Eternal Prosperity: Reconstructing Economic Growth Theory Without Time

Standard economic growth theory models output as a time derivative (dY/dt), embedding time as anunbounded independent variable. This paper argues that the formal choice is not neutral: it rendersinfinite growth formally admissible and generates five systematic evaluative distortions—movementprivilege, inaction-as-loss, destruction-as-growth, the invisibility of persistent value, and the complicity ofmonetisation. The paper then distinguishes two concepts that “time” has been made to carry in economics.Time as a coordinate axis is unbounded, homogeneous, and independent; it is the tof dY/dt, and itis eliminable. Time as a human lifetime is finite, irreversible, and non-interchangeable; it is not anaxis but a constraint, and it is the natural unit of economic evaluation. The distinction dissolves thestandard objection that economics is constitutively temporal—memory, expectation, path dependence,and entropic irreversibility all concern the second concept—while grounding elimination of the first ina domestic observation: no economic agent occupies t→∞, so an economics that evaluates by ratesevaluates in a register no participant inhabits. Temporal eliminativism in physics (Barbour; Rovelli) isinvoked as precedent that such a reconstruction is achievable, not as authority for its warrant. Usingthe Landau–Stuart equation as a bridging formalism, the paper shows that the saturated configuration isdetermined by constraint parameters without reference to time, and recasts Raworth’s doughnut modeland Daly’s steady-state economics as constraint-satisfaction structures they anticipated intuitively butcould not formally ground. Prosperity emerges as a state of constraint fulfilment rather than a rate of