The paradox has become almost obscene. Stock markets break records while the living world deteriorates. Financial indices rise while soils are exhausted, oceans acidify, forests burn, glaciers melt and species disappear. The economy appears to “work” precisely when the conditions of life are being destroyed.
This contradiction is not a misunderstanding. It is the central symptom of our time. We have built an economic system capable of transforming ecological degradation into accounting performance. As long as a forest is standing, it barely counts. Once cut, transported, processed and sold, it becomes GDP. As long as a community preserves its autonomy, it is invisible to markets. Once it is made dependent on paid services, it becomes economic activity.
The problem is therefore not that the economy fails according to its own indicators. The problem is that its indicators can improve while the world becomes less habitable.
The illusion of a functioning economy
When the stock market rises, commentators speak of confidence, recovery, dynamism and wealth creation. But what exactly is being measured? Not the health of ecosystems. Not the quality of social bonds. Not the robustness of infrastructures. Not the capacity of societies to live within planetary limits.
Financial markets measure discounted expectations of profits. If a company can generate future cash flows by extracting more, selling more, automating more, capturing more attention, producing more waste or shifting costs onto society and nature, markets can reward it.
This is why an economy can be financially successful and biophysically suicidal. The logic of the balance sheet and the logic of the biosphere are not aligned.
GDP: the great confusion
The same problem appears with GDP. GDP measures monetary flows, not human flourishing. It counts repairs after disasters, medical costs generated by pollution, reconstruction after floods and the sale of useless goods as positive contributions to economic activity.
It does not subtract the destruction of natural capital. It does not measure exhaustion, stress, loneliness, democratic fatigue or ecological debt. It does not distinguish between a euro spent to regenerate a wetland and a euro spent to destroy it.
GDP is therefore not a measure of wealth in any deep sense. It is a measure of monetized activity. And in a world where destruction often generates activity, GDP can grow because the world is becoming more damaged.
The impossible decoupling
The dominant answer to this contradiction is “decoupling”. We are told that technology will allow economic growth to continue while resource consumption and emissions fall in absolute terms. This promise is reassuring because it avoids the hardest question: what if the growth imperative itself is incompatible with ecological limits?
Relative decoupling exists in some sectors. We can produce certain goods with less energy or fewer materials per unit. But relative efficiency is not enough. What matters is absolute reduction at the global scale, at the speed required by climate and biodiversity thresholds.
The evidence is brutal: global material extraction keeps rising; energy demand remains immense; emissions reductions are far too slow; and many gains in efficiency are cancelled by rebound effects. When production becomes more efficient, it often becomes cheaper, and therefore more widely consumed.
The economy becomes less intensive per unit, but more extensive in total volume.
The monetary root of acceleration
The growth imperative is not merely cultural. It is monetary. In our current system, money is largely created through debt. Debt requires repayment with interest. Repayment requires future income. Future income requires enough economic expansion to keep the system solvent.
This creates a structural pressure toward growth. Firms must grow to survive competition and repay loans. States must maintain tax bases to service public debt. Households must earn enough to pay mortgages and consumer credit. Banks must create profitable credit. Investors demand returns.
In such a system, degrowth is not only politically difficult. It is monetarily destabilizing. If flows slow down without a redesigned monetary architecture, defaults rise, unemployment increases, public finances deteriorate and social conflict intensifies.
This is why moral appeals to consume less collide with the plumbing of the system. Individuals may want sobriety, but the financial architecture demands acceleration.
The economy that “works” for capital
The apparent success of the economy must therefore be interpreted carefully. It works for whom? It works for financial portfolios, for asset owners, for sectors capable of externalizing costs, for institutions that measure performance through monetary returns.
But it does not work for rivers, soils, insects, forests or future generations. It does not work for workers exhausted by precarious productivity demands. It does not work for territories sacrificed to logistics, tourism, mining or industrial agriculture.
An economy can function from the point of view of capital while failing from the point of view of life.
False solutions: green growth and ESG theatre
Green finance claims to solve the contradiction by redirecting capital toward sustainable activities. But the underlying logic often remains unchanged. Assets are relabelled, portfolios are rebalanced, indicators are polished, and the machinery of accumulation continues.
A wind farm built to power endless growth does not automatically create a viable civilization. An electric SUV is still a heavy object requiring minerals, roads, batteries and energy. A “sustainable” fund can still include companies whose business models depend on extraction, global logistics or artificial demand.
Green growth promises to make the existing machine cleaner. But if the machine’s purpose remains expansion, the result is not transformation. It is cosmetic adaptation.
What would it mean for an economy to work?
An economy should be judged by its capacity to preserve the conditions of life. Does it reduce material throughput? Does it protect ecosystems? Does it strengthen social bonds? Does it secure essential needs with less pressure on the biosphere? Does it reduce dependency on destructive flows?
By these criteria, many of today’s “successful” economies are failing. They produce abundance for some, insecurity for many and ecological overshoot for all.
The task is not to make financial indicators greener. It is to redefine success.
Toward a monetary architecture of robustness
This is where NEMO IMS enters the debate. If the current monetary system rewards flows regardless of their ecological consequences, then the monetary system itself must be redesigned. Money creation should not be tied primarily to debt and growth. It should finance what makes societies robust: public health, education, care, ecological restoration, low-impact infrastructures and protection of the commons.
Likewise, destructive transactions should no longer be treated as neutral. A system of transaction-based monetary demurrage can make degenerative activities more costly and low-impact activities less penalized. The point is to make monetary circulation recognize what prices currently hide.
Conclusion: the real crash has already begun
The financial crash is not the only crash that matters. The deeper crash is ecological: the collapse of living systems that make economic activity possible. The tragedy is that markets can rise during this crash, because markets are not designed to measure it.
The economy that “works” according to financial indicators is killing us because it has never been asked to account for life. It has been asked to account for value in monetary terms, and it has done so by ignoring the destruction that made those values possible.
The task ahead is not to restore confidence in the old economy. It is to build a monetary and economic architecture in which confidence can no longer be separated from the robustness of the living world.