Christian Morgenstern´s sarcastic endline of “Die unmögliche Tatsache” (the impossible fact) may be what explains the esteemed Bruegel Institute`s tone-deafness to two questions raised by me during their recent 20th Anniversary Tour at the Austrian National Bank.

Zoltan Darvas´ lecture on „EU sustainable growth: what is the right mix of structural, monetary and fiscal instruments?“ was a very competent (as can be expected by Bruegel) run-down of the well-known arguments, mainly referring to Mario Draghi’s infamous (@ Kurt Bayer) report on increasing EU competitiveness – with the major direction of increasing the EU’s growth (potential). He called his approach „bold“ and also echoed the OeNB’s Deputy Governor’s introductory (unfounded) claim that „all of us agreee on the need for higher growth“.

In my intervention I pleaded for a „bolder“ approach with a view to consider – given the present state of our economies and societies – that economic policy in the future refrain from attempting to maximing nominal GDP growth, but rather attempt to maintain per-capita well-being (including beyond-gdp, non-material aspects of wellbeing). Both the effects on nature (climate and biodiversity) and of the stagnating or falling populations would argue for changing the traditional economic model. Economic policy should rather gear up to tackle the challenges of smaller labor forces and smaller economies – especially with respect to financing the social system.

In his reply, Darvas only remarked that his approach was „bold enough“, but did not deem it necessary to address the substance of my question.

In wrapping up, Bruegel director Jeromin Zettelmayer, an excellent MIT educated traditional economist, focussed on the energy sector and exhorted Austria (and also Germany) to start deep discussions of whether their labelling the steel and (for Austria) aluminum industries – both massive useres of electricity – as sacrosanct lead industries to be maintained at all cost. Interesting.

But when I asked my question of whether energy policy should no longer take all demand as given to be fulfilled by ever-increasing supplies of energy, but should also (as Jeromin did) think more intensively at the demand side, and e.g. ban socially destructive uses like private crypto (whose mining takes up large amounts of electricity), or even some of the gigantic data centers built by „artificial intelligence“ companies – he did not reply to this question.

It seems that even excellent economists still forbid themselves to think about a smaller economy – in the face of below reproduction level fertility rates and the effects of GDP growth on nature. Who else but academics and think tanks should pave the way forward – away from an economic model which massively endangers nature and causes the loss of social cohesion by outrageous mal-distributions of income and wealth? „Weil nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf“?