Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

A farmer might grow a pear because they like its juicy-sweet flavour or because it takes the edge off their hunger in the afternoon. An artisan might build a chair because it’s useful for sitting on: to relax on the porch or to enjoy a meal around the table. And they might choose to sell these things in order to get money to buy other useful things, like a hoe for their garden or a pocketknife for their daughter. In fact, this is how most of us participate in the economy today. When we go to the shops it’s usually to buy things that will be useful to us, like ingredients for dinner or a jacket to protect against the winter cold. We can summarise this kind of economy like this, where C stands for commodity (like a chair or a pear), and M stands for money: C1 → M → C2 This might seem like a good description of capitalism on the face of it – free exchange of useful things between individuals. Just like in a farmers’ market or a souk. But in reality there is nothing here that is particularly capitalist. It could be any economic system at all, at more or less any time or place in human history. What makes capitalism distinctive is that, for capitalists, value is reckoned quite differently. While a capitalist might recognise the usefulness of things like chairs and pears, the goal of producing them isn’t to have a nice place to sit or a tasty afternoon snack, or even to sell them for other useful things. The goal is to produce and sell them for one purpose above all others: to m...