Simon Mair

But hopefully our action and reflection in this space can be useful for others. We invite anyone interested in exploring them to contact us.

In the MEND Network we're interested in trying to reimagine and take back work. The network started life in the efforts of a group of early career academics seeking to align our efforts at teaching management with the social and ecological crises unfolding around us.

We can use ideas from political economy to understand how the current economic setup makes it hard to do meaningful work. And once we start understand how market structures create the paradox, we can start to find ways to overcome it.

A big part of this paradox is about the disconnect between what we consider to be important, and the work we get paid to do. Marx's concept of Alienation and Graeber's Bullshit Jobs both help us see this.

The Paradox of Work Published by the Management Educators Navigating Degrowth (MEND) collective, with Simon Mair as lead author. Work occupies a paradoxical role in many of our lives: can’t live with it, can’t live wi…

Working is often unpleasant, but we fear being without it, and it is something many of us find important. In a blogpost for the MEND* Network, we explore the paradoxical role that work plays in many of our lives. mendnetwork.wordpress.com/2026/02/09/t...
*Management Educators Navigating Degrowth

We have used growth as a way into conversations about scale. The growth argument has always really been an argument about how big the economy should be, and even if growth stopped tomorrow, we would have a mountain to climb in terms of adequate rates of decarbonisation.

Can we really have green growth? | Comment by Simon Mair Has economic growth really been decoupled from climate damage? In this blog, Simon Mair examines recent claims from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit ...

In a blog post for @cusp.ac.uk I argue that countries are not decoupling fast enough and that growth remains a barrier to genuine progress on carbon emissions. But the increased rate of decoupling should prompt reflections from environmentalists and ecological economists.

cusp.ac.uk/themes/aetw/...

It's time to talk about emissions and growth again. Certain people got very excited about a substantial number of wealthy nations decoupled growth from carbon. This is good news. But: global emissions grew 2023-2024, and almost certainly grew again in 2025.

Keynes as a post-growth economist Some key aspects of J.M. Keynes's economics are reassessed, showing how they fit with and can add to a modern post-growth economics. While Keynes favo…

Pleased to see this paper now published - in it, I examine the status of Keynes as a post-growth economist www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Archaeologists! Considering joining @simonmair.bsky.social and I at the European Society for Ecological Economics conference in Ghent to provide examples of "non-capitalist economies" that we can use to learn about sustainability.

cc @adamsgreen.bsky.social @uoyenvironment.bsky.social @cusp.ac.uk

You can red the full description here: esee2026ghent.be/wp-content/u... and please message or email me if you want help developing an abstract or more details!

This could include, but is not limited to:
1) the application of methods to historical and archaeological data;
2) use of ecological economic methods to analyse present day household or commons based provisioning;
3) development of tools to analyse fictional economies.

We are particularly interested in methodological reflection and development, either through the extension of existing ecological economic methods to non-capitalist contexts, or development of broader methods to expand the scope of ecological economic analysis of non-capitalist economic activity

This includes feminist analyses of households, anthropological explorations of commons activity, modelling of eco-socialist systems, and deep historical or archaeological work from past societies.

In this track we're looking for work that builds on the traditions in Ecological Economics that have a broad conception of what the economy is and can be.

Call for abstracts: Learning from Non-Capitalist Economies. Deadline 19th December. Details here: esee2026ghent.be/wp-content/u...

Abstracts will form sessions at the 16th Biennial Conference of the European Society of Ecological Economics in Ghent. More details th thread below:

On the left, a narrow, glass-fronted display case with a mix of letterpress, hand-bound, antiquarian, and collectors' books; stretching off to the right, 8-foot bookcases laden with literary and contemporary commercial fiction, about one thousand books out of the 6-7 thousand in that section. LED lighting and light-colored wood cases and flooring keep the room feeling relatively spacious despite the sheer quantity of books.

Communities need used-book shops.

As the trends in our world are increasingly standardized and entrenched by "predictive" technologies that stifle innovation and reduce human actions into economic categories...

We need a full range of possibilities for readers and communities to explore and share.

This is not to say that there is no role for complex models. Our next step in WISE is to add complexity. We're working to extend the analysis of productivity, & this workshop identified shared themes to focus an integrated model. But this is only possible because we have the simpler models.

Interpretation is key to understanding how to make change. No model can actually tell us what will happen following a change. Any application of model knowledge requires interpretation of model mechanics - judgements about how those mechanisms translate to circumstances beyond the model. 7/8

Embracing the partial nature of models helps us develop a deeper understanding of the mechanisms being modelled. More mechanisms may make models more realistic, but they also make them harder to interpret. 6/8

All models are partial: Economic methodologist Uskali Mäki argues that models always work by isolating particular causal mechanisms. By manipulating the model we explore what happens when those mechanisms interact. Modelling works best when the number of mechanisms being modelled is fairly small 5/8

This is often how models in the public domain are represented: think about economic forecasts from the UK Office for budgetary responsibility. They are treated as definitive statements on future economic performance, despite being inherently partial. 4/8

It is always tempting to add more to a model, to make it more 'realistic'. This is particularly the case when we try to make models for policy: we (and policymakers) want a model of nearly everything. A complete description of reality so that when we model a policy we can "know" what will happen 3/8

Our epistemological approach is a core strength of the WISE. We adopt a pluralist position, developing 9 thematic models that speak to particular issues and take different theoretical and methodological paths to get there. The key advantage is that the models are fairly simple & tractable. 2/8

A thread of thoughts on epistemology and making change, sparked by our latest WISE Horizons future lab, hosted by the European Economic and Social Committee. 1/8

wisehorizons.world