Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

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. It’s like shovelling ecosystems and human lives into a bottomless pit of demand. And the void will never be filled.

Some might be tempted to blame individuals for buying too many smartphones or washing machines, but this misses the point. People become victims of this machine. Blaming individuals misdirects our attention away from the systemic causes.

How might we address these inefficiencies? One option is to introduce mandatory extended warranties on products. The technology already exists for appliances to last on average two to five times longer than they presently do, with lifespans up to thirty-five years, at little additional cost. With simple legislation, we could require manufacturers to guarantee their products for the duration of maximum feasible lifespans. If Apple was held to a 10-year guarantee, watch how quickly they would redesign their products to be resilient and upgradeable.

We could also introduce a ‘right to repair’, making it illegal for companies to produce things that can’t be repaired by ordinary users, or by independent me...

Up to the 1920s, consumption was a relatively perfunctory act: people just bought what they needed. Advertisements did little more than inform customers of the useful qualities of a product. But this system posed an obstacle to growth, because once people’s needs were satisfied, purchases slowed down. Companies seeking a ‘fix’ – a way to surmount the limits of human need – found it in the new theories of advertising being developed at the time by Edward Bernays, the nephew of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Bernays pointed out that you can provoke people to consume far beyond their needs simply by manipulating their psychology. You can seed anxiety in people’s minds, and then present your product as a solution to that anxiety. Or you can sell things on the promise that they will provide social acceptance, or class distinction, or sexual prowess. This kind of advertising quickly became indispensable to American companies desperate to generate growing demand.

A survey conducted in the 1990s revealed that 90% of American CEOs believed it would be impossible to sell a new product without an advertising campaign; 85% admitted that advertising ‘often’ persuaded people to buy things they did not need; and 51% said that advertising persuaded people to buy things they didn’t actually want.

And in the age of the internet, it has become more powerful and insidious than even Bernays himself could have dreamed. Browser cookies, social media profiles and big data allow firms to present us with ads tailored not just to our personalities – our specific anxieties and insecurities – but even to our likely emotional state at any given time.

There are many ways to curb the power of advertising. We can introduce quotas to reduce total ad expenditure. We can legislate against the use of psychologically manipulative techniques. And we can liberate public spaces from ads – both offline and online – where people don’t have a choice about what they see. São Paulo, a city of 20 million people, has already done this in key parts of the city. Paris has made moves in this direction too, reducing outdoor ads and even banning them outright in the vicinity of schools. The results? Happier people: people who feel more secure about themselves and more content with their lives. Cutting ads has a direct positive impact on people’s well-being.

There is another inefficiency that’s built into capitalism. A lot of the stuff we consume is necessary but rarely used. Pieces of equipment like lawnmowers and power tools are used perhaps once a month, for maybe an hour or two at most, and for the rest of the year lie idle. Manufacturers want everyone to own a garage full of things that can otherwise quite easily be shared, but a more rational approach would be to establish neighbourhood workshops where equipment can be stored and used on an as-need basis. Some communities are already doing this, maintaining shared equipment with a neighbourhood fund. Projects like these can be scaled up by city governments, and enabled by apps for easy access. Shifting from ownership to ‘usership’ can have a big impact on material throughput. Sharing a single piece of equipment among ten households means cutting demand for that product by a factor of ten, while saving people time and money in the process.

Nearly 60% of global agricultural land is used for beef – either directly for cattle pasture or indirectly for growing feed.16 It’s one of the most resource-inefficient foods on the planet, in terms of the land and energy it requires per calorie or nutrient. And the pressure to find land for pasture and feed is the single greatest driver of deforestation. As I write this, large parts of the Amazon rainforest are literally being burned down for the sake of beef. Yet, far from being essential to human diets, beef accounts for only 2% of the calories humans consume.

Switching from beef to non-ruminant meats or plant proteins like beans and pulses could liberate almost 11 million square miles of land – the size of the United States, Canada and China combined.18 This simple shift would allow us to return vast swathes of the planet to forest and wildlife habitat, creating new carbon sinks and cutting net emissions by up to 8 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year, according to the IPCC. That’s around 20% of current annual emissions. Scientists say that degrowing the beef industry is among the most transformative policies we could implement, and is essential to avoiding dangerous climate change.19 A first step would be to end the subsidies high-income countries give to beef farmers. Researchers are also testing proposals for a tax on red meat, which they find would not only curtail emissions but deliver a wide range of public health benefits, while driving medical costs down.

We could scale down the arms industry and the private jet industry. We could scale down the production of single-use plastics, disposable coffee cups, SUVs and McMansions (in the United States, house sizes have doubled since the 1970s21). Instead of building new stadiums for the Olympics and the World Cup every few years we could reuse existing infrastructure. We know that to reach our climate goals we will need to scale down the commercial airline industry, starting with policies like a frequent flyer levy, ending routes that can be served by train, and getting rid of first-class and business-class cabins, which have the highest CO2 per passenger mile. And we must shift from an economy based on energy-intensive long-distance supply chains to one where production happens closer to home.

