Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

Every time capital bumps up against barriers to accumulation (say a saturated market, a minimum-wage law, or environmental protections), then like a giant vampire squid it writhes in a desperate attempt to whip those barriers out of the way and plunge its tentacles into new sources of growth.3 This is what is known as a ‘fix’.4 The enclosure movement was a fix. Colonisation was a fix. The Atlantic slave trade was a fix. The Opium Wars against China were a fix. The western expansion of the United States was a fix. Each one of these fixes – all of them violent – opened up new frontiers for appropriation and accumulation, all in service of capital’s growth imperative.

Over the past 500 years, an entire infrastructure has been created to facilitate the expansion of capital: limited liability, corporate personhood, stock markets, shareholder value rules, fractional reserve banking, credit ratings – we live in a world that’s increasingly organised around the imperatives of accumulation.

The concrete use-values of economic production (meeting human needs) have been subordinated to the pursuit of abstract exchange-value (GDP growth).

As labour productivity improves, firms need fewer workers. People get laid off and unemployment rises; poverty and homelessness go up. Governments have to respond by scrambling to generate more growth just to create new jobs. But the crisis never goes away; it just keeps recurring, year after year. This is known as the ‘productivity trap’.12 We are in the absurd position of needing perpetual growth just in order to avoid societal collapse.

The consumption gap between the global North and global South has exploded since 1990. In per-capita terms, a full 81% of growth in material use during this period is due to increased consumption in rich nations. If we want to build a more humane and ecological economy, we need to be doing exactly the opposite: we need to shrink the gap.

Even in liberal nations women come under heavy social pressure to reproduce, often to the point where those who choose to have fewer or no children are interrogated and stigmatised. Poverty exacerbates these problems considerably. And of course capitalism itself creates pressures for population growth: more people means more labour, cheaper labour, and more consumers. These pressures filter into our culture, and even into national policy:

What brings a nation’s birth rate down? Investing in child health, so that parents can be confident their children will survive; investing in women’s health and reproductive rights, so that women have greater control over their own bodies and family size; investing in girls’ education to expand their choices and opportunities; and ensuring economic security for all.

The patterns of extraction that characterised colonisation remain very much in place today. But this time, instead of being seized by force, those resources are being extracted and sold, for cheap, by governments that have been rendered dependent on foreign investment and beholden to the growth imperatives of capitalism.

The trauma of climate breakdown in the South directly echoes the trauma of colonisation. The South has suffered twice over: first from the appropriation of resources and labour that fuelled the North’s industrial rise, and now from the appropriation of atmospheric commons by the North’s industrial emissions.

The natural process of growth is always finite.

Under capital’s growth imperative, there is no horizon – no future point at which economists and politicians say we will have enough money or enough stuff. There is no end, in the double sense of the term: no maturity and no purpose. The unquestioned assumption is that growth can and should carry on for ever, for its own sake. It is astonishing, when you think about it, that the dominant belief in economics holds that no matter how rich a country has become, their GDP should keep rising, year after year, with no identifiable end point. It is the definition of absurdity.

In fact, one can imagine that GDP might continue growing even as social and ecological systems begin to collapse. Capital will pile into new growth sectors like sea walls, border militarisation, Arctic mining and desalinisation plants. Indeed, many of the world’s most powerful governments and corporations are already positioning themselves to capitalise on likely disaster scenarios. They know very well what’s ahead if we carry on with business as usual.

and Elon Musk has shown that it’s possible to mass-produce storage batteries

First you establish massive tree plantations around the world. The trees suck CO2 out of the atmosphere as they grow. Then you harvest the trees, churn them into pellets, burn them in power plants to generate energy, capture the carbon emissions at the chimneys and store it all underground where it can never escape. Voila: a global energy system that produces ‘negative emissions’. This technology is known as BECCS: bio-energy with carbon capture and storage.

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And let’s not pretend that powerful nations are going to willingly give their own land over to biofuels; it’s more likely they’ll attempt to seize land elsewhere, setting off a kind of climate colonialism. Where wars were once fought over access to oil, they would instead be fought over land for biofuels.

Afraid of calling for steeper emissions cuts, policymakers have been using BECCS as an excuse to carry on with the status quo. Some of the other key figures behind early articulations of BECCS have also raised questions, pointing out that the technology was only ever meant to be used on a small scale. They warned from the beginning that a large-scale rollout would be a social and ecological disaster – and yet modellers have run with it anyhow.

Scientists at the Stockholm Environment Institute calculate that rich countries need to reach zero emissions before 2030.13

while it’s possible to transition to 100% renewable energy, we cannot do it fast enough to stay under 1.5°C or 2°C if we continue to grow the global economy at existing rates. Again: more growth means more energy demand, and more energy demand makes it all the more difficult (and probably impossible) to generate enough renewable capacity to meet it in the short time we have left.

But while sunshine and wind are obviously clean, the infrastructure we need to capture it is not. Far from it. The transition to renewables is going to require a dramatic increase in the extraction of metals and rare-earth minerals, with real ecological and social costs.

When we innovate more efficient ways to use energy and resources, total consumption may briefly drop, but it quickly rebounds to an even higher rate. Why? Because companies use the savings to reinvest in ramping up more production. In the end, the sheer scale effect of growth swamps even the most spectacular efficiency improvements.

The technological innovations that have contributed most to growth have done so not because they enable us to use less nature, but because they enable us to use more.

Lashed to the growth imperative, technology is used not to do the same amount of stuff in less time, but rather to do more stuff in the same amount of time. The steam engine, the cotton gin, fishing trawlers – these technologies have contributed so spectacularly to growth not because money springs forth from them automatically, but because they have enabled capital to bring ever-greater swathes of nature into production.

recycling rates have been declining over time, not improving. In 2018, the global economy achieved a recycling rate of 9.1%. Two years later it was down to 8.6%. This isn’t because our recycling systems are getting worse. It’s because growth in total material demand is outstripping our gains in recycling.

