From Growth to Freedom: Ecological Ordoliberalism and the Renewal of the Social Market Economy

tl;dr: To survive in the twenty-first century, the Social Market Economy must move beyond growth as its organising principle. Its future lies not in abandoning markets, but in reordering them around freedom, social reproduction, and ecological limits.

The Social Market Economy remains one of the few political-economic ideas in Germany and, more broadly, in Europe that still carries real normative weight. It evokes a promise that many other formulas no longer can: economic freedom without social cruelty, markets without social disintegration, prosperity without authoritarianism.… Read more

Notes from AOM 2025

tl;dr: AOM 2025 brought planetary boundaries, postgrowth, and critique closer to the centre — but the structural tensions remain. Hopeful shifts, unfinished conversations.

2025 in Copenhagen marked my first in-person AOM since 2019 in Boston. I had joined the virtual meetings in 2020 and 2021, but skipped 2022 and 2023. Returning felt both familiar and strange — especially since this was the first AOM Annual Meeting ever held outside of North America. With around 13,000 participants, it was also the largest in the Academy’s history.… Read more

Rethinking Sustainability: A Post-Growth Perspective on the UN-SDGs

tl;dr: The UN SDGs aim to foster global sustainability by 2030, yet their reliance on economic growth (Goal 8) creates contradictions with ecological objectives. We need a post-growth critique to reform the SDGs beyond 2030, emphasizing sufficiency and planetary boundaries.

The UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, an ambitious framework for global action, has been heralded as a roadmap for tackling poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation. However, as I argue in my recent chapter on the Post-(Growth)-2030 Agenda, these lofty ambitions are undermined by a fundamental contradiction: the persistent reliance on economic growth as the engine for achieving sustainable development.… Read more

Sustainability & Capitalism

Game Over. Capitalism is over if you want it.

tl,dr: Sustainability and capitalism have complex interactions. While capitalism emphasizes accumulation and expansion, sustainability requires long-term dynamic balance for all life.

Can sustainability can be reconciled with the logic of capitalism? I’ll try to sort both terms and will also talk about post-growth and degrowth. And if we’re at it, we just might want to also talk about post-capitalism and if such a thing exists.

Sustainability. A huge word, a non-word, both under- and over-complex.… Read more

Hacking growth!

Photo by Elizabeth Gottwald on Unsplash

tl;dr Recapture the concept of growth by reformulating it as ecological growth, containing expansion and contraction, and a clear focus on ecosystem regeneration

A very long time ago, in the autumn of 2022, Liz Truss was briefly Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. One of her big policy announcements was her desire to ignite the forces of growth – by means of government debt and tax cuts, for example in the form of tax-free banker bonuses.… Read more