Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

In the nineteenth century the global economy was worth a little more than $1 trillion, in today’s money. That means each year capital needed to find new investments worth about $30 billion – a significant sum. This required a huge effort on the part of capital, including the colonial expansion that characterised the nineteenth century. Today the global economy is worth over $80 trillion, so to maintain an acceptable rate of growth capital needs to find outlets for new investments worth another $2.5 trillion next year. That’s the size of the entire British economy – one of the biggest in the world. Somehow we have to add the equivalent of another British economy next year, on top of what we are already doing, and then add even more than that the following year, and so on. Where can this quantity of growth possibly be found? The pressures become enormous. It’s what is driving the pharmaceutical companies behind the opioid crisis in the United States; the beef companies that are burning down the Amazon; the arms companies that lobby against gun control; the oil companies that bankroll climate denialism; and the retail firms that are invading our lives with ever-more sophisticated advertising techniques to get us to buy things we don’t actually want. These are not ‘bad apples’ – they are obeying the iron law of capital.