor does it mitigate the risks associated with growth at all costs. Benefits are privatized and costs are socialized. We rack up enormous hidden costs: to our health, to the public purse, to future generations. We end up living in a false economy—haunted by what the ecological economist Herman Daly once called “uneconomic growth.”
The long-run prognosis is bleak. When prosperity is defined as expansion, competition for resources becomes central to politics. Control becomes necessity. Conflict becomes inevitable. Political realism is dressed up as economic reasoning. But its endgame is violence and warfare. Trump’s New Year posturing was just the overture to an illegal, ill-considered and potentially catastrophic war against Iran. Yet we remain somehow obsessed with growth.
Broken promises
Part of our obsession is clearly structural. Financial institutions, legal frameworks, tax systems and accounting rules are all designed around expansion. All of these structures are, in principle, malleable. But we have engineered them into our economies. So there must be something deeper at work here: a cultural belief that growth is intrinsically good; that more is always better; that novelty is the only foundation for happiness.
It’s certainly true that novelty lies at the beating heart of capitalism. Joseph Schumpeter called this tendency creative destruction: the continual overthrow of the old in favour of the new; the relentless search for new markets and new products to fill them. Innovation as the spirit of enterprise.
But for this to work, novelty must also occupy a central place in the human heart. Fortunately for capitalism, it does. We love new stuff. We value consumer goods not only for their use value but for their symbolic power. Material objects communicate meaning, status and belonging. Novelty speaks of hope—of a brighter, shinier future for ourselves, and for our children.
At its most extravagant, consumerism promises something close to immortality: an earthly paradise of never wanting and never needing for anything. Our belief in this promise binds us into an “iron cage” of endless desire and instant gratification. Heaven on earth for those who gain access to its infinite delights.
The first crack in the shiny surface appears when we recognize that this promise is rooted in our own anxiety. Adam Smith once related consumer demand to the desire for a life without shame. In Smith’s time, the basket of necessities to avoid shame was modest. Today it expands relentlessly as expand it must. “What does your car, your home, your lifestyle say about you?” the marketers ask as they weaponize our anxiety in pursuit of profit.
But we’re being lured into a trap. To sustain growth, this anxiety must tip over into outright discontent. Consumerism will promise fulfilment. But it must systematically deliver its opposite. It must fail us, not occasionally, but consistently and by design. For if we stop craving the fruits of innovation, growth falters. Unemployment rises. Instability beckons.
Paradoxically then, the success of the growth-based economy lies not in meeting our needs, but in its continual ability to disappoint us. Economic growth depends on the broken promises of consumerism. And on our desperation to keep believing them.
Prosperity as health
Seen this way, the mantra of growth looks tragic. But its tragedy hides a vital clue about renewal. Beyond conflict and relentless dissatisfaction lies the possibility of contentment. Beyond consumerism and violence lies the society of enough.
If growth has led us into environmental breakdown, social fragmentation and geopolitical instability, the problem lies not only with our policies and our institutions, but also with our vision: our conception of prosperity. We have mistaken accumulation for wellbeing, innovation for progress and expansion for success.
Understanding this error opens the pathway to a different prosperity: one that is both older and more urgent. Prosperity is first and foremost about health: individual health; societal health; planetary health. As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, “the first wealth is health.” Without health, all other forms of prosperity are secondary.
This reframing offers a powerful insight. When wealth is our compass, the driving dynamic is one of accumulation: always more, always faster. Health works differently. Living systems survive by maintaining balance—through a process physiologists call homeostasis. Where there is deprivation, more is a legitimate remedy. But where there is excess, restraint is essential.
Perpetual growth creates two significant dangers. First, the relentless rush toward more obscures the point of enough. Second, even if we notice it, we have no means of stopping as we rush headlong by. The entire system is locked inexorably into growth.
Two profound policy implications follow from this. First, we must attend constantly to balance—to the set points of human, social and planetary health. We cannot afford to let revenue, profit, GDP, or any of the buzzwords of growth distract us from that task. Second, the economy must adopt viable control mechanisms. It must develop the capacity to slow down as well as speed up in pursuit of wellbeing. A healthy economy must reinforce, not undermine, the restorative forces that return living systems to balance.
Government’s role in this process is like the autonomic nervous system in the human body: part oversight, part allocation. It must measure what matters, curb excess and invest judiciously in the conditions of health.
In short, it must replace the mantra of growth with an ethos of care—in a very specific sense of that word. Care is not just a subsector of the economy or a claim to the moral high ground. As I argue in The Care Economy, it should be seen as a fundamental organizing principle for economic life, just as it is for organic life: a restorative force whose role is to bring us continually back into balance.
Granted, this framing of the economy as care seems a million miles from where we are today. Care resists automation and defies productivity gains. As a result, it is persistently overlooked and systematically undervalued in market capitalism. It sits uneasily within an economic system predicated on growth. And it’s about as far away from Trump’s Machiavellian reprise as it is possible to get.
But that is precisely the point. Redefining prosperity as health is not a retreat into austerity or resignation. It’s a countervailing narrative to a broken geopolitics. It opens up new possibilities for progress: stronger relationships, a deeper security, a renewed sense of meaning and purpose.
The real question is no longer whether we can afford to let go of growth. But whether we can afford not to—as its dangerous endgame plays out ever more clearly before us.
Tim Jackson
The author is a Professor Emeritus in Sociology, University of Surrey and Co-Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity, and author of The Care Economy
