Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

In the new capitalist system, a mass of hidden female labour was appropriated by elites virtually for free. Descartes’ dualism was recruited for this task too. Within the dualist framework, bodies were set out on a spectrum. Women were regarded as closer to ‘nature’ than men. And they were treated accordingly – subordinated, controlled and exploited.42 No need for compensation. As with everything shunted into the category of ‘nature’, the costs of extraction were externalised.

During the colonial period, the peoples of the global South were routinely cast as ‘nature’: as ‘savages’, as ‘wild’, as less-than-human. Tellingly, the Spaniards referred to Indigenous Americans as naturales. Dualism was recruited in order to justify the appropriation not only of land in the colonies, but of the bodies of the colonised themselves. This played out clearly in the European slave trade. After all, in order to enslave someone, you first have to deny their humanity. Africans and Indigenous Americans were cast as objects in the European imagination, and exploited as such. As the Martiniquan writer Aimé Césaire put it, colonisation is, at base, a process of thingification.

We all know that the violence of colonisation was justified, by its perpetrators, as part of a ‘civilising mission’. What we tend not to grasp is that one of the key goals of this mission was to eradicate animist thought. The object was to turn the colonised into dualists – to colonise not only lands and bodies, but minds. As the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has put it: ‘Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conquest and subsequent political dictatorship. But its most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world.’

Take your local restaurant, for example. It makes a profit at the end of the year, but the owners are content with more or less the same profit year after year: enough to pay the rent, put food on the table for their family, and maybe go for a holiday in the summer. While such a business might participate in elements of capitalist logic (paying wages, making a profit), it is not capitalist as such, since ultimately the profit is organised around some conception of use-value. This is how the vast majority of small businesses operate. Such shops existed thousands of years before capitalism emerged.

We often talk about the relentless expansionary drive of corporations like Amazon or Facebook as due to greed; CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg are just obsessed with accumulating money and power, we might say. But it’s not quite so simple. The reality is that these firms, and the CEOs who run them, are subject to a structural imperative for growth. The Zuckerbergs of the world are just willing cogs in a bigger machine.

This tendency was noticed in 1772 by the mathematician Richard Price. Compound growth, he pointed out, ‘increases at first slowly … but, the rate of increase being continuously accelerated, it becomes in some time so rapid as to mock all the powers of the imagination’.

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.

The Depression devastated the economies of the United States and Western Europe, and governments found themselves scrambling for a response. In the United States, officials reached out to Simon Kuznets, a young economist from Belarus, and asked him to develop an accounting system that would reveal the monetary value of all the goods and services that the US produced each year. The idea was that if you can see what is happening in the economy more clearly, you can figure out where things are going wrong and intervene more effectively. Kuznets created a metric called Gross National Product, which provided the basis for the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) metric we use today. But Kuznets was careful to emphasise that GDP is flawed. It tallies up the market value of total production, but it doesn’t care whether that production is helpful or harmful. GDP makes no distinction between $100 worth of tear gas and $100 worth of education. And, perhaps more importantly, it does not account for the ecological and social costs of production. If you cut down a forest for timber, GDP goes up. If you extend the working day and push back the retirement age, GDP goes up. If pollution causes hospital visits to rise, GDP goes up.

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.

Initially, economists used GDP to measure ‘levels’ of economic output. Was the level too high, causing excess production and a glut of supply? Or was it too low, leaving people unable to get the goods they needed? During the Depression it was clear that output was too low – so to pull themselves out of it, Western governments invested heavily in infrastructure projects and created vast numbers of well-paid jobs, putting money into people’s pockets to stimulate demand and get things moving again. It worked, and GDP went up. But growth was not a goal in and of itself. Remember, this was the progressive era of President Franklin Roosevelt. For the first time in history, the goal was to raise the level of output specifically in order to improve people’s livelihoods and achieve progressive social outcomes – quite unlike during the previous 400 years. In other words, early progressive governments treated growth as a use-value.

This new focus on GDP growth for its own sake – growthism – forever changed the way that Western governments managed their economies. The progressive policies that had been used to improve social outcomes after the Great Depression, like higher wages, labour unions and investment in public health and education, suddenly became suspect. These policies had led to high levels of well-being, but in so doing had made labour too ‘expensive’ for capital to maintain a high rate of profit.

None of this is to say that growth is bad, in and of itself. That’s not my argument. It’s not growth that’s the problem, it’s growthism: the pursuit of growth for its own sake, or for the sake of capital accumulation, rather than to meet concrete human needs and social objectives.

