As a prolific contributor to ecological economic debate over the past decade, Giorgos Kallis has established himself as a leading proponent of degrowth. In a brief book reflecting on what Thomas Robert Malthus in 1798 really said about scarcity and growth, he distinguishes between what is frequently attributed to environmentalists as “Malthusianism,” on the one hand, and Kallis’s own views on self-limitation (a concept derived from Cornelius Castoriadis) as a source of freedom from unlimited wants, on the other. While Malthusianism usually refers to external, physical limits to growth, Kallis’s main point is to present personal moderation and voluntary restraint as a wise outlook on life with deep roots in Romanticism and ancient Greek philosophy. He advocates internally limiting our wants, not primarily to avoid having our consumption bump into external constraints, but to liberate ourselves from the mainstream economic assumption of scarcity, and the concomitant obsession with growth. He assures us that this does not mean denying the reality of external limits, only displacing them as the main environmentalist argument against limitless growth.Footnote ¹ The mainstream obsession with growth can clearly be criticized from two different directions, either for jeopardizing planetary boundaries or undermining existential meaning, yet the two objections need not be opposed. They obviously converge in the movement for degrowth.

Kallis begins by showing that Malthus’s ideas were far from the so-called Malthusianism with which his name is generally associated: he was a prophet not of limits, but of growth. His 1798 “Essay on the Principle of Population,” Kallis suggests, can be read as an early endorsement of free market economics and a rejection of redistributive policies such as welfare. Indeed, he observes, Malthus was the first professional economist. The new discipline of economics paradoxically evoked scarcity to champion the limitless expansion made possible by fossil fuels and colonialism. For both Malthus and modern neoclassical economists, says Kallis, “the world is limited because our wants are unlimited” [35]. Malthus’s ideas are not only a “cornerstone of modern economics” [42] but also became foundational to environmentalist concerns that growth would clash with natural limits. Kallis shows how the neo-Malthusianism of Garrett Hardin, Paul Ehrlich, and much mainstream environmentalism advocates restraint for quite different reasons than the existential concerns expressed by Emma Goldman, William Wordsworth, or Cornelius Castoriadis. Rather than a burden imposed by external constraints, Kallis argues, self-restraint may be a source of meaning, creativity, and personal freedom, while “limitless possibility can be debilitating and a constant source of frustration” [57]. In elaborating the latter kind of critique, he faults environmentalism for adopting the “economic idiom of wants, resources, and technologies” [43].

The question that haunts the discussion of limits is what it is that propels human societies to approach and transgress them. Kallis comes close to answering the question but does not discuss it as thoroughly as it deserves. It does not suffice to state that growth is inscribed in the capitalist “system” and naturalized (and sacralized) by economists through the assumption of scarcity [36]. Nor is it convincing to assert that we are “as much a part of nature as any other species, and our constructs are as natural as those of any animal” [72]. We need to understand how the “system” is generated and why it deviates so conspicuously from what any other animal species could possibly produce. The phenomenon of capitalism hinges on the peculiar artifact of general-purpose money,Footnote ² which in turn relies on the uniquely human capacity for symbolism. Precisely in order not to naturalize capitalism, we must thus retain the analytical distinction between the social and the natural. The social (or cultural) aspects of phenomena are those features that cannot be accounted for without reference to symbolism. They are as pervasive in the constitution of human bodies, landscapes, and technologies as in the current chemical composition of the atmosphere. In a very general sense, nothing in the world remains exclusively “natural” once it has been touched by the logic of money.

It is tantalizing to find Kallis recognizing the centrality of money in dismantling limits, as in his references to Seaford’s [2004]Footnote ³ incisive discussion of the consequences of monetization in ancient Greece, yet without drawing the obvious conclusion—quite in line with the thrust of much recent social theory—that the design of artifacts may decisively shape how humans relate to each other as well as how they think. I shall return to the momentous implications of this conclusion shortly, but first reflect on why Kallis found Seaford’s investigation so congenial to his own concerns. As Kallis writes, Seaford’s thesis is that “much of Greek culture and philosophy was shaped in reaction to money’s seemingly limitless character” [77]. In the 6th century BC, the Aegean region was the first area in the world to experience modern (i.e. general-purpose) money. Seaford shows how precious metals at this time were transformed from coveted commodities, measurable by weight, into abstract and uniform exchange-values in the form of stamped coins. In this crucial transformation, the semiotic attributes of pieces of metal became more important than their substance.Footnote ⁴ While the use of precious metals in trade has been documented much earlier throughout the Near East, this was the point at which modern money was born. As Seaford observes,

Seaford’s investigation goes on to explore in detail how the introduction of coined money transformed ancient Greek society and thought. However, for current purposes it will suffice to follow Kallis in observing, as so many others have done before him, that limitlessness is inscribed in the artifact of money.

