IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-3-031-82299-5_2.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The Economic Growth Trap

In: The Economic Decline of the West

Author

Listed:
  • Wim Naudé

    (RWTH Aachen University)

Abstract

This chapter describes the economic Growth Trap wherein the West has fallen. It explains why and how neoliberal capitalism depends on everlasting economic growth. This has resulted in ecological overshoot, of which climate change is a symptom. The Growth Trap has also fostered socio-political instability, rising inequality, job insecurity, and ruptured the social fabric. This chapter also introduces the Great Stagnation, which, since the 1970s, has been slowly ending the Great Take-Off and Great Acceleration described in Chap. 1. While the Great Stagnation could reduce ecological overshoot in the West, the increasingly zero-sum economy that it is resulting in brings its own hazards. More specifically, as this book shows, under the pressure of the Growth Trap, the Great Stagnation will accentuate the dangers of the decline in oil, the rise of the Oligarchy and of the Permanent War Economy. It creates a dilemma of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” as far as economic growth is concerned.

Suggested Citation

  • Wim Naudé, 2025. "The Economic Growth Trap," Springer Books, in: The Economic Decline of the West, chapter 0, pages 21-54, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-82299-5_2
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-82299-5_2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-82299-5_2. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.