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. Ecological economists insist that the only way to do it is with a hard limit: cap resource and energy use at existing levels and ratchet them down each year until you get back within planetary boundaries.

We can facilitate this process by introducing a public job guarantee (a policy that happens to be resoundingly popular24), so that anyone who wants to work can get a job doing socially useful things that communities actually need, like care, essential services, building renewable energy infrastructure, growing local food, and regenerating degraded ecosystems – paid at a living wage.25 Indeed, a job guarantee is one of the single most powerful environmental policies a government could implement, because it enables us to have an open conversation about scaling down destructive industries without worrying about the spectre of unemployment.

researchers have found that if the United States were to reduce its working hours to the levels of Western Europe, its energy consumption would decline by a staggering 20%. Shortening the working week is one of the most immediately impactful climate policies available to us.

In 1930, the British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay titled ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’. He predicted that by the year 2030 technological innovation and improvements in labour productivity would free people to work only fifteen hours a week. Keynes turned out to be correct about productivity gains, but his prophecy about working hours never came true. Why not? Because gains in labour productivity have been appropriated by capital.

capitalism betrays the very Enlightenment values it claims to advance. We normally think of capitalism as organised around the principles of freedom and human liberation – that’s the ideology it sells us. And yet while capitalism has produced the technological capacity to provide for everyone’s needs many times over, and to liberate people from unnecessary labour, it deploys that technology instead to create new ‘needs’ and to endlessly expand the treadmill of production and consumption. The promise of true freedom is perpetually deferred.

Some of this will be accomplished automatically with the shorter working week and the job guarantee. These measures would dramatically improve the bargaining power of labour, and increase workers’ share of the national income. But we can also add another layer of protection, by introducing a living wage policy that’s pegged to the week or month, rather than to the hour.

In the UK, labour’s share of national income has declined from 75% in the 1970s down to only 65% today. In the United States it’s down to 60%. Hourly wages at the bottom could be raised quite a lot by reversing these losses. There’s plenty of room for this within companies too. CEO compensation has grown to dizzying heights in recent decades, with some executives capturing as much as $100 million per year. And the gap between CEO salaries and the wages of average workers has exploded. In 1965, CEOs earned about twenty times more than the average worker. Today they earn on average 300 times more.

One approach would be to introduce a cap on wage ratios: a ‘maximum wage’ policy. Sam Pizzigati, an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, argues that we should cap the after-tax wage ratio at 10 to 1.38 CEOs would immediately seek to raise wages as high as they can reasonably go. It’s an elegant solution, and it’s not unheard of. Mondragon, a huge workers’ co-operative in Spain, has rules stating that executive salaries cannot be more than six times higher than the lowest-paid employee in the same enterprise. Better yet, we could do it on a national scale, by saying that incomes higher than a given multiple of the national minimum wage would face a 100% tax.

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. Extreme wealth has a corrosive effect on our society, on our political system, and on the living world. We should have a democratic conversation about this: at what point does hoarding become destructive and unacceptable? $100 million? $10 million? $5 million?

We could do the same thing with other goods that are essential to people’s well-being. Healthcare and education are obvious ones. But why not the internet? Why not public transport? Why not basic quotas of energy and water? Researchers at the University of London have demonstrated that a full range of what they call Universal Basic Services could be publicly funded (with progressive taxation on wealth, land, carbon, etc.) at costs much lower than we presently spend, while guaranteeing everyone access to a decent, dignified life.41 On top of this, we could invest in public libraries, parks and sports grounds. Facilities like these become particularly important as we shorten the working week, so that people can spend their time in ways that enrich well-being with little environmental impact.

Decommodifying basic goods and expanding the commons allows us to improve the welfare purchasing power of incomes, so people can access the things they need to live well without needing ever-higher incomes in order to do so. This approach reverses the Lauderdale Paradox we explored in Chapter 1. Capitalists enclose commons (‘public wealth’) in order to generate growth (‘private riches’), forcing people to work more simply to pay for access to resources they once enjoyed for free. As we create a post-growth economy we can flip this equation around: we can choose to restore commons, or create new commons, in order to render ever-rising incomes unnecessary. The commons become an antidote to the growth imperative.

We see artificial scarcity being imposed on our public goods too. Since the 1980s endless waves of privatisation have been unleashed all over the world, of education, healthcare, transport, libraries, parks, swimming pools, water, housing, even social security. Social goods everywhere are under attack for the sake of growth. The idea is that by making public goods scarce, people will have no choice but to purchase private alternatives. And in order to pay, they will have to work more, producing additional goods and services that must find a market, and thereby creating new pressures for additional consumption elsewhere in the system. This logic reaches its height in the politics of austerity, which was rolled out across Europe in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Austerity (which is literally a synonym for scarcity) is a desperate attempt to restart the engines of growth by slashing public investment in social goods and welfare protections – everything from elderly heating allowances to unemployment benefits to public sector wages – chopping away at what remains of the commons so that people deemed too ‘comfortable’ or ‘lazy’ are placed once again under threat of hunger, and forced to increase their productivity if they want to survive.