Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

Kuznets warned that we should never use GDP as a normal measure of economic progress. He thought we should improve it to account for the social costs of growth, so that governments would take human well-being into account and pursue more balanced objectives. But then the Second World War struck. As the Nazi threat mounted, Kuznets’ concerns about well-being faded into the background. Governments needed to count all economic activities – even negative ones – so they could identify every shred of productive capacity and income available for the war effort. This more aggressive vision of GDP ended up becoming dominant. And at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, when world leaders sat down to decide the rules that would govern the world economy in the wake of the war, it was enshrined as the key indicator of economic progress – exactly what Kuznets had warned against.