Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

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.

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.

The most powerful intervention by far is to invest in affordable (or even free) public transportation, which is more efficient in terms of the materials and energy required to move people around. This is vital for any plan to get off fossil fuels. Bicycles are even better, as many European cities are learning (as I write this, Milan is handing over 35 kilometres of streets to cyclists, in a bid to keep pollution low after their coronavirus lockdown). And for journeys that can’t be made with either, we can develop publicly owned, app-based platforms for sharing cars between us – without the rentier intermediation that has made platforms like Uber and Airbnb so problematic.

Here’s a fact that never ceases to amaze me: up to 50% of all the food that’s produced in the world – equivalent to 2 billion tonnes – ends up wasted each year.

On top of targeting intentional inefficiencies and waste, we also need to talk about scaling down specific industries that are ecologically destructive and socially less necessary. The fossil fuel industry is the most obvious example, but we can extend this logic to others. Take the beef industry, for instance. 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.

The gains would be astonishing. 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.

This might seem like an impossible bind; and indeed it’s one reason why politicians consider degrowth to be so unthinkable. But there’s a way out. As we shed unnecessary jobs we can shorten the working week, going from forty-seven hours (the average in the United States) down to thirty or perhaps even twenty hours, sharing necessary labour more evenly among the working population and maintaining full employment. This approach would allow everyone to benefit from the time that’s liberated by degrowth. And retraining programmes can be deployed to ensure that people are able to transition easily from sunset industries to other kinds of work, so no one gets left out.

Studies in the US have found that people who work shorter hours are happier than those who work longer hours, even when controlling for income.

And – perhaps best of all – shorter hours are associated with greater gender equality, both in the workplace and at home.

By contrast, when people are given time off they tend to gravitate towards lower-impact activities: exercise, volunteering, learning, and socialising with friends and family.

These effects play out across whole countries. For instance, 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.

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. Instead of shortening the working week and raising wages, companies have pocketed the extra profits and required employees to keep working just as much as before. In other words, productivity gains have been used not to liberate humans from work but rather to fuel constant growth.

In 1965, CEOs earned about twenty times more than the average worker. Today they earn on average 300 times more.36 And in some companies the gap is even more extreme. In 2017, Steve Easterbrook, the CEO of McDonald’s, earned $21.7 million while the median full-time McDonald’s worker earned $7,017. That’s a ratio of 3,100 to one.

But it’s not just income inequality that’s a problem – it’s 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. The problem with this kind of inequality is that the rich become extractive rentiers. As they accumulate money and property far beyond what they could ever use, they rent it out (be it residential or commercial properties, patent licences, loans, whatever). And because they have a monopoly on these things, everyone else is forced to pay them rents and debts. This is called ‘passive income’, because it accrues automatically to people who hold capital without any labour on their part. But from the perspective of everyone else it is anything but passive: people have to scramble to work and earn above and beyond what they would otherwise need, simply in order to pay rents and debts to the rich. It is like modern-day serfdom.

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?

Remember, when it comes to human welfare, it’s not income itself that matters; it’s the welfare purchasing power of income that counts.

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.

Inequality perpetuates an artificial scarcity of income.

This plays out in the realm of consumption too. Inequality stimulates a sense of inadequacy. It makes people feel that they need to work longer hours to earn more income to buy unnecessary stuff, just so they can have a bit of dignity.

And then there’s the artificial scarcity of time. The structural compulsion to work unnecessarily long hours leaves people with so little time that they have no choice but to pay firms to do things they would otherwise be able to do themselves: cook their food, clean their homes, play with their children, care for their elderly parents. Meanwhile, the stress of overwork creates needs for anti-depressants, sleep aids, alcohol, dieticians, marital counselling, expensive holidays, and other products people would otherwise be less likely to require. To pay for these things, people need to work yet more to increase their incomes, driving a vicious cycle of unnecessary production and consumption.

If scarcity is created for the sake of growth, then by reversing artificial scarcities we can render growth unnecessary.

By decommodifying public goods, expanding the commons, shortening the working week and reducing inequality, we can enable people to access the goods that they need to live well without requiring additional growth in order to do

Austerity calls for scarcity in order to generate more growth. Degrowth calls for abundance in order to render growth unnecessary.

Researchers have found that households with high-interest mortgages work longer hours than they would otherwise need to simply in order to stay afloat.

debt. In an era of ecological breakdown, debt cancellation becomes a vital step towards a more sustainable economy.

This principle was institutionalised in the Hebrew Law of Jubilee, which decreed that debts should be automatically cancelled every seventh year.48 Indeed, debt cancellation became core to the Hebrew concept of redemption itself.

Compound interest is just a fiction, after all. And the nice thing about fictions is that we can change them. Perhaps no one has put this more eloquently than David Graeber: [Debt cancellation] would be salutary not just because it would relieve so much genuine human suffering, but also because it would be our way of reminding ourselves that money is not ineffable, that paying one’s debts is not the essence of morality, that all these things are human arrangements and that if democracy is going to mean anything, it is the ability to all agree to arrange things in a different way.

