We’ve reached the end of our economic model.
We just don’t realise it yet.
On paper it still looks like growth - 0.2% this year, 3% in some countries.
But our population is shrinking.
Those are two ends of the same candle: an economy can’t honestly call itself growing while there are fewer people every year to grow for.
Here’s the part the GDP figure misses.
Each year a greater share of that “growth” is just the same life getting more expensive - energy and housing eating a larger slice, not because we’re getting more, but because the basics cost more to stand still.
That’s dead money.
If a pound isn’t creating something new, then growth is just measuring the rising cost of what we already had.
And a lot of what we count as new activity is old activity finally getting a price tag.
Dating apps charge for what courtship did for free.
Single-earner households become dual-earner households that hire a nanny to cover the gap. The work was always happening- now it runs through the market, so now it counts.
That’s the economy doing exactly what it’s designed to do: turn every possible exchange into something monetisable, measurable, taxable, investible.
It looks like growth.
But are we actually any better off?
That’s the flaw in the model. It measures transactions, not future growth - and the two have quietly stopped moving together.
But it was never meant to.
What comes next
Systems overcorrect.
They zig too far one way, then zag too far back.
It’s a global competition, and whoever optimises hardest for the wrong thing eventually gets beaten by whoever didn’t.
That’s part of why the global south is catching up.
Optimise purely for economic output and your population shrinks; the country that kept some slack gains ground.
Everything reverts to the mean in the end.
So this probably resolves itself - competition and evolution will force the correction whether we plan it or not.
The shame is the wasted time.
We could start now: better metrics that count wellbeing and not just throughput, more digital governance, and an all-out push for abundant housing and energy so the basics stop swallowing our growth.
Fix the basics, and growth can go back to meaning what we thought it meant.