The Curse of the Sun.

Why Our Economy Runs on Excess, Not Scarcity

Article based on Giorgos Kallis’s “Political Ecological Economics and the Nature of Economic Growth”.

1. A civilization drunk on “more”

There’s a peculiar silence in the modern mind — the quiet assumption that “growth” is good, necessary, inevitable.

Every president, CEO, and start-up founder seems to speak the same language: growth will solve our problems. Growth will lift the poor, heal the planet, fund the future. But Giorgos Kallis, a professor of ecological economics, opens his talk with a heretical whisper:

“The human condition,” he says, “is not scarcity. It’s excess.”

And just like that, the floor falls out from under centuries of economic thought.

The problem, he argues, isn’t that we don’t have enough — it’s that we don’t know what to do with too much. Our predicament isn’t hunger. It’s gluttony.

2. The solar secret we’ve forgotten

Start with the sun.

Every second, it floods Earth with ten thousand times more energy than humanity consumes. From that downpour of light, all life arises — plants, animals, fossil fuels, and us.

For most of history, this cosmic generosity meant abundance. Ancient societies worshipped the sun not as a threat, but as a gift. Feasts, temples, and carnivals were not waste — they were gratitude made visible.

Then, somewhere between the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, we rewired our relationship with this abundance. We stopped dancing for the sun and started mining it. Stored sunlight, buried deep as coal, became “capital.” And so the feast became a factory.

Economists told us this was progress — the triumph of reason over superstition. But Kallis suggests it was actually a tragic narrowing of imagination. We replaced a worldview of overflow with one of lack, and in that mental shift we enslaved ourselves to an idea that now devours the planet: growth.

3. The economy is not real — we made it up

Here’s the first real heureka moment in Kallis’s argument: “the economy,” as we know it, didn’t even exist until about ninety years ago.

Before the 1930s, people spoke of trade, markets, or livelihoods — but not of “the economy” as a single national organism. It was invented during the Great Depression, when governments began managing production and money like a living system that could grow or shrink.

We needed a number to measure its health, so economists invented GDP. Overnight, a vast, messy web of human and natural relationships became a single line on a graph.

Then came the magic trick: if GDP went up, politicians declared the country was better off.

Growth became not just an economic indicator but a moral compass. Presidents promised it. Citizens internalized it. “For the good of the economy” became the modern catechism.

Timothy Mitchell, a political theorist Kallis cites, calls this new logic economality: a form of government where people manage themselves — their jobs, desires, and even self-worth — for the sake of something that exists mostly in our imagination.

It’s a stunning insight: our civilization is organized around an abstraction. “The economy” isn’t nature. It isn’t even society. It’s a story we tell to justify who gets the surplus — and who doesn’t.

4. Surplus: the forgotten heart of economics

Kallis’s big conceptual breakthrough is his re-centering of surplus — not scarcity — as the defining force of human life.

Forget Adam Smith’s invisible hand or Keynes’s aggregate demand. The true driver of civilization is the simple fact that the sun gives more energy than we need to survive. Every organism lives off a trickle of this gift. Humans, uniquely, learned to harvest and stockpile it.

From that moment, our history became a story of what we do with the surplus.

• Some societies turned it into cathedrals, festivals, and art — “unproductive expenditures” that made meaning, not money.
  
  

• Others turned it into factories, weapons, and empires — reinvestments that multiplied power.
  
  

Modern capitalism perfected the latter. It made surplus reproduction—the reinvestment of excess energy, money, and labor to create more of the same—its very essence.

This is the logic of growth: surplus creates surplus.

Once you see this, economics stops looking like a science of efficiency and starts looking like a theology of multiplication. Growth is not a necessity; it’s an addiction. A cosmic feedback loop of our own making.

5. The dark side of surplus-making

Kallis draws his next insight from Marxist and feminist thinkers: the growth machine doesn’t run on ingenuity alone. It runs on domination.

Every increase in surplus somewhere comes from an extraction elsewhere. The Industrial Revolution’s spinning wheels in Manchester depended on enslaved cotton pickers in America, unpaid wives in Britain, and colonized lands stripped of life.

Even today, the sleek promise of “digital growth” rests on cobalt mines in Congo, server farms guzzling electricity, and the invisible labor of content moderators and care workers.

Kallis calls this the “double face” of surplus-making: above the surface, technological innovation and productivity gains; below it, exploitation and ecological degradation.

He captures this elegantly in his diagram of the economy: a system where surplus flows through intertwined channels of energy, labor, and power. Growth, in this view, is not a natural process. It’s a political project — one that decides who works, who profits, and who pays the entropy bill.

Kallis’s theory of “political ecological economics” blends three schools of thought—ecological economics, Marxist political economy, and political ecology—into a single, illuminating lens.

In this view, the economy is not a neutral machine churning out goods and services. It’s a social metabolism: a system that takes in energy and materials, transforms them into products, and spits out waste and inequality.

Here’s how it works:

1. The Physical Surplus
   
   Every society extracts energy—whether from the sun, fossil fuels, or human labor—to create a surplus beyond what’s needed for mere survival. This is our energetic foundation.
   

2. The Economic Surplus
   
   That physical surplus is transformed through work and technology into economic value—goods, services, wealth. But this surplus is never shared equally. A ruling class—those who own land, factories, or algorithms—captures a disproportionate share, turning “energy surplus” into “private surplus.”
   

