Why Alternative Economies Haven't Changed the World (yet)?
By Goran Jeras · Published on Substack · 17 July 2026
Humanity is not short of good economic ideas. Over the past two generations, distinct intellectual traditions - ecological economics, Doughnut Economics, post-growth thought, the Sustainable Development Performance Indicators (SDPI) and Common Good Matrix, endogenous money theory, ergodicity economics, complexity economics, cybernetics, systems dynamics, steward ownership, cooperative governance, institutional economics, bioregionalism, regenerative economics and collapsology - have each diagnosed part of what is wrong with industrial-era capitalism and proposed part of what should replace it. What is missing are institutionalized entities capable of holding all of these insights together and turning them into the daily, unglamorous work of redefining finance and its economic outcomes for communities. In this piece, I argue that these traditions are not competing paradigms but complementary descriptions of a single socio-economic system, and I trace how a financial institution dedicated to their operationalization would have to look if it were built, from the ground up, to hold all of them at once.
Abstract quoted from the original essay by Goran Jeras.
Twenty-five years of alternative economics produced an intellectual abundance without institutional forms able to turn it into everyday financial practice.
Physics, biology and ecology moved from a mechanistic to a living-systems worldview. Banking still governs the economy as if it were a machine to be optimized.
Real-estate speculation, asset trading, fossil infrastructure and consumption debt are not accidents, they are the predictable output of the existing incentive design.
Doughnut Economics and SDPI answer what to optimize for, endogenous money and complexity science explain how the system behaves, steward ownership and cooperative governance supply the institutional form.
A bank designed from the ground up to hold all of these layers at once is what banking looks like once the living-systems shift reaches finance.
The transition to a regenerative economy will not happen because someone invents one single better economic theory. It will happen when complementary ideas about value, ownership, money, governance and ecological regeneration become embedded in institutions capable of allocating capital differently.
The complete piece walks through the mechanistic-to-living-systems shift, what conventional finance actually optimizes for, and the institutional architecture a regenerative bank would need.
Read the full essay on SubstackOpens goranjeras807272.substack.com in a new tab
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