The University of Tartu’s Delta Centre of Economics is the pinnacle of Estonian economic thought, yet within its walls a picture emerges that is oddly at odds with the building’s modern façade. Instead of discussing how to grow Estonia’s economy, students — who are expected to become the country’s future economic leaders and analysts — are promoting a narrative in which humanity is a burden on the planet, consumption is a sin, and salvation lies in austerity, writes Hugo Rait Mei.
This article is prompted by my recent experience in an economics course at the University of Tartu, where students were required to give group presentations on economic topics of their own choosing.
To my shock, the overwhelming majority of presentations were steeped in consumption‑hostile green ideology infused with neo‑Marxism. Where does this deeply rooted support for central planning and hostility toward capitalism come from in a generation that has grown up during a time when the free market has provided them with unprecedented prosperity? Why has growth‑critical “degrowth” become the new dogma, while the classical, growth‑oriented view of economics is denounced as something evil?
One possible answer lies in the paradox that the better people live, the worse they feel about it. Today’s students have not experienced empty store shelves or rationing under Soviet rule; for them, abundance is a self‑evident normality. When your stomach is full and a smartphone is in your pocket, attention shifts to the top of Maslow’s pyramid, where one searches for moral justification for one’s existence.
As a result, an interesting “us versus them” framework has emerged: if so many people in the developing world live in poverty, then the West must be to blame, because we live unjustifiably better lives — presumably at their expense.
This false sense of guilt has been cultivated through social media, where young people are fed images of natural disasters and poverty in the Global South as a direct consequence of the Western world’s high standard of living.
Like the German people after World War II, today’s youth have internalized a sense of collective guilt — so‑called white guilt — and poverty is idealized as moral purity. If we consume less, we supposedly save someone else on the other side of the planet. This emotionally charged argument ignores the fact that economic growth is precisely what has helped more than one billion people escape extreme poverty over the past quarter century (The World Bank, Ending Extreme Poverty).
TikTok and Instagram do not lend themselves to complex economic theories about comparative advantage or the effects of interest rates on investment. On social media, capitalism has become a convenient punching bag for all the world’s problems.
When a young person consumes content that constantly repeats the message that the system is broken, they begin to believe it — even when their own life demonstrates the opposite. And when the vast majority of peers support abandoning the pursuit of economic growth and transitioning away from a capitalist system to something else, it takes real courage to say clearly that what we actually need is an efficient market economy and the economic growth that comes with it in order to genuinely improve human well‑being.
Of course, social media is not the only force shaping young people’s views. What is taught in elementary and secondary schools also has a major impact. It seems that over the past decade the emphasis in education has shifted from knowledge‑based learning to values‑based instruction. Classrooms no longer teach how and why it is important to create added value in the economy, but rather how to protect nature — because pristine nature is considered the world’s most important value, far more important than people themselves.
This approach is misguided. As a result, young people arrive at university believing that ecological footprint matters more than value added per worker. They do not see the entrepreneur as a driver of society, but as a waster of resources.
Most troubling of all is that poverty itself is increasingly seen as a solution to resource scarcity. Who in the last century would have believed that poverty would one day be romanticized? History has shown that stripping benefits from the more prosperous does not lead to the harmonious equality idealized by communism, but rather to deepening social conflict. It is ironic that at the University of Tartu — where forward‑looking solutions should be born — many young people look back nostalgically to a time no one truly wants to return to.
If we want Estonia and Europe to remain competitive in the world, we must once again speak about economic growth in a positive light. We must make it clear to young people that economic growth and environmental protection are not opposites, but that the former is a prerequisite for the latter.
Capitalism is, so far, the only economic system known to have been able to raise living standards on a mass scale. If we allow the “less is better” ideology to dominate in schools, we risk raising a generation that no longer knows how to create value in society, but only how to shrink what already exists. And that is how we become poor.
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