When capital is no longer allowed to plunder nature in order to fuel the growth imperative, we must ask ourselves: what new forms of exploitation might it devise? The first culprit will be human labour.

Let’s not pretend either that capital’s need for constant expansion is going to only make better products. That would be naïve. When capital has bumped up against limits to profit-growth in the past, it has found fixes in things like colonisation, structural adjustment programmes, wars, restrictive patent laws, nefarious debt instruments, land grabs, privatisation, and enclosing commons like water and seeds.

They are willing to risk everything – literally everything – just to keep GDP rising. And yet, remarkably, none of these people has ever bothered to justify their core premise – the assumption that we need to keep increasing production, year-on-year, for ever. It is simply taken as an article of faith. Most people don’t stop to question it, and indeed in some circles to do so is a kind of heresy.

If we’re willing to imagine speculative science-fiction fairy tales to keep the existing economy chugging along, why not just imagine a different kind of economy altogether?

Teams from the World Bank and the IMF went around the global South arguing that if governments wanted to improve social indicators like infant mortality and life expectancy, they needn’t bother building public health systems (which many of them had been trying to do after the end of colonialism); instead, they should just focus on paving the way for growth. Do whatever it takes: get rid of environmental protections, slash labour laws, cut spending on healthcare and education, reduce taxes on the rich – it might seem regressive, and it may do a bit of harm in the short term, but ultimately it’s the only true way to improve people’s lives.

For the vast majority of the history of capitalism, growth didn’t deliver welfare improvements in the lives of ordinary people; in fact, it did exactly the opposite.

Artificial scarcity quite often caused the livelihoods and welfare of ordinary people to collapse even as GDP grew.

Historians today point out that it began with a startlingly simple intervention, something McKeown had overlooked: sanitation.

Empirical data from the United States shows that water sanitation measures alone explain three quarters of the decline in infant mortality in major cities between 1900 and 1936, and nearly half the decline in total mortality.4 A recent study led by an international team of medical scientists found that, after sanitation, the greatest predictor of improved life expectancy is access to universal healthcare, including child vaccination.5 And once you have these basic interventions in place, the biggest single driver of continued improvements in life expectancy happens to be education – and particularly women’s education. The more you learn, the longer you live.

What explains the remarkable results that these countries have achieved? It’s simple: they’ve all invested in building high-quality universal healthcare and education systems.13 When it comes to delivering long, healthy, flourishing lives for all, this is what counts. The good news is that this is not at all expensive to do. In fact, universal public services are significantly more cost-effective to run than their private counterparts.

the continued pursuit of growth in high-income nations is exacerbating inequality and political instability,18 and contributing to problems like stress and depression from overwork and lack of sleep, ill health from pollution, diabetes and heart disease, and so on.

Researchers have found that – once again – it’s not income itself that matters, but how it’s distributed.20 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.

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.22 This means things like universal healthcare, unemployment insurance, pensions, paid holiday and sick leave, affordable housing, daycare and strong minimum wages. When people live in a fair, caring society, where everyone has equal access to social goods, they don’t have to spend their time worrying about how to cover their basic needs day to day – they can enjoy the art of living. And instead of feeling they are in constant competition with their neighbours, they can build bonds of social solidarity.

We should look at people’s sense of meaning – a more profound state that lies beneath the tumult of daily emotions. And when it comes to meaning, what matters has even less to do with GDP. People feel they have meaningful lives when they have the opportunity to express compassion, co-operation, community and human connection.

Over and over again, we see that the excess GDP that characterises the richest nations wins them nothing when it comes to what really matters.

When it comes to human welfare, it’s not income as such that matters. It’s what that income can buy, in terms of access to the things we need to live well. It’s the ‘welfare purchasing power’ of income that counts.

This means fundamentally reversing the neoliberal policies that have dominated for the past forty years. In their desperate hunt for growth, governments have privatised public services, slashed social spending, cut wages and labour protections, handed tax cuts to the richest and sent inequality soaring. In an age of climate breakdown, we need to be doing exactly the opposite.

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.

Right now, more resources and money flow from the global South to the global North each year than the other way around. This might be surprising to hear, because we are accustomed to the familiar narrative that emphasises all the aid that rich countries give to poor countries, which amounts to around $130 billion a year. But that flow of aid – and even the flow of private investment, which adds up to another $500 billion a year – is outstripped many times over by flows that are siphoned in the other direction. There is a net drain from poor countries to rich countries.

We live on an abundant planet. 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.

It will require an enormous struggle against those who benefit so prodigiously from the status quo. And presumably this is why some are so eager that we avoid this course of action: they would prefer to sacrifice the planet in order to maintain the existing distribution of global income.

it’s important to remember that many of the most important innovations of the modern era, including truly life-changing technologies we use every day, were funded not by growth-oriented firms but rather by public bodies. From plumbing to the internet, vaccines to microchips, even the technologies that make up smartphones – all of these came from publicly funded research. We don’t need aggregate growth to deliver innovation. If the objective is to achieve specific kinds of innovation, then it makes more sense to invest in those directly, or incentivise investment with targeted policy measures, rather than grow the whole economy indiscriminately and hope it will deliver the innovation we want.

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.

We like to think of capitalism as a system that’s built on rational efficiency, but in reality it is exactly the opposite. 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.

Ultimately, governments need to set concrete targets for reducing material and energy use. As we saw in Chapter 3, taxes alone won’t be enough.

It is those with less leisure time who tend to consume more intensively: they rely on high-speed travel, meal deliveries, impulsive purchases, retail therapy, and so on.