For most of modern history, we have treated economic growth as both means and end: the thing that keeps politicians in office, CEOs in their jobs, and news anchors reassuring us on Friday evenings that all is well because GDP is up, not down. Our latest Moral Revolution conversation with Matt Orsagh of the Arketa Institute and Degrowth is the Answer starts from a simple but unsettling claim: on a finite planet whose life‑support systems are already in overshoot, this story about growth can no longer be true.
Matt comes to this as a long‑time insider in finance, not as an academic economist -someone formed both by the discipline of reading balance sheets and by a storyteller’s instinct to ask what is missing from the dominant plot. What is missing from the neat circular diagram of firms and households trading labor and goods, as he notes, is everything that actually makes that circle possible: the flows of energy and materials that enter it, and the wastes it expels into land, water, and air. Ecological economics, drawing on figures like Herman Daly and frameworks like planetary boundaries, begins by insisting that the economy is not a self‑contained machine but a subsystem of the Earth, now “full” rather than “empty.”
This shift has profoundly moral implications. If seven of nine planetary boundaries are already breached, then continued growth in material throughput is not a sign of prudence or ingenuity, but of a failure of stewardship toward future generations as well as all non‑human life. Here the conversation touches Catholic social teaching and Laudato Si’, which warn against a technocratic paradigm that treats nature as raw material for manipulation rather than a common home we are called to care for as stewards, not dominators. Prosperity, on this view, cannot simply mean “more stuff”; it has to be re‑anchored in ideas of human flourishing that go back to Aristotle: lives of virtue, meaning, and relationship lived within the ecological conditions that make any life possible.
Yet finance today is structured around the opposite assumption. Instead of channeling savings into real, shared goods like homes, hospitals, renewable energy, resilient local infrastructure, it has become a vast machine for trading and gambling, often indifferent to social cost so long as short‑term returns are maximized. The infamous Abacus deal, in which a deliberately toxic security was constructed and sold on to unsuspecting buyers while being shorted for profit, is not a bug in this system but a vivid expression of its underlying ethic. Matt’s image of financiers as dragons sitting on piles of gold, oblivious to the burning landscape outside the cave, captures how far the sector has drifted from any notion of serving the real economy, let alone serving a just and livable planet.
The episode does not pretend that shifting from this growth‑at‑all‑costs model to a post‑growth, wellbeing‑oriented economy will be easy or politically tidy. Degrowth, as a word, triggers understandable fears of permanent austerity and zero‑sum conflict, and it raises hard questions about justice between the “overgrown” Global North and countries in the South that still need to grow to secure basic capabilities. Matt’s answer is twofold: first, that degrowth is best understood as a family of policy ideas aimed at bringing the overconsuming minority back within planetary boundaries, not as a blanket commandment for the world’s poor to stay poor; and second, that people are far more open to the concrete policies such as shorter work weeks, universal basic services, investment in care and low‑carbon infrastructure than to the provocative label itself.
If there is a through‑line connecting ecological economics, Catholic social teaching, and your own “moral revolution” project, it is the insistence that the economy should be ordered to human and more‑than‑human flourishing, not the other way around. That implies re‑politicizing questions of purpose: what is finance for, who does it serve, what do we as societies count as “enough”? It also means re‑localizing power through practices of subsidiarity, solidarity, and bioregional care for the specific lands and waters that sustain us. The choice, as Arketa’s first paper
puts it, is whether we allow these changes to arrive by disaster or by design; the work of a post‑growth finance is to make design thinkable again.
