Sweden's productivity growth has become too low. To reverse the trend, new thinking is needed – not more power for the vested interests of business. Growth that worsens the climate, equality and welfare leads to zero-sum thinking, where everyone ultimately loses. To achieve real development, investments are needed in people, nature and fair working conditions. Collective solutions strengthen both society and growth.
https://www.dn.se/debatt/i-nollsummespelet-blir-vi-alla-ekonomiska-forlorare/
As well as new institutions, laws and agreements. Mariana Mazzucato and Carlota Pérez have written a lot about that.
For example, we have an agriculture that is tightly tied through a lot of laws to delivering bulk goods to the world market with the addition of a lot of chemicals. We have an urban development where traffic engineers are in control, and their default goal is higher speeds.
Lots of laws need to be changed, lots of new institutions need to be built to govern differently than the ones we already have. The ones we have were built from the late 1800th century for the technology that existed then, but they have become completely dysfunctional for what exists now.
The kind of environmental opinion that you and I belong to is usually skeptical of talk about "new technology" - but it is needed, it just needs to be *built upon* with new institutions etc., so as not to just become more of the same.
Mazzucato and Pérez wrote a program about this a few years ago, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/sites/bartlett_public_purpose/files/mazzucato_perez_2022_redirecting_growth-inclusive_sustainable_and_innovation-led.pdf . Not entirely perfect of course, not least because their talk about "growth" is entirely based on neoclassical economics, the rest of us have no interest in "more" as an end in itself. But at least something to start from.
I agree that the DN text's use of the word growth was bad. We must find a level of production and methods that are socially and ecologically sustainable and then have a socially and ecologically circularly sustainable productivity. The economy exists to fix this. Production should not adapt to the economy, but the economy to the production that people and nature require and tolerate.