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MENTAL MODEL · M5333

Steady-state Economy

Steady-state Economy
BusinessHigh supportEconomics
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Updated 2026-08-04

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INTRODUCTION

English translation pending.

CORE DEFINITION

A concept associated with Herman Daly, describing an economy whose population and stock of physical capital are held roughly constant rather than growing. Development continues through improvements in resource efficiency, quality, and non-material sectors such as services, education, and culture. The image is a mature forest, where total biomass stops increasing while internal complexity and diversity remain high. The framework is proposed as an alternative to growth-dependent economics, and it requires institutional design for distribution and for limiting throughput, since a constant scale must still be maintained against pressures to expand.

SCAFFOLDING EFFECT

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- Plateau reframe: treat a pause in scale as a stage rather than as a failure. - Internal optimization: shift effort from expansion to quality, experience, and efficiency. - Throughput limit: design the rules that hold scale constant, since the default is expansion.

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Growth in physical throughput is bounded by resource and sink limits, so an economy that depends on expansion eventually meets a constraint that cannot be negotiated. Once scale is fixed, improvements must come from doing more with the same material input, which shifts value toward design, quality, and services. Because expansion is the default outcome of competition and investment, holding a steady state requires deliberate rules rather than passive equilibrium, which is why the framework is institutional rather than merely descriptive.

MINIMUM ACTION

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Source support: Explicit

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    en.wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economyZH · Explicit
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