It’s essential that we stabilise the size of the human population. The good news is that this is not a particularly difficult matter: as the economist Kate Raworth put it to me, ‘It’s one growth curve that the world actually knows how to flatten, so it’s not the one that keeps me awake at night.’ 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. With these policies in place, population growth falls fast – even within a single generation.24 Gender justice and economic justice must be central to any vision for a more ecological economy.

But stabilising the global population would not cause ecological damage to automatically level off, in and of itself. In the absence of more consumers, capital finds ways to get existing consumers to consume more. Indeed, that has been the dominant story for the past few hundred years: the growth rate of material use has always significantly outstripped the growth rate of the population. Indeed, material use keeps rising even when populations stabilise and decline. This has been the case in most historical examples of population stability under capitalism.

What’s happening here should be understood as a process of atmospheric colonisation. A small number of high-income nations have appropriated the vast majority of the safe atmospheric commons, and have contributed the vast majority of emissions in excess of the planetary boundary.

The data we now have on historical emissions reveals that the North’s industrialisation has also been a process of appropriating the atmosphere – what we might call atmospheric theft. And just as the first phase of colonisation wrought ecological and human destruction across the South, now so too is this. Ironically, despite having contributed virtually nothing to the climate crisis, the South bears the vast majority of the impact of climate breakdown.

Remember, this is happening at 1°C. Two degrees will be a death sentence for much of the global South. The only reason that people have come to accept 2°C as a reasonable target is because climate negotiators from the United States and other powerful countries have pushed for it, over the loud objections of their colleagues from the South – and particularly from Africa. When the 2°C target was announced at the Copenhagen summit in 2009, Lumumba Di-Aping, the Sudanese chief negotiator for the G77, said: ‘We have been asked to sign a suicide pact.’ ‘It is unfortunate,’ he went on, ‘that after 500 years-plus of interaction with the West we are still considered “disposables”.’

We can choose to keep shooting up the curve of exponential growth, bringing us ever closer to irreversible tipping points in ecological collapse, and hope that technology will save us. But if for some reason it doesn’t work, then we’re in trouble. It’s like jumping off a cliff while hoping that someone at the bottom will figure out how to build some kind of device to catch you before you crash into the rocks below, without having any idea as to whether they’ll actually be able to pull it off. It might work … but if not, it’s game over. Once you jump, you can’t change your mind.

Here’s how the Paris Agreement works. Each country submits a pledge on how much they will reduce their annual emissions. The pledges – known as Nationally Determined Contributions – are supposed to be set in line with the goal of keeping warming to 1.5°C. But if you add up all the pledges that have been made by signatory nations as of 2020, you’ll notice something rather strange: they don’t come anywhere close to keeping us under 1.5°C. In fact, they don’t even keep us under 2°C. Even if all the countries in the world fulfil their pledges – which are voluntary and non-binding, so there’s certainly no guarantee of this – global emissions will keep rising. We’ll still be hurtling towards 3.3°C of global warming by the end of the century.

This technology is known as BECCS: bio-energy with carbon capture and storage. When Obersteiner published his paper there was no evidence that the scheme would actually work; it was just speculation. But the sheer possibility of it captivated those who were looking for politically palatable ways of staying under 2°C. The idea was that we can get by with making relatively minor reductions to CO2 emissions – nothing that would pose any significant threat to economic growth – so long as we manage to get BECCS up and running. We’ll overshoot the carbon budget, but that’s OK because BECCS will pull the excess carbon back out of the atmosphere later in the century, bringing us back into the safety zone. Emit now, clean up later.

He saw it as something we could use to help us reach our emissions targets under emergency conditions. Modellers have ‘misused’ the idea, he says, by including it in regular scenarios for staying under 1.5 or 2°C.

It’s important to keep in mind that most of the key materials for the energy transition are located in the global South. Parts of Latin America, Africa and Asia are likely to become the target of a new scramble for resources, and some countries may become victims of new forms of colonisation. It happened in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the hunt for gold and silver from South America. In the nineteenth century, it was land for cotton and sugar plantations in the Caribbean. In the twentieth century, it was diamonds from South Africa, cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and oil from the Middle East. It’s not difficult to imagine that the scramble for renewables might become similarly violent.

If we don’t take precautions, clean energy firms could become as destructive as fossil fuel companies – buying off politicians, trashing ecosystems, lobbying against environmental regulations, even assassinating community leaders who stand in their way, a tragedy that is already unfolding.

