Laura Wiman (aka. Laua) is a researcher and PhD candidate focusing on post-growth economics and systems simulation. She is particularly interested in (the mitigation of) financial, fiscal, and welfare state crises in the context of macroeconomic stagnation and contraction. The title of Laura’s PhD thesis is Enodgenous System Perspectives: Economic Growth Dependence and Sustainable Change. Outside of research Laura is a club event producer and DJ, a hobbyist seamstress, and a French learner. Laura lives in Helsinki, Finland.

This blog is for ideating the institutional and narrative preconditions of a “post-growth economy” – an economy that does not tend toward recessions and other crises without growth. While the research literature keeps growing, the topic benefits also from an informal, quick-to-publish, medium-length blog format. My aim with this blog is not to declare “solutions”, but to help develop a coherent and convincing alternative to those societal visions that cannot help but demand ever-more consumption, production, work, flexibility, and cuts.

Post-growth perspectives are justified on ecological and climate justice grounds, but they are sometimes a poor fit with existing institutions. Individual post-growth policy proposals can also be in tension with traditional growth-based thought on economy and politics that has had time to refine itself since the 1940s. Nonetheless, I consider the aims of post-growth economics to be largely mainstream: sufficient employment and incomes, acceptable levels of inequality, climate change mitigation, and so on. Growth-constrained scenarios are likewise not radical at all. Slow growth has already been reality across wealthy economies since 2008, despite the pro-growth intentions of policymakers. Mainstream projections of future economic growth are often pessimistic, and the feasibility of old-school growth rates is routinely questioned in much of policy analysis. Many young people are disillusioned by growth visions in a society that already overproduces/overconsumes and where many technical innovations come at immense social costs and questionable benefits. Post-growth theory is not a panacea, and no “solution” is perfect, but the problems of growth-based thought are too large to ignore.

CV

PhD candidate, defence 2026, University of Helsinki
MSc Ecological Economics, 2018, University of Leeds

Senior Scientist at Technical Reserach Centre of Finland (VTT), 2025 – ongoing
Research Scientist at Technical Research Centre of Finland (VTT), 2019 – 2025

Finnish, English, German, and French (in that order).

Publications (on post-growth stuff)