SOME OF their conclusions are surprisingly pleasant. For example, to move away from growth, we’ll all have to work a lot less. That’s because no-growth economists agree with mainstream economists on one big point: Technological advances make workers more productive every year. In the mainstream view, these labor efficiencies make goods cheaper, which leaves consumers with more disposable income—which they invest or spend on more stuff, leading to more hiring to fulfill demand. By contrast, the no-growthers would do things differently; they would use those efficiencies to shorten the workweek, so that most people would stay employed and bring home a reasonable salary. If new technology continued to drive productivity gains, citizens in a nongrowing economy would actually work less and less over time as they divvied up the shrinking workload.

Handled correctly, this could bring about an explosion of free time that could utterly transform the way we live, no-growth economists say. It could lead to a renaissance in the arts and sciences, as well as a reconnection with the natural world. Parents with lighter workloads could home-school their children if they liked, or look after sick relatives—dramatically reshaping the landscape of education and elder care. (Some steady-state thinkers argue that these typically unpaid forms of domestic labor ought to be included in GDP calculations and even subsidized by the government, since they contribute so heavily to national well-being.)

In 1982, Dutch business and labor leaders struck a deal encouraging people to work fewer hours. What followed came to be known as the “Dutch miracle.”

Viewed this way, a nongrowing economy could have broad political appeal, ushering in the sort of togetherness and family values that social conservatives celebrate. Liberals might appreciate the concept of work sharing, which could help narrow the income gap between rich and poor. Indeed, some countries have already edged towards this vision. In 1982, labor unions in the Netherlands agreed to limit demands for higher pay in exchange for policies encouraging people to work less. Within a decade, the proportion of Dutch citizens working part-time soared from 19 percent to 27 percent, the average workweek fell from 30 to 27 hours, and unemployment had plummeted from 10 percent to 5 percent. (They called it “the Dutch miracle.”) Work sharing also has a pedigree in times of crisis: In Austria and Germany, the Kurzarbeit laws let employers avoid layoffs by scaling back people’s hours and pay—10 percent less money, say, for 10 percent less work. The government then steps in and covers the salary difference.

The types of work available (and your take-home pay) would change significantly in a no-growth scenario. To prevent global warming and resource depletion, no-growthers favor heavily taxing carbon and other pollutants. At the same time, they want the government to invest in clean energy as part of a “Green New Deal” that also encourages private-sector investment to move people into labor-intensive jobs—entertainer, preventive health worker, artisan manufacturer, organic farmer, nurse—that consume relatively few raw materials.

So working less is the fun (or at least the more doable) part. The hard part is that we would be consuming less—probably far less.

What does that mean, exactly? Daly has suggested that Americans would need to scale back our energy consumption to 1960s levels (assuming we stick to a predominantly fossil-fueled economy). Victor, for his part, points out that 1983 was the last year that “the world economy was just at the level of the capacity of the planet to support it.” Since then, of course, world population has exploded and global resources have dwindled even further.

Beyond these big-picture parameters, none of the experts has really crunched the numbers to envision what daily life might be like in a no-growth world—though they agree that it’s something people had better start thinking about.

For starters, they say, Western consumption rates would need to shrink disproportionately so that citizens of countries like India and El Salvador could enjoy a lifestyle upgrade. Why? The no-growthers argue that a world with fewer yawning inequities between the rich and poor would be more stable; but quite apart from that, their models require stabilizing world population, and raising the economic lot of the poor is a proven way to do that.

Given the shift in wealth needed to accomplish this, Americans would need to turn back the clock to well before 1983; in fact, we’d be pretty lucky even to find ourselves where we were in 1960—when the median family made $35,994 in today’s dollars (versus $61,932 in 2008).

Hardly the plenitude we’re accustomed to. Still, technological advances mean that your dollar buys a lot more than it did back then. For a couple of bucks, you can score a pocket calculator that does things it once took a million-dollar university machine to accomplish. “We’re better at making things now,” Victor says, so our living standards would be considerably higher than this figure suggests.

In a no-growth economy, as Daly points out, we would still consume new stuff—just at a much slower pace. People might need to develop a renewed appreciation for durable goods that require lots of labor to make but ultimately use fewer resources than their throwaway counterparts. We would also have to evolve away from “positional” consumption—feeling good because you possess something the Joneses don’t.

So maybe hipsters won’t be buying the latest iPhone every 12 months­. Or perhaps we’ll seek more fulfillment through activities with a lighter footprint—sports, music, hiking. The vexing reality is that the no-growth thinkers simply don’t know how things would shake out. We don’t have any realistic examples to learn from, after all. In the past, the only no-growth societies were agrarian or consisted of hunter-gatherers.

But when you take the thought experiment a few steps further, no-growth theory raises a host of questions about psychology and motivation. How do you prevent people from producing and buying needless stuff? Would innovation cease if entrepreneurs didn’t think they would sell a million widgets? Could individual companies still grow—and if not, who would want to invest in them?

In any case, the pathway to America voluntarily reducing its consumption levels seems obscure at best. Right-wing radio hosts fulminate against the government merely for placing restrictions on incandescent lightbulbs; one can imagine their reaction to scaling back consumption to the Kennedy era. Not to mention that governments would have to pass new tax laws, seriously tackle income inequality, and return banking to its traditional role of raising and lending capital (as opposed to gambling on imponderable derivatives and credit default swaps).

There are other aspects of no-growth theory—like the population-stabilizing businesss—that could chill partisans of any stripe. To halt population growth, you need to reduce global fertility rates to an average of about two children per couple. But if boosting poor people’s means doesn’t defuse the population bomb, what then? Population control by mandate is essentially totalitarianism.

So, not exactly a walk in the park. But for all the troubling questions it raises, there’s one thing you can say about steady-state thinking: It is almost cosmically ambitious. Given how numb and static the world’s economic arguments have become, no-growth theory is a rare beast: a vision of social change that is genuinely radical, almost jaw-droppingly so. Even talking about such ideas, Victor admits in his book, “could make a politician unelectable.” The no-growthers regard their job not as promoting specific policies, but widening the field of debate. “I want to make it possible just to start to think about growth and its role in economic thought,” Victor told me.

Is the world ready, or even interested, in such unorthodox ideas? The new crop of books hasn’t provoked the sort of backlash that Limits once did. Jackson suspects that climate change may have made us more receptive. As he’s traveled around giving talks on his book, some politicians and businessmen have grudgingly admitted that hyping growth has created real problems—even if they can’t quite endorse the solutions. “The response often is that my logic is faultless,” Jackson told me, “but the policy recommendations are bonkers.” He also suspects no-growth theory is still so marginal that it hasn’t attracted much attention—no best-sellers this time—but should it gain political momentum, the attacks will come.

Daly, who’s been arguing his case for four decades, has begun to think that only the Earth itself will compel people to act. In a few decades, if basic resources become scarce, prices spike, and climate change is causing global conflict, no-growth thinking could arrive whether we like it or not. “It’ll be forced on us,” he says. In the end, when it comes to determining the shape of our economy, the planet may possess the most powerful invisible hand of all.