Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

By contrast, when people are given time off they tend to gravitate towards lower-impact activities: exercise, volunteering, learning, and socialising with friends and family.

But perhaps the most important part about shortening the working week is that it frees people to spend more time caring – be it nursing a sick relative, playing with children, or helping restore a woodland. This essential reproductive work (most of which is normally done by women) is totally devalued under capitalism; it is externalised, unpaid, invisible and unrepresented in GDP figures.

Because gains in labour productivity have been appropriated by capital. Instead of shortening the working week and raising wages, companies have pocketed the extra profits and required employees to keep working just as much as before.

In 2017, Steve Easterbrook, the CEO of McDonald’s, earned $21.7 million while the median full-time McDonald’s worker earned $7,017. That’s a ratio of 3,100 to one. In other words, the average McDonald’s employee would have to work 3,100 years – every day from the advent of ancient Greece until now – to earn what Steve Easterbrook received in his annual pay cheque.

One approach would be to introduce a cap on wage ratios: a ‘maximum wage’ policy.

One way to solve this problem is with a wealth tax (or a solidarity tax, perhaps). The economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman have proposed a 10% annual marginal tax on wealth holdings over $1 billion. This would push the richest to sell some of their assets, thus distributing wealth more fairly. But in an era of ecological crisis, we must be more ambitious than this. After all, nobody ‘deserves’ this kind of wealth. It’s not earned, it’s extracted: from underpaid workers, from cheap nature, from rent-seeking, from political capture and so on.

Artificial scarcity served as the engine of capital accumulation. This same logic operates today. It’s all around us. Take the labour market, for example. People feel the force of scarcity in the constant threat of unemployment. Workers must become ever more disciplined and productive at work or else lose their jobs to someone who will be more productive still – usually someone poorer or more desperate. But as productivity rises, workers get laid off – and governments have to scramble for ways to grow the economy in order to create new jobs. Workers themselves join in the chorus calling for growth, and push to elect politicians who promise it.

Inequality stimulates a sense of inadequacy. It makes people feel that they need to work longer hours to earn more income to buy unnecessary stuff, just so they can have a bit of dignity.

We normally think of capitalism as a system that generates so much (just consider the extraordinary cornucopia of stuff that’s displayed on television and in shopfronts). But in reality it is a system that is organised around the constant production of scarcity. Capitalism transforms even the most spectacular gains in productivity and income not into abundance and human freedom, but into new forms of artificial scarcity. It must, or else it risks shutting down the engine of accumulation itself. In a growth-oriented system, the objective is not to satisfy human needs, but to avoid satisfying human needs. It is irrational and ecologically violent.

The main reason our economy is so loaded with debt is because it runs on a money system that is itself debt.

banks lend out about ten times more money than they actually have. So where does that extra money come from, if it doesn’t actually exist? Banks create it out of thin air when they credit your account. They literally loan it into existence. More than 90% of the money that’s presently circulating in our economy is created in this manner. In other words, almost every single dollar that passes through our hands represents somebody’s debt. And this debt has to be paid back with interest – with more work, more extraction and more production. This is extraordinary, when you think about it. It means that banks effectively sell a product (money) that they produce out of nothing, for free, and then require people to go out into the real world and extract and produce real value to pay for it.

It’s not ‘human nature’ that’s the problem here. It’s that we have a political system that allows a few people to sabotage our collective future for their own private gain.

The answer is that our ‘democracies’ are not actually very democratic at all. As income distribution has grown increasingly unequal, the economic power of the richest has translated directly into increased political power. Elites have managed to capture our democratic systems.

As a result of political capture, the interests of economic elites in the US almost always prevail in government policy decisions even when the vast majority of citizens disagree with them. In this sense, the US resembles a plutocracy more than a democracy.

One of the reasons we’re staring down the barrel of an ecological crisis right now is because our political systems have been completely corrupted. The preferences of the majority who want to sustain our planet’s ecology for future generations are trumped by a minority of elites who are quite happy to liquidate everything. If our struggle for a more ecological economy is to succeed, we must seek to expand democracy wherever possible. That means kicking big money out of politics; it means radical media reform; strict campaign finance laws; reversing corporate personhood; dismantling monopolies; shifting to co-operative ownership structures; putting workers on company boards; democratising shareholder votes; democratising institutions of global governance; and managing collective resources as commons wherever possible.

Ultimately, what we call ‘the economy’ is our material relationship with each other and with the rest of the living world. We must ask ourselves: what do we want that relationship to be like? Do we want it to be about domination and extraction? Or do we want it to be about reciprocity and care?

What are we doing here? Where are we going? What’s it all for? What is the end, as it were, of human existence? Growthism prevents us from stopping to think about these questions. It prevents us from reflecting on what we actually want our society to achieve. Indeed, the pursuit of growth comes to stand in for thought itself. We are in a trance. We slog on, mindlessly, unaware of what we’re doing, unaware of what’s happening around us, unaware of what we are sacrificing … who we are sacrificing.

I finished writing this book during the coronavirus lockdown in London. I will always remember it as a strange and eerie time. We all suddenly realized what parts of the economy really matter – and whose jobs we depend on most.