A degenerative system, in Ethan Roland and Gregory Landua's 📝Regenerative Enterprise, is one that grows financial and material capital by depleting the living, cultural, and 📝spiritual capital that generates all 📝wealth.
The definition depends on reading an economy through all of the 📝8 Forms of Capital rather than 📝money alone. Through that lens, the authors write, "degenerative systems optimize the increase of financial and material capital by depleting the fundamental generative basis of living, cultural, and spiritual capital," and "intentionally apply intellectual, experiential, and 📝social capital to achieve the increase of financial and material capital at the expense of living capital" (p. 15). A system can be profitable and still be degenerating.
Roland and Landua locate the global economy here. They propose "that the ongoing growth of 📝financial capital is only possible through the loss of other forms of capital" (p. 11), and describe a "mono-capital trajectory" in which the world depletes "the pools of most forms of capital while exponentially increasing the amount of financial capital" (p. 13). The single flow they identify as most in need of reversal is the conversion of living capital into financial capital, from mountaintop-removal coal mining to ocean over-fishing (p. 25).
The book also explains why well-meant alternatives slide back toward degeneration. Because the current system requires every enterprise to turn a financial profit or fail, most triple-bottom-line businesses are eventually "forced to reduce their triple bottom line to a single bottom line" (pp. 23–24).