With every year that goes by, it becomes more and more difficult to extract the same amount of materials from the earth. All the stuff that’s close to the surface and easy to get to has already been snatched up. As we exhaust easily accessible reserves of minerals and metals we have to dig ever deeper and more violently to get more. We know that oil companies are being forced to turn to fracking, deep-sea drilling and other ‘tight plays’ to reach remaining oil reserves, using up more energy and materials to get the same amount of fuel. The same thing is happening with mining. According to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), today three times more material has to be extracted per unit of metal than a century ago.27 Part of this is also down to the decline in the quality of metal ore – by as much as 25% over the past ten years alone – meaning we need to extract and process more ore just to get the same quantity of finished product.28 In other words, despite significant improvements in mining technology, the material intensity of mining has been getting worse, not better.

Back in 1865, during the Industrial Revolution, the English economist William Stanley Jevons noticed something rather strange. James Watt had just introduced his steam engine, which was significantly more efficient than previous versions: it used less coal per unit of output. Everyone assumed that this would reduce total coal consumption. But oddly enough, exactly the opposite happened: coal consumption in England soared. The reason, Jevons discovered, was that the efficiency improvement saved money, and capitalists reinvested the savings to expand production. This led to economic growth – and as the economy grew, it chewed through more coal. This odd result became known as the Jevons Paradox. In modern economics, the phenomenon is known as the Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate, named after the two economists who described it in the 1980s. And it doesn’t just apply to energy – it applies to material resources too.

Jevons described this as a ‘paradox’, but if you think about it it’s not particularly surprising. Under capitalism, growth-oriented firms do not deploy new and more efficient technologies just for fun. They deploy them in order to facilitate growth. The same is true at the level of the whole economy. Ask any economist and they’ll tell you: efficiency improvements are good because they stimulate economic growth. This is why we see that, despite constant improvements in efficiency, aggregate energy and resource use has been rising for the whole history of capitalism. There’s no paradox; it’s exactly what economists expect.

Take the chainsaw, for instance. It’s a remarkable invention that enables loggers to fell trees, say, ten times faster than they are able to do by hand. But logging companies equipped with chainsaws don’t let their workers finish the job early and take the rest of the day off. They get them to cut down ten times as many trees as before. 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.

Now, some might argue that capitalism could theoretically find growth opportunities in completely immaterial goods. That might sound nice on the face of it. But the thing about immaterial goods is that they tend already to be abundant and freely available, or are otherwise very easy to share. In order to secure growing profits in a context where all new value must be immaterial, then capital may well seek to enclose immaterial commons that are presently abundant and free, to make them artificially scarce and force people to pay for them.

It’s true that nations with higher income tend in general to have better life expectancies than nations with lower income. But there is no simple causal relationship between these two variables. ‘The historical record is clear that economic growth itself has no direct, necessary positive implications for population health,’ Szreter points out. ‘The most that can be said is that it creates the longer-term potential for population health improvements.’9 Whether or not that potential is realised depends on the political forces that determine what kinds of things get produced, who has access to them, and how income is distributed. Progress in human welfare has been driven by progressive political movements and governments that have managed to harness resources to deliver robust public goods and fair wages.10 In fact, the historical record shows that in the absence of these forces, growth has quite often worked against social progress, not for it.

nations can succeed on a wide range of key social indicators – not just health and education, but also employment, nutrition, social support, democracy and life satisfaction – with less than $10,000 per capita, while staying within or near planetary boundaries.

Consider this thought experiment: if Portugal has higher levels of human welfare than the United States with $38,000 less GDP per capita, then we can conclude that $38,000 of America’s per capita income is effectively ‘wasted’. That adds up to $13 trillion per year for the US economy as a whole. That’s $13 trillion worth of extraction and production and consumption each year, and $13 trillion worth of ecological pressure, that adds nothing, in and of itself, to the fundamentals of human welfare.

In 2014, the political scientist Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn conducted a review of existing data on this question. He found something remarkable: 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.

Rich people have a much higher ecological footprint than everybody else. The richest 10% of the world’s population are responsible for more than half of the world’s total carbon emissions since 1990.

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. Trying to run a household on $30,000 in the United States would be a struggle. You can forget sending your kids to a decent university. But the exact same income in Finland, where people enjoy universal healthcare and education and rent controls, would feel luxurious.

