"Advanced capitalist societies seem to limp from one existential crisis to the next, becoming ever more fragile and unstable as a result. Yet the dominant theoretical frameworks in political economy view capitalism as fundamentally stable or, at most, subject to incremental change. In a recent volume published by Oxford University Press, Diminishing Returns: The New Politics of Growth and Stagnation, we develop a more dynamic framework that places disequilibrium, aggregate demand and distributive conflict centre stage. The result of a collaborative effort involving European and North American scholars, our volume emphasises the diversity of capitalist trajectories, which we reframe as a diversity of growth models. We do not stop at mapping diversity, however. We seek systematically to link country-level and regional developments to cross-cutting trends in the international economy, such as liberalisation, financialisation and the rise of inequality. In this short article, we present the approach and articulate the implications of the growth models perspective for our understanding of the role of labour and ‘green growth' in the current moment."

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