Toward A New Nordic Model

(And It's Not a Car)

In the carport of my ancestral home in Norway, where my extended family still lives, there are three garbage bins: one for compost, one for recyclables, and one for general trash. Most homes in the country are part of an extensive recycling and composting program mandated by the state and run by the local municipality. Most new cars are now electric.

The country is also self-sufficient in pollution-free hydroelectric power. Norway is therefore hailed as one of the most environmentally friendly places in the world. In reality, Norway is not sustainable enough, not even by a long shot.

Political democracy has served capitalism and wealth accumulation well in recent years — just look at the current rise in the number of billionaires, such as technology wizard Elon Musk and the Indian entrepreneur Mukesh Ambani. In 2000, there were 322 billionaires; in 2026 more than 3400.

During that same period, however, global capitalism did not make the economy more democratic or equal. In fact, relative economic inequality is increasing all over the world, and nearly one billion people still live in extreme poverty on less than $3 per day.

Where the economy is more democratic and equal, as in Scandinavia, where I lived until my mid-20s, this is largely due to the buffering effects of union bargaining power and deep trust in government. Economists refer to this Nordic model as a mixed economy, a blend of free-market capitalism tempered by the equalizing effects of democratic socialism.

Some years ago, The Economist hailed the Nordic model with its strong welfare system of free education and health care as the best economy in the world. An economy all countries needed to emulate. Since I still visit often and have closely followed developments in this part of the world, I basically agree. Economically speaking, that is.

The Economist, a staunch believer in capitalism, left out an important fact in its conclusion, though. If all people in the world lived like Norwegians, Finns, and Swedes, we would, according to the Global Footprint Network, need nearly 3 planets’ worth of resources to survive. Surprise, surprise: even though, according to The World’s Happiness Report, Scandinavia ranks as the “happiest” place on earth, socially and economically, the economy is neither sustainable nor truly democratic. Not even close.

The main reason for this is that capitalism still rules. And capitalism is all about increasing capital or profit, less about caring for people and planet. To maximize profit, you need to sell more stuff: more Chinese electric cars, new bathrooms, bigger houses, more imported foods and clothing, more of everything.

While Nordic socialism has focused on people’s welfare and produced a safety net admired by economists and sociologists, both systems have traditionally treated nature—the source of most economic wealth—as a free resource for extracting oil and minerals, and as an endless dumping ground for civilization’s waste.

Hence, in the wealthier parts of the world, we have entered the age of overshoot; we have exceeded the carrying capacity of the natural systems that support us with food, oil, and minerals. So, while we in the rich North are metaphorically biting the hand that feeds us, people in the poor South are literally stretching out their hands for our leftovers.

What has historically been lacking in neoliberal, mixed, and socialist economies, then, is a failure to see that economies and ecologies are intimately linked. This understanding emerged only in the past 40 years or so, with the advent of ecological economics, developed by people such as Herman Daly, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, and Kenneth Boulding.

While sustainable development became an acknowledged need in the late 80s, now nearly four decades later, the world is, environmentally speaking, much worse off than before the term entered the vocabulary of economists. The main reason, I believe, is the fact that sustainable capitalism is an oxymoron.

Reforming the same system that created its inherent problems will never work, will never be truly sustainable or ecological. The past few decades of capitalist greenwashing and unrestricted GDP growth have proven this fact repeatedly.

Hence, we need a new economy altogether, a post-capitalist and post-materialist economy that is holistic, human, and planet-centered in the best sense of the terms.

In this era of skyrocketing inequality, ecological collapse, and eroding trust in institutions, the call for a more ecological economy, for what many now call economic democracy, has never been more urgent. But what will this economy look like?

This emerging economy has been envisioned by thinkers and activists such as Jason Hickel, Kate Raworth, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Robert Reich, and Gar Alperovitz, who diagnose capitalism’s failures—corporate oligarchy, endless-growth imperatives, and worker disempowerment—and propose reforms to democratize and localize production, finance, and power.

Amid these vital contributions, which offer important critiques of capitalism’s failures as well as more democratic reforms based on eco-socialism (Hickel), localism (Norberg-Hodge), cooperatives (Alperovitz), and ecological indicators to maintain balance (Raworth), the most radical and comprehensive vision may be that of the Indian philosopher P. R. Sarkar.

His progressive framework is nothing less than a system that offers comprehensive structural change in the economy, going beyond mere reforms to lay down new economic principles and introduce synergistic structures never before constitutionalized in any country.

While transitional reforms are much needed today, Sarkar’s post-capitalist vision integrates human well-being ethics and economic system change by preserving good government industries and services; converting corporations into cooperatives; and retaining private ownership in small-scale local industries and shops (no more corporate billionaires by constitutional design!).

He thus shares key overlaps with Hickel and Alperovitz on cooperatives, decentralization, and need-based planning, as well as with Norberg-Hodge’s localism and Raworth’s popular doughnut economy. But where they mainly opt for reforms, Sarkar claims principled economic restructuring is needed to tame the hungry beast of corporate capitalism.

In short, what the world needs now is a synthesis of these ideas, and, in some places, such as Norway, it’s time to go even further, opting for Sarkar’s principles of economic democracy as they provide a missing link to a much-needed path forward in ecological economics.

Why? Because ecological or green capitalism, even in its most benign, Nordic form, is an oxymoron. It will keep cooking the only home we have, one degree at a time. Instead, we need a post-capitalist economy, a truly democratic and circular economy where effluence can become sustainable affluence, well into the 7th generation.