Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

in theory we could achieve all of our social goals, for every person in the world, with less GDP than we presently have, simply by investing in public goods, and distributing income and opportunity more fairly.

Societies with unequal income distribution tend to be less happy. There are a number of reasons for this. Inequality creates a sense of unfairness; it erodes social trust, cohesion and solidarity. It’s also linked to poorer health, higher levels of crime and less social mobility. People who live in unequal societies tend to be more frustrated, anxious, insecure and discontent with their lives. They have higher rates of depression and addiction.

We constantly want more, not because we need it but because we want to keep up with the Joneses.

We keep buying more stuff in order to feel better about ourselves, but it never works because the benchmark against which we measure the good life is pushed perpetually out of reach by the rich (and, these days, by social media influencers).

countries that have robust welfare systems have the highest levels of human happiness, when controlling for other factors. And the more generous and universal the welfare system, the happier everyone becomes.17 This means things like universal healthcare, unemployment insurance, pensions, paid holiday and sick leave, affordable housing, daycare and strong minimum wages.

Individuals in the richest 1% emit one hundred times more than individuals in the poorest half of the human population.23 Why? It’s not only because they consume more stuff than everybody else, but also because the stuff they consume is more energy-intensive: huge houses, big cars, private jets, frequent flights, long-distance holidays, luxury imports, and so on.24 And if the rich have more money than they can spend, which is virtually always the case, then they invest their excess in expansionary industries that are quite often ecologically destructive. This leads us to a simple but radical conclusion: any policy that reduces the incomes of the very rich will have a positive ecological benefit. And because the excess incomes of the rich win them nothing when it comes to welfare, this can be accomplished without any cost to social outcomes. This position is widely shared among researchers who study this issue. The French economist Thomas Piketty, one of the world’s leading experts on inequality, doesn’t mince his words: ‘A drastic reduction in purchasing power of the richest would therefore in itself have a substantial impact on the reduction of emissions at global level.’

Americans are under extraordinary pressure to work ever-longer hours and pursue ever-higher incomes, because the cost of accessing basic goods like healthcare and education is not only outrageously high, but constantly rising. Decent health insurance can be prohibitively expensive to buy, and the cost of deductibles and co-payments is often enough to sink people into debt for their whole lives. Health insurance premiums have nearly quadrupled since 2000.27 As for education, a family with two kids can expect to pay up to half a million dollars just to put them through college – almost 500% more than in the 1980s.28 These prices have nothing to do with the ‘real’ cost of healthcare and education: they are an artefact of a system organised around profit.

By expanding people’s access to public services and other commons, we can improve the welfare purchasing power of people’s incomes, enabling flourishing lives for all without needing any additional growth.

growthism is little more than ideology – an ideology that benefits a few at the expense of our collective future.

it’s possible for global South countries to achieve strong outcomes on every human development indicator (including life expectancy, well-being, sanitation, income, education, electricity, employment and democracy) while remaining within or near planetary boundaries. Here again, Costa Rica – which I described above – provides an excellent example of what this might look like.32 But this requires an entirely different way of thinking about development. Instead of pursuing growth for its own sake and hoping that it will magically improve people’s lives, the goal must be to focus on improving people’s lives first and foremost – and if that requires or entails economic growth, then so be it. In other words, organise the economy around the needs of humans and ecology, rather than the other way around.

investing in robust universal social policy to guarantee healthcare, education, water, housing, social security. It means land reform so that small farmers have access to the resources that they need to thrive. It means using tariffs and subsidies to protect and encourage domestic industries. It means decent wages, labour laws and a progressive distribution of national income. And it means building economies that are organised around renewable energy and ecological regeneration rather than around fossil fuels and extractivism.

What the South needs, then, is to be free of structural adjustment – in other words, free from control by foreign creditors – so governments can pursue the progressive economic policies that we know to be so effective at delivering human development.

people who work in export industries in the South lose around $2.8 trillion in underpaid wages each year, because they lack bargaining power in international trade.41 One straightforward way to address this problem would be to introduce a global minimum wage.

some $1 trillion is stolen out of global South countries each year and stashed in offshore secrecy jurisdictions, mostly by multinational companies seeking to evade taxes.42 For example, companies might generate profits in Guatemala or South Africa, but then shift that money into tax havens like Luxembourg or the British Virgin Islands. This starves global South countries of the revenues they need to invest in public services. But it is not an intractable problem: we could shut down the tax evasion system with laws to regulate cross-border trade and corporate accounting.

the international institutions that govern the global economy are deeply anti-democratic, and tilted heavily in favour of rich nations. At the World Bank and the IMF, the United States holds veto power over all major decisions, and high-income countries control the majority of the vote. In the World Trade Organization, bargaining power depends largely on GDP, so the countries that grew rich during the colonial period get to determine the rules of international trade. Democratising these institutions would ensure that global South countries have a real say in the decisions that affect them, and greater control over their own economic policy.