Real GDP per capita in the US has doubled since the 1970s. One might assume that such extraordinary growth would have delivered decisive improvements to human lives, but in fact the opposite has happened. The poverty rate today is higher, and real wages are lower, than they were forty years ago.

What does this look like, in practice? It means, following the example of states like Costa Rica, Sri Lanka, Cuba and Kerala, 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.

It’s important to remember that many of these policies were used widely across the South in the post-colonial decades, from the 1950s to the 1970s, before that vision was dismantled by structural adjustment programmes from the 1980s onwards. A few countries managed to escape this fate, for various historical reasons. Costa Rica was one of them. So were South Korea and Taiwan (although their ecological policies have fallen short).

The poorest 60% of humanity receives only about 5% of total global income.42 Over the course of the past four decades since 1980, their daily incomes have increased by an average of about 3 cents per year.43 Forget ‘trickle-down’ economics – this is barely even a vapour.

For the world’s rich, by contrast, it’s a rather different story. Over the four decades since 1980, no less than 46% of all new income from global economic growth has gone to the richest 5%.

The richest 1% alone capture $19 trillion in income every year, which represents nearly a quarter of global GDP.44 That adds up to more than the GDP of 169 countries combined – a list that includes Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Argent...

if we were to shift $10 trillion of excess annual income from the richest 1% to the global poor, we could end poverty in a stroke, and boost life expectancy in the global South to eighty years – eliminating the global health gap. And the richest 1% would still be left with an average annual household income of more than a quarter million dollars: more than anyone could ever reasonably need, and nearly eight times higher than the median household income in Britain. And that’s just income; we haven’t even touched wealth. The richest 1% have accumulated wealth worth $158 trillion, which amounts to nearly half of the world’s total.

Once we grasp the scale of national and global inequalities, then the narrative that seeks to cast GDP growth as a proxy for human progress begins to seem a bit tendentious – perhaps even a bit ideological. And by ideology I mean in the technical sense: a set of ideas promoted by the dominant class, which serves their material interests, and which everybody else has internalised to such an extent that they are willing to go along with a system they might otherwise reject as unjust. The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci has called this ‘cultural hegemony’: when an ideology becomes so normalised that it is difficult or even impossible to reflect on it.

The notion that we need aggregate growth to improve people’s lives no longer makes any sense. We need to be able to specify growth for whom, and for what ends. We must learn to ask: where does the money go? Who benefits from it? In an era of ecological breakdown, are we really content to accept an economy where nearly a quarter of total output goes into the pockets of millionaires?

As for the process of innovation itself: 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. Is it really reasonable to grow the plastics industry, the timber industry and the advertising industry in order to get more efficient trains? Does it really make sense to grow dirty things in order to get clean things? We have to be smarter than that.

When Simon Kuznets introduced the GDP metric to the US Congress back in the 1930s, he was careful to warn that it should never be used as a normal measure of economic progress. Focusing on GDP would incentivise too much destruction. ‘The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income,’ Kuznets said. ‘Goals for more growth should specify more growth of what and for what.’ A generation later, in 1968, the US politician Robert Kennedy conveyed this same message during a speech at the University of Kansas: ‘GDP measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country … it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.’

The OECD launched a new metric off the back of this report, the Better Life Index, which incorporates welfare indicators like housing, jobs, education, health and happiness. There is now a fast-growing list of alternative metrics, including the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare and the Genuine Progress Indicator, both of which set out to correct GDP for social and ecological costs.

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. The practice was first developed in the 1920s, when lightbulb manufacturers, led by the US company General Electric, formed a cartel and plotted to shorten the lifespan of incandescent bulbs – from an average of about to 2,500 hours down to 1,000 or even less.4 It worked like a charm. Sales shot up and profits soared. The idea quickly caught on in other industries, and today planned obsolescence is a widespread feature of capitalist production.

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. Apple is not the only one, of course. Tech companies sold a total of 13 billion smartphones between 2010 and 2019. Only about 3 billion of them are in use today.6 That means 10 billion smartphones have been discarded over the past decade.

It’s not that the possibility for long-lasting, upgradable devices doesn’t exist – it does – but its development is suppressed in favour of growth. Our biggest technology firms, which we celebrate as our greatest innovators, stifle the innovation we need because it runs against the growth imperative. And it’s not just appliances and smartphones. It’s everything. Nylon stockings that are designed to tear after a few wears, devices with new ports that render old dongles and chargers useless – everyone has stories about the absurdities of planned obsolescence.

There’s a paradox here. 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.