Thinking a lot about nature preservation, I often get confronted with the problems that the growth of humankind causes to our planet. I
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In a society with zero economic growth, the game changes. When the pie stops growing, everyone starts fighting to keep their slice—or better yet, protect it from being taken. Innovation stalls, upward mobility shrinks, and opportunities to build wealth from scratch dry up. In that vacuum, power calcifies.
We end up with a kind of modern feudalism: a small class that owns and controls most valuable assets—land, housing, platforms, IP—and a much larger class that must pay to access them. Without growth, there's little incentive for those at the top to take risks or share. Instead, their primary goal becomes defending what they already have—through legal systems, regulations, and gatekeeping.
Meanwhile, those without assets can't build new wealth, only serve the existing order. Rent-seeking becomes the norm, and institutions slowly turn from engines of progress into fortresses of preservation. The more the economy stagnates, the more effort goes into locking the doors rather than opening them.
In a growing economy, you can climb. In a zero-growth economy, you either cling to what you’ve got or get shut out entirely. That’s the road to feudalism—not by force, but by a slow, systemic freezing of mobility.