We could cancel odious debts, freeing poor countries to invest in public healthcare and education instead of spending all their money on interest payments to foreign banks; we could put an end to corporate land grabs, and distribute land back to small farmers;

If we can find ways to share what we already have more fairly, we won’t need to plunder the Earth for more. Justice is the antidote to growth.

This kind of mobilisation requires government policy to guide and direct existing financial resources. The vast majority of major, collaborative infrastructure projects around the world have been guided by government policy and funded by public resources: sanitation systems, road systems, railway networks, public health systems, national power grids, the postal service. These are not the spontaneous outcomes of market forces, much less of abstract growth. Projects like these require public investment. Once we realise this, it becomes clear that we can fund the transition quite easily by directing existing public resources from, say, fossil fuel subsidies (which presently stand at $5.2 trillion, 6.5% of global GDP) and military expenditure ($1.8 trillion) into solar panels, batteries and wind turbines.

We need new indicators of progress – but that’s not enough

GDP is not an arbitrary metric of economic performance. It’s not as though it’s some kind of mistake – an accounting error that just needs to be corrected. It was devised specifically in order to measure the welfare of capitalism. It externalises social and ecological costs because capitalism externalises social and ecological costs. It’s naïve to imagine that if policymakers stop measuring GDP, capital will automatically cease its constant pursuit of ever-increasing returns, and our economies will become more sustainable. Those who call for a shift towards well-being as the sole solution tend to miss this point.

We cannot save the world by playing by the rules. Because the rules have to be changed. Greta Thunberg

we need to change how the economy works. Think of all the energy that’s needed to extract and produce and transport all the stuff the economy churns out each year. It takes energy to pull raw materials out of the earth, and to power the factories that turn them into finished products. It takes energy to package those products and send them around the world on trucks and trains and aeroplanes, to build warehouses for storage and retail outlets for sales, and to process all the waste when they’re binned. Capitalism is a giant energy-sucking machine.1 In order to reduce energy use, we need to slow it all down. Slow down the mad pace of extraction, production and waste, and slow down the mad pace of our lives.

degrowth is not about reducing GDP. It is about reducing the material and energy throughput of the economy to bring it back into balance with the living world, while distributing income and resources more fairly, liberating people from needless work, and investing in the public goods that people need to thrive.

Degrowth is completely different. It is about shifting to a different kind of economy altogether – an economy that doesn’t need growth in the first place. An economy that’s organised around human flourishing and ecological stability, rather than around the constant accumulation of capital.

The majority of commodity production is geared toward accumulating profit rather than toward satisfying human needs.

Step 1. End planned obsolescence Nowhere is this tendency clearer than when it comes to the practice of planned obsolescence. Companies desperate to increase sales seek to create products that are intended to break down and require replacement after a relatively short period of time.

People end up scrapping huge chunks of perfectly good metal and plastic every few years for no good reason at all.

Apple’s growth strategy seems to rely on a triple tactic: after a few years of use, devices become so slow as to be worthless; repairs are either impossible or prohibitively expensive; and advertising campaigns are designed to convince people that their products are obsolete anyhow.

Our biggest technology firms, which we celebrate as our greatest innovators, stifle the innovation we need because it runs against the growth imperative.

Planned obsolescence is a form of intentional inefficiency. The inefficiency is (bizarrely) rational in terms of maximising profits, but from the perspective of human need, and from the perspective of ecology, it is madness: madness in terms of the resources it wastes, and madness in terms of the needless energy it consumes. It is madness too in terms of human labour, when you consider the millions of hours that are poured into producing smartphones and washing machines and furniture simply to fill the void created, intentionally, by planned obsolescence. It’s like shovelling ecosystems and human lives into a bottomless pit of demand. And the void will never be filled.