The far-reaching implications of this observation remain to be fathomed. Whereas church doctrine in the Middle AgesFootnote ⁶ suppressed the globalizing logic of money [cf. Le Goff 2012]Footnote ⁷, by the 18th century it had been reassessed and sufficiently unleashed to integrate an expansive capitalist world-system. Because the premises of social thought at the time were not conducive to such interpretations, the convulsions of early British capitalism addressed by contemporary economic theorists from Malthus to Marx were not conceptualized as generated by the inherent logic of the money artifact. Marx was very much concerned with that logic yet dismissed Robert Owen’s ambition to transform money as utopian [Nelson 2001: 46]Footnote ⁸. Meanwhile, mainstream economics codified the logic of general-purpose money without reflecting on the fact that it was merely registering the injunctions and imperatives of an artifact that could, in principle, be redesigned. In both cases, the societal inertia of artifacts was overlooked. Marx believed that capitalism could be transcended without changing the design of money, while mainstream economists have not considered that the subject matter of their discipline is completely determined—and thus constrained—by that design. Given what Actor-Network Theory and design theory are currently proposing about the recursive relations between artifacts and their human creators, it may now be more acceptable to suggest, as has Escobar [2018: 4],Footnote ⁹ that “we design our world, and our world designs us back—in short, design designs.”

An implication of this approach to artifacts—as recursively related to humans—is that it could turn the widespread critique of neoclassical economics on its head. This critique is as historically deep and voluminous as the literature on neoclassical economics itself, and the recent arguments against the latter’s obsession with growth[e.g., Daly 1996; Jackson 2009; Kallis 2018; Latouche 2009; Raworth 2017; Victor 2008] Footnote ¹⁰ can be seen as additions to a tradition of denouncing money that goes back to Aquinas and ultimately Aristotle. Common to such critique is the concern that there are fundamental flaws in the way neoclassical economists think about the management of money. Typical of this approach is Kate Raworth’s widely acclaimed book Doughnut Economics, which has the telling subtitle, Seven Ways to Think Like a 21^st Century Economist. As for so many other critiques of mainstream economics, it is difficult not to agree with its wish list of reforms that would yield a more just and sustainable world. But what these critics seem to miss is that the ultimate problem is not how economists think, but the money artifact whose logic it is their task to understand. Mainstream economics has done very well in interpreting the injunctions of general-purpose money to maximize efficiency and growth. The task of economists has never been to redesign the artifact of general-purpose money, only to understand its social inertia and devise policies for its management. If we are ever to transcend the horizons of neoclassical economic thought, we must begin by imagining how money could be redesigned.

Drawing on Seaford, Kallis [78, 121] concludes that

Seaford’s investigation convincingly shows how this novel artifact—stamped coins representing abstract exchange-value—shaped thought and society in ancient Greece. If modes of thought can thus derive from artifacts, does this not also apply to modern economists? If we are dissatisfied with what the economists’ policies are doing to the world, should we not start reconsidering the design of money? The question may seem ludicrously naive, but it is no more absurd than its alternative: to allow the logic of a fetishized human artifact to undermine the conditions for human survival. Nor is it less realistic than to hope for a global revolution that will overthrow capitalism.

Can money be redesigned so that it no longer encourages limitless expansion? This is not the place for an extended presentation of how that might be done, but I have elsewhere proposed the outlines of such a reform [Hornborg 2017, 2019]Footnote ¹². My points of departure are (a) that national authorities are its most appropriate administrators, (b) that the task must be to issue and distribute a complementary currency (CC) that can only be used to buy goods and services produced within a certain (locally negotiable) geographical distance from the point of purchase,Footnote ¹³ and (c) that the CC is digitally distributed to all the inhabitants of the nation as an unconditional basic income (UBI) that is high enough to cover basic subsistence needs (and largely financed by making much federal expenditures on social security redundant).Footnote ¹⁴ The proposal obviously raises many questions, some of which I have responded to in the references cited, but here it will suffice to emphasize that differently designed currencies would generate different forms of economic rationality and efficiency—and different forms of economic thought.

Kallis recognizes that what we euphemistically refer to as “globalization” is an expression of the limitlessness inherent in modern money. During the three decades following WWII, many countries tried to regulate the most destructive aspects of market logic through taxes, social security, environmental legislation, and other progressive reforms. Since the 1980s, however, we have seen “the removal of limits to money flows and accumulation, or of environmental and social protections” [94]. Neoliberalism is ultimately about liberating general-purpose money, giving it—and what Polanyi called “the idea of the self-regulating market”—free rein. As Kallis writes, “set your own limits to money as a city, region, or country, and money will flee elsewhere, while you will be left sorting out the ruins rather than living within carefully crafted limits” [109]. On this unlimited world market, low wages and lax environmental legislation are competitive advantages that promote asymmetric transfers of embodied labor and resources from the Global South to consumers in the Global North. The only possible way of curbing these detrimental processes—short of protectionism, which is correctly identified as a threat to world peace—is to reorganize national economies along the lines I have suggested. The combination of CC and UBI provides nations with the possibility of counteracting the logic of globalization by directing consumption towards patterns that will increase sustainability, global justice, local resilience, and social security.Footnote ¹⁵

Kallis’s deliberations on the virtues of limits finally leads him to ask himself what limits he has in mind. One of the things we will have to limit, he writes, is

This is a conclusion with which a growing number of people agree. Yet, no doubt because we are so unaccustomed to thinking of artifacts as ruling our lives, critics of growth rarely target money itself. They thus continue to fault economists for flawed thinking, a capitalist “system” for generating injustices and ecological degradation, and people in general for their contemptible greed. I would hope that Kallis’s influential crusade against growth will eventually inspire the degrowth movement to revise its understanding of politics by acknowledging that, to change ourselves, we need to redesign our artifacts.