I like these two recently-published articles on growth dependence complementary. I think they’re complementary.
- Keyßer et al. (2025) “Economic growth dependencies and imperatives: A review of key theories and their conflicts”
- Vuorinen (2026) “Structural liquidity shortfalls, competition and macroeconomic stability – Conceptual synthesis of economic growth dependencies”
Both articles are high-quality and contain several interesting points, but they takeaways I want to highlight are the following.
Keyßer et al. do valuable work in tacking stock of the enormous variety of growth dependence and imperative (GDI) claims in the literature. They find that as many as 112 distinct GDI mechanisms have been articulated. The article furthermore groups these mechanisms, discusses their connectivities, and discusses reasons for divergent opinions on key GDIs. The huge number of mechanisms and connectivities of GDIs paint a very complex picture. This variety can then be simplified e.g. by focusing on key themes or the dynamics of capitalism’s core institutions.
Vuorinen points out that several key (proposed) GDIs have something in common, which is structural liquidity shortfalls. My colloquial understanding of structural liquidity shortfall is that some group in society is persistently receiving too little money to function (too little to stay in business, to earn a sufficient wage, to pay rents or debts, etc.). One way out of a structural liquidity shortfall is redistribution, and when that’s not (politically) possible, the only other way is economic growth.
I like these two papers together, because it looks like one is saying that there are an unmanageable number of growth dependencies and the other is saying that there’s really just one 🙂
The paper’s aren’t contradictory. For one, Keyßer et al. (2025) is a review of claims, whereas Vuorinen (2026) focuses on articulating an original claim or summary. Furthermore, I think the difference in perspectives simply illustrates that many perspectives can be taken on growth dependence. Differences can stem from different substance foci or theory preferences (as in the list of 112) or simply from the level of generality used in a growth dependence claim (unemployment and bankruptcy can be two different growth dependencies or they can both be structural liquidity shortfall). For what it’s worth, I buy the structural liquidity shortfall argument / summary; and I also find the list of 112 mechanisms to contain many realistic phenomena.
My methodological background is simulation modelling, which makes me think that everything (including, or especially theory) is “just a model”, that all models have a perspective, that all models make more or less arbitrary conceptual choices, and that “all models are wrong but some are useful”. As such, I’m not usually very concerned about finding “true” or “fundamental” growth dependencies. Instead, I think growth dependence is a useful concept; that it is motivated more by a social need to maintain a stable economy than any fundamental law about the economy or capitalism; that it can be operationalized, articulated, and explained in different ways; and that it can be identified in many phenomena.
Much depends on what you want to do with growth dependence knowledge once you have it. If you want to theorize a long-term sustainable non-growing economy, then you probably have to analyze political-economic vested interests and power that relate to e.g. the labour-capital distinction (my reading of e.g. Driouich and Kallis 2026 is roughly this). If instead you want to inform policymakers about how consumption/production reduction can be socially acceptable in the next say 5-15 years, you could possibly “get away” with proposing fairly traditional economic and social policies that promote employment during low demand or asset crashes (this is roughly the spirit in which I’ve written my pension and welfare state papers, which don’t really aim to analyse capitalism and its basic institutions at all).
The fact that you can understand growth dependence as a list of 112 mechanisms or one type of economic outcome simply illustrates that claims about society can be “packaged in different ways”. Before even analysing whether some claims are true or false, the different claims likely stem at least in part from different aims of knowledge.
I’m glad there have been recent articles that scrutinize the colloquial notion of growth dependence (Janischewski et al. 2026 is ofc another good one; and in Wiman 2024 I argue that growth dependence should be a projected or realized negative outcome of low growth rather than just bad vibes from a system’s assumed vulnerability). I don’t think we all need to conceptualise and identify growth dependencies the same way. But I do think these perspectives need to be explicated when they are made so that we can understand each other and produce useful knowledge about a complex topic. I’m glad that’s becoming more common.
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