With simple legislation, we could require manufacturers to guarantee their products for the duration of maximum feasible lifespans. If Apple was held to a 10-year guarantee, watch how quickly they would redesign their products to be resilient and upgradeable. We could also introduce a ‘right to repair’, making it illegal for companies to produce things that can’t be repaired by ordinary users, or by independent mechanics, with affordable replacement parts. Laws along these lines are already being considered in a number of European parliaments. Another option would be to switch to a lease model for large appliances and devices, requiring manufacturers to assume full responsibility for all repairs, with modular upgrades to improve efficiency whenever possible. Measures like these would ensure that products (not just appliances and computers but furniture and houses and cars) would last many times longer than they presently do. And the effects would be significant. If washing machines and smartphones lasted four times longer, we would consume 75% fewer of them. That’s a big reduction of material throughput, without any negative impact on people’s lives. In fact, if anything it would improve quality of life, as people wouldn’t have to deal with the frustration and expense of constantly replacing their equipment.

Step 2. Cut advertising

Up to the 1920s, consumption was a relatively perfunctory act: people just bought what they needed.

Firms like Google and Facebook are worth more than companies like BP and Exxon, purely on the promise of advertising. We think of these companies as innovators, but the majority of their innovations appear to be focused on developing ever more sophisticated tools to get people to buy things.

We can introduce quotas to reduce total ad expenditure. We can legislate against the use of psychologically manipulative techniques. And we can liberate public spaces from ads – both offline and online – where people don’t have a choice about what they see.

Cutting ads has a direct positive impact on people’s well-being.12 In addition to slowing down needless consumption, these measures would also free our minds – so we can follow our thoughts, our imaginations, our creativity without being constantly interrupted. And we can fill those spaces instead with art and poetry, or with messages that build community and affirm intrinsic values.

in the age of the internet, people don’t actually need ads in order to find and evaluate products. A simple search is enough to do the trick. The internet has rendered advertising obsolete (ironically, for a place that has become filled with ads), and we should embrace this fact.

Step 3. Shift from ownership to usership

A lot of the stuff we consume is necessary but rarely used. Pieces of equipment like lawnmowers and power tools are used perhaps once a month, for maybe an hour or two at most, and for the rest of the year lie idle. Manufacturers want everyone to own a garage full of things that can otherwise quite easily be shared, but a more rational approach would be to establish neighbourhood workshops where equipment can be stored and used on an as-need basis. Some communities are already doing this, maintaining shared equipment with a neighbourhood fund. Projects like these can be scaled up by city governments, and enabled by apps for easy access.

We know we need to switch to electric cars, but ultimately we also need to dramatically scale down the total number of cars. The most powerful intervention by far is to invest in affordable (or even free) public transportation, which is more efficient in terms of the materials and energy required to move people around. This is vital for any plan to get off fossil fuels. Bicycles are even better, as many European cities are learning (as I write this, Milan is handing over 35 kilometres of streets to cyclists, in a bid to keep pollution low after their coronavirus lockdown). And for journeys that can’t be made with either, we can develop publicly owned, app-based platforms for sharing cars between us – without the rentier intermediation that has made platforms like Uber and Airbnb so problematic.

Step 4. End food waste

up to 50% of all the food that’s produced in the world – equivalent to 2 billion tonnes – ends up wasted each year.

France and Italy have both recently passed laws preventing supermarkets from wasting food (they have to donate unsold food to charities instead).

Step 5. Scale down ecologically destructive industries

The fossil fuel industry is the most obvious example,

beef industry, for instance. Nearly 60% of global agricultural land is used for beef – either directly for cattle pasture or indirectly for growing feed.16 It’s one of the most resource-inefficient foods on the planet, in terms of the land and energy it requires per calorie or nutrient. And the pressure to find land for pasture and feed is the single greatest driver of deforestation.

scale down the arms industry and the private jet industry. We could scale down the production of single-use plastics, disposable coffee cups, SUVs and McMansions

scale down the commercial airline industry, starting with policies like a frequent flyer levy, ending routes that can be served by train, and getting rid of first-class and business-class cabins, which have the highest CO2 per passenger mile. And we must shift from an economy based on energy-intensive long-distance supply chains to one where production happens closer to home.

During the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, we all learned the difference between ‘essential’ industries and superfluous ones; it quickly became apparent which industries are organised around use-value, and which ones are mostly about exchange-value. We can build on those lessons.

But what about jobs?