history – Stephen Hinton Consulting

Beyond Growth and Degrowth: The Compelling Vision of Capital Maturity

For decades, our economic discourse has been trapped in a false choice between two unsatisfying futures. On one side stands the familiar model of endless economic growth. This path that relentlessly consumes natural resources and risks environmental devastation. On the other is the alternative of degrowth, a concept often perceived as a narrative of reduction, scarcity, and diminished quality of life. This document introduces a third, more inspiring path forward: the pursuit of Real Capital Maturity. This vision reframes our ultimate economic goal not as perpetual expansion, but as the achievement of a stable, high-quality, and regenerative state where the fundamental needs of everyone are met with sufficiency and efficiency.

The Challenge

This is a letting my heart out moment and I can’t promise it is going to be coherent. But I see some very important things that have happened recently as stakes in the new ground of economic thinking and in politics. There is a challenge laid down to find something new, built out of the old

Economists see humans as homo economicus? Still?

I really recommend listening to this Youtube with Richard Murphy, Emeritus Professor of Accounting Practice and John Christensen, co-founder of the Tax Justice Network.

The subject was the idea of homo economicus – the supposed rational economic actor at the heart of mainstream economics – and its critics.

John traces the origins of the concept back to the late nineteenth century, when economics shifted from being a branch of moral philosophy into the mathematically-driven neoclassical framework most of us were taught at university.

One of the key figures was Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, a mathematician and economist at Oxford. Edgeworth drew on Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian philosophy – the idea that human beings are rational calculators of pleasure and pain – Edgeworth sought to create a perfectly tidy model of human behaviour. We were, he argued, calculating machines engaged in constant cost-benefit analysis, each of us pursuing our own utility.

Modern models of the economy, like – the DSGE models used by the Bank of England and the UK Office for Budget Responsibility – still rest on the fiction of a single rational agent – or homo economicus – who knows everything and always restores balance.

And these models continue to shape policy. They produce neat forecasts that always return to equilibrium, because the assumptions guarantee that outcome. They are sadly blind to the lived reality of power, inequality, exploitation and environmental breakdown.

Investors in peace, one of my projects, something else. We don’t see homo economicus, we see homo pax. Our true nature is peace and as long as we don’t realise and get to enjoy and appreciate that, we will continue to be homo errorum leading to homo insatisfactus (man of error, unsatisfied man).

This is where Investing in peace and political economy overlap: as long as economics and business continue to model their art on misguided views of what it is to be human, they will continue to guide policy in the wrong direction.

If you are working with economic policy we urge you to look closer at yourself: what is it you really want, what is driving you? Can it be that is something you share with the rest of the people on the planet?

Should we tax the rich more?

Much ado is being made (rightfully) on Gary Stephenson’s exhortations to tax the rich – all over the internet and BBC, getting people of all ilks to wade into the debate.