Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

Take the global economy in the year 2000 and grow it at the usual rate of 3% a year. Even at this modest-sounding increment, economic output will double every twenty-three years, which means quadrupling before the middle of the century, within half a human lifespan. And if we continue growing at that same rate, by the end of the century the economy will be twenty times bigger – twenty times more than we were already doing in the roaring 2000s. Another hundred years later and it’s 370 times bigger. Another hundred years after that and it’s 7,000 times bigger, and so on. It mocks all the powers of the imagination.

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. Over the past 500 years, an entire infrastructure has been created to facilitate the expansion of capital: limited liability, corporate personhood, stock markets, shareholder value rules, fractional reserve banking, credit ratings – we live in a world that’s increasingly organised around the imperatives of accumulation.

GDP growth is, ultimately, an indicator of the welfare of capitalism. That we have all come to see it as a proxy for the welfare of humans represents an extraordinary ideological coup.

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. When we look

As the global economy has come to rely more on these less polluting fuels, one might think that emissions would begin to decline. This has happened in a number of high-income nations, but not on a global scale. Why? Because GDP growth is driving total energy demand up at such a rapid pace that these new fuels aren’t replacing the older ones, they are being added on top of them. The shift to oil and gas hasn’t been an energy transition, but an energy addition.

All that new clean energy isn’t replacing dirty energies, it’s being added on top of them.19 This dynamic should give us pause. Yes, we need as much renewable energy as we can get – but it won’t make enough of a difference if the global economy continues to grow at existing rates. The more we grow, the more energy the global economy requires, the more difficult it is to cover it with cleaner energy sources.

A more holistic way of thinking about growth is to recognise that it is broadly equivalent to the rate at which our economy is metabolising the living world.

if high-income nations were to consume at the average level of the rest of the world, we would not be overshooting the safe boundary at all. We’d be operating roughly within the planet’s biocapacity, rather than staring down the barrel of an ecological emergency. By contrast, if everyone in the world were to consume at the level of high-income countries, we would need the equivalent of four planets to sustain us.

The more an economy relies on corporate supply chains, the more intensive its material use is likely to be.

But there’s another side to this equation: we also have to ask where in the world that breakdown is happening. High-income nations depend in large part on extraction from the global South. In fact, fully half of the total materials they consume are extracted from poorer countries, and generally under unequal and exploitative conditions. The coltan in your smartphone comes from mines in the Congo. The lithium in your electric car battery comes from the mountains of Bolivia.

But this time, instead of being seized by force, those resources are being extracted and sold, for cheap, by governments that have been rendered dependent on foreign investment and beholden to the growth imperatives of capitalism.

That the excess emissions of a few rich nations will harm billions of people in poorer nations is a crime against humanity and we should have the clarity to call it

paradigm shift.

Ecological science requires that we learn to see the human economy not as separate from ecology but as embedded within it. This poses a radical challenge to the dominant world view, and to capitalism itself.

Of course, even if these solutions succeed in stopping climate change, continued growth will still drive continued material use, and continued ecological breakdown.

But if we want the transition to be technically feasible, ecologically coherent and socially just, we need to disabuse ourselves of the fantasy that we can carry on growing aggregate energy demand at existing rates. We must take a different approach.

‘material footprint’, which includes the total resources embodied in a nation’s imports.

Using this more holistic measure it quickly becomes clear that the material consumption of rich nations hasn’t been falling at all. In fact, in recent decades it’s been increasing dramatically, even to the point of outpacing GDP growth. There has been no decoupling. It was all an illusion of accounting.

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.

We tend to think of capitalism as a system that incentivises innovation. And it does. But, paradoxically, the potential ecological benefits of innovation are constrained by the logic of capital itself.

One can imagine an economy where not only water and seeds are privatised, commodifed and sold back to people for money, but also knowledge, songs and green spaces; maybe even parenting and physical touch; perhaps even the air itself. As for the rest of us, we would have to work more and more, producing (presumably) immaterial things for sale, simply in order to earn enough wages to buy access to immaterial things that we used to get for free.

What if instead of trying so desperately to decouple GDP from resources and energy use, we could decouple human progress from GDP instead? What if we could find a way to release our civilisation, and our planet, from the constraints of the growth imperative?

For decades, progress towards the goal of public sanitation was opposed, not enabled, by the capitalist class. Libertarian-minded landowners refused to allow officials to use their property, and refused to pay the taxes required to get it done.

The resistance of these elites was broken only once commoners won the right to vote and workers organised into unions. Over the following decades these movements, which in Britain began with the Chartists and the Municipal Socialists, leveraged the state to intervene against the capitalist class. They fought for a new vision: that cities should be managed for the good of everyone, not just for the few.

This explanation is now backed up by a strong consensus among public health researchers. Empirical data from the United States shows that water sanitation measures alone explain three quarters of the decline in infant mortality in major cities between 1900 and 1936, and nearly half the decline in total mortality.4 A recent study led by an international team of medical scientists found that, after sanitation, the greatest predictor of improved life expectancy is access to universal healthcare, including child vaccination.5 And once you have these basic interventions in place, the biggest single driver of continued improvements in life expectancy happens to be education – and particularly women’s education. The more you learn, the longer you live.

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.

We tend to see these countries as ‘outliers’, but they prove the very point that Szreter and other public health researchers have been trying to make: it’s all about distribution. And what matters most of all is investment in universal public goods.

What explains the remarkable results that these countries have achieved? It’s simple: they’ve all invested in building high-quality universal healthcare and education systems.13 When it comes to delivering long, healthy, flourishing lives for all, this is what counts.

simply by organising production around human well-being, investing in public goods, and distributing income and opportunity more fairly.

So, if not income, what does improve well-being? 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.

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. By expanding people’s access to public services and other commons, we can improve the welfare purchasing power of people’s incomes, enabling flourishing lives

Instead of pursuing growth for its own sake and hoping that it will magically improve people’s lives, the goal must be to focus on improving people’s lives first and foremost – and if that requires or entails economic growth, then so be it. In other words, organise the economy around the needs of humans and ecology, rather than the other way around.

anti-colonial leaders including Mahatma Gandhi, Patrice Lumumba, Salvador Allende, Julius Nyerere, Thomas Sankara and dozens of other figures who insisted on a human-centred economics,

Frantz Fanon,

There is a net drain from poor countries to rich countries.

Another problem is that the international institutions that govern the global economy are deeply anti-democratic, and tilted heavily in favour of rich nations. At the World Bank and the IMF, the United States holds veto power over all major decisions, and high-income countries control the majority of the vote.

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.

But when we understand how inequality works, suddenly the choice becomes much easier: between living in a more equitable society, on the one hand, and risking ecological catastrophe on the other.

It rises because capitalism is organised around the imperative of constant expansion.

It was devised specifically in order to measure the welfare of capitalism. It externalises social and ecological costs because capitalism externalises social and ecological costs.

Capitalism is a giant energy-sucking machine.

The key is to remember that capitalism is a system that’s organised around exchange-value, not around use-value.

People become victims of this machine. Blaming individuals misdirects our attention away from the systemic causes.

as our economy becomes more rational and efficient, it will require less labour.

As we shed unnecessary jobs we can shorten the working week,

exercise, volunteering, learning, and socialising with friends and family.

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.

In a degrowth scenario, this means shifting income from capital back to labour,

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.

wealth inequality too. In the United States, for instance, the richest 1% have nearly 40% of the nation’s wealth. The bottom 50% have almost nothing: only 0.4%.39 On a global level the disparities are even worse: the richest 1% have nearly 50% of the world’s wealth.