3. The Political Struggle
   
   The rest of society—the working majority—fights to reclaim some of that surplus in the form of wages, public services, or social welfare. Governments act as intermediaries, deciding how much of the surplus becomes “social” (schools, hospitals) versus how much remains “private” (profits, luxury, power).

In short: growth is not a natural process—it’s a political one.

6. The curse of the sun

One of Kallis’s most poetic ideas is borrowed from Georges Bataille’s 1949 book The Accursed Share. Bataille argued that humanity’s fundamental problem isn’t shortage but what to do with excess energy.

Too much sunlight, too much potential — a “curse” of abundance.

Every civilization must decide how to spend this curse. We can build pyramids, throw festivals, or wage wars. We can create cathedrals of beauty or skyscrapers of finance. But we must spend it somehow, because the surplus always demands expression.

Capitalism’s great innovation was to channel this overflow into reinvestment — building machines to produce more machines. It transformed sacred excess into perpetual expansion.

But this is where Kallis’s argument turns prophetic: the more we turn surplus into growth, the more we destroy the very foundations of life that make surplus possible — the ecosystems, the workers, the time to live meaningfully.

We have become a species that burns the sun faster than the sun gives. The feast has become a furnace.

7. When the engine breaks

All engines have limits. Kallis points to two.

First, the biophysical limit: energy return on investment (EROI). Every unit of energy we extract now costs more energy to obtain — whether drilling deeper oil or mining rare earths. The surplus shrinks.

Second, the social limit: human endurance. Exploitation can only intensify so far before rebellion, burnout, or breakdown.

To push beyond these limits, the system doubles down: it invents “green growth” to pretend that new technologies will decouple energy use from expansion, and “inclusive growth” to claim it can reduce inequality while multiplying profits.

But history, says Kallis, gives us little reason to believe these miracles. Growth has always needed both innovation and domination. To bet on a clean, just, exponential capitalism is to believe in a perpetual-motion machine powered by moral sincerity.

8. Degrowth: not less, but different

Here’s where the narrative pivots from diagnosis to vision.

Degrowth, in Kallis’s framework, isn’t about collapse or austerity. It’s a conscious re-routing of the surplus — away from accumulation, toward regeneration.

Imagine if we treated surplus not as fuel for profit, but as a commons for care. The hours we now waste producing unnecessary goods could be spent restoring ecosystems, teaching, creating art, or simply resting.

In a degrowth society, we would still have energy and innovation — but we would choose where to spend them. The goal wouldn’t be to shrink life, but to deepen it.

It’s a radical redefinition of progress: not “more stuff,” but better meaning.

9. Growth as ideology: the invisible leash

Perhaps the most unsettling revelation in Kallis’s talk is how growth functions ideologically — how it persuades even the exploited to consent to their own exploitation.

Under capitalism, workers accept low wages and long hours because growth promises them a better tomorrow. Governments justify inequality because growth, they say, will “lift all boats.” It’s a brilliant illusion — one that unites rulers and ruled under a shared fantasy of future plenty.

But as Kallis shows, when growth stalls — as energy plateaus and ecosystems unravel — the ideology begins to crack. What happens when people realize the promised future will never come?

Maybe that’s the moment we’re living through now: the first civilizational hangover after a centuries-long binge.

10. A new myth for a full world

What Kallis offers isn’t just a critique of economics — it’s a new myth for the Anthropocene.

In his model, the economy isn’t a machine to optimize. It’s a living metabolism shaped by power, imagination, and sunlight. Growth isn’t destiny — it’s a choice.

And that means we can choose differently.

We can reimagine surplus not as a burden to multiply but as a gift to share. We can invest it not in more extraction but in beauty, care, and restoration.

The future, Kallis implies, will not be written by those who manage scarcity, but by those who learn to dance with excess.

We may never stop the sun from shining — but we can stop mistaking its light for a command to consume.

11. The question that changes everything

At the end of his talk, Kallis asks quietly:

“What do we do with the excess that the sun so generously gives us?”

That question echoes long after the lecture ends.

Because once you see the economy as sunlight transformed, you realize that every policy, every paycheck, every act of production is an ethical decision about how to spend the gift of existence.

Do we build more machines? Or do we build meaning?

That is the true post-growth question — not technical, but spiritual.

And maybe that’s the real curse of the sun: not that it gives too much energy, but that it forces us to confront our own boundless desires.

In summary: The three insights

1. The economy is an invention. It’s a 20th-century mental construct that disciplines people into serving “growth” as if it were nature itself.
   

2. The real driver of civilization is surplus, not scarcity. Energy abundance — not lack — shapes human behavior. The economy is a system for channeling excess.
   

3. Growth is a political and moral project. It fuses exploitation and ideology into a self-sustaining machine. To stop it, we must reimagine what we do with our surplus — ethically, ecologically, and joyfully.
   

Kallis doesn’t offer easy answers. He offers something rarer: a shift in consciousness.Once you see that our crisis is not a lack of growth but a surplus of energy and imagination used badly, everything changes.

The path forward isn’t about producing more. It’s about spending better — with wisdom, beauty, and care.

And perhaps that’s the truest economy of all.