Golden Ratio Economy

What if economics rediscovered proportion? The “Golden Ratio Economy” calls for correcting the grotesque asymmetries of our growth-obsessed paradigm — where towers of abundance rise beside deserts of deprivation. Drawing on lived examples from food systems, housing, urban planning, and labor, this framework names the imbalance and proposes a way back to equilibrium.The modern era has too often reduced human beings to homo oeconomicus — a narrow utility-maximizer. This impoverished view severs us from the Renaissance and Enlightenment traditions that celebrated humanity’s full stature: beings endowed with aesthetic, creative, deliberative, and communal aspirations. The “Golden Ratio” reclaims this abandoned lineage, echoing classical ideals, Renaissance humanism, and the civic dynamism of the ancient Greek polis.But it also looks forward. Infused with ecological and post-growth economic thought, and shaped by the convivial philosophy of Ivan Illich, the Golden Ratio Economy confronts the entangled crises of the 21st century — climate, inequality, alienation — through a revival of humanism.Its vision of prosperity is not a single metric but sophisticated contemplations: the grace of sensory experience, the nobility of collective dialogue, the vitality of mutual flourishing, and beauty of balance and harmony. Value, scale, and proportion must be recalibrated to serve human flourishing rather than monetary expansion.By offering a new grammar and syntax for economic life, the Golden Ratio Economy seeks to restore balance — between need and excess, self and community, present and future — so that our systems once again evolve according to the wonders of humanity itself.