But when we focus on how to release our system from the growth imperative, we begin to get a sense of what a post-capitalist economy might look like. And it’s not scary at all. This is not the command-and-control fiasco of the Soviet Union, or some back-to-the-caves, hair-shirted disaster of voluntary impoverishment. On the contrary, it’s an economy that feels in key ways familiar, in the sense that it resembles the economy as we normally describe it to ourselves (in other words, perhaps as we wish it to be): an economy where people produce and sell useful goods and services; an economy where people make rational, informed decisions about what to buy; an economy where people get compensated fairly for their labour; an economy that satisfies human needs while minimising waste; an economy that circulates money to those who need it; an economy where innovation makes better, longer-lasting products, reduces ecological pressure, frees up labour time and improves human welfare; an economy that responds to – rather than ignores – the health of the ecology on which it depends. And yet inasmuch as it is

A steady-state economy follows two key principles in order to stay in balance with the living world: 1) Never extract more than ecosystems can regenerate. 2) Never waste or pollute more than ecosystems can safely absorb.

As income distribution has grown increasingly unequal, the economic power of the richest has translated directly into increased political power. Elites have managed to capture our democratic systems. We can see this particularly clearly in the United States, where corporations have the right to spend unlimited amounts of money on political advertising, and where there are few restrictions on donations to political parties. These measures – justified according to the principle of ‘free speech’ – have made it difficult for politicians to win elections without direct support from corporations and billionaires, placing them under pressure to align with the policy preferences of elites.

We can see similar plutocratic tendencies when it comes to finance. A significant chunk of shareholder votes is controlled by massive mutual funds like BlackRock and Vanguard that have no democratic legitimacy. A small number of people decide how to use everyone else’s money, and exert extraordinary influence over companies’ practices, pushing them to prioritise profits above social and ecological concerns.

In Britain, three companies control over 70% of the newspaper market – and half of that is owned by Rupert Murdoch.63 In the US, six companies control 90% of all media.64 It is virtually impossible to have a real, democratic conversation about the economy under these conditions.

In other words, capitalism has a tendency to be anti-democratic, and democracy has a tendency to be anti-capitalist.

In the very earliest time When both people and animals lived on earth A person could become an animal if they wanted to And an animal could become a human being. Sometimes they were people And sometimes animals And there was no difference. All spoke the same language. Nalungiaq, Inuit elder

We are not the defenders of the river. We are the river. Fisherman, Magdalena River, Colombia

Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado.

What’s powerful about the Salgados’ story is that it illustrates how quickly ecosystems can regenerate. The research on this is truly exciting. In 2016, an international team of scientists presented the biggest-ever database on forest regrowth in the New World tropics. They found that across ecosystems, from wet forest to dry forest, it takes an average of only sixty-six years for a forest to recover 90% of its old-growth biomass, completely naturally. All you have to do is leave it alone.

For 500 years, capitalist growth has been a process of enclosure and dispossession. Degrowth represents a reversal of this process. It represents release. It represents an opportunity for healing, recovery and repair.

Over the past decade or two, the Achuar have attracted attention because there’s something rather unexpected about their world view that has riveted anthropologists and philosophers, and it’s now completely upending the way that they think about nature. For the Achuar, you see, ‘nature’ does not exist. This might seem absurd to Western observers, who tend to see the category of nature as self-evident. It certainly seemed absurd to me when I first encountered it. But linger with this idea for long enough and it becomes clear there’s something profound going on. And it may hold powerful secrets within. If you visit the Achuar, you’ll find them living in small circular clearings in the middle of jungle, with dense walls of trees rising up all around them like giant waves of green – dark, brooding, pulsing with the noises of frogs, toucans, snakes, monkeys, jaguars, millions upon millions of insects, plus a universe of mosses and mushrooms and curling, roping vines. For many people, to live in such a way, cut off from other human communities, would feel tremendously lonely and isolated. But the Achuar see the jungle quite differently. They see people all around. As far as the Achuar are concerned, most of the plants and animals that populate the jungle have souls (wakan) similar to the souls of humans, and are therefore classified, literally, as ‘persons’ (aents). Just like humans, plants and animals have agency, intentionality and even self-consciousness. They experience emot...

The moral code at play here is not that you should never take (that would lead to a quick demise), but that you should never take more than the other is willing or able to give – in other words, never more than an ecosystem can regenerate. And you have to make sure to give back in return, by doing what you can to enrich, rather than degrade, the ecosystems on which you depend.

Anthropologists refer to this way of being as animism. The religious studies scholar Graham Harvey defines animism quite simply as the claim ‘that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others’.5 Animists approach animals and plants and even rivers and mountains as subjects in their own right, rather than as objects. There is no ‘it’ in such a world view. Everything is ‘thou’.

Whatever one might think of animism, one thing is certain: it is deeply ecological. In fact, it anticipates the core principles of ecological science that lie at the heart of the discipline today, which can be boiled down into a single phrase: everything is intimately interconnected; behave accordingly.

In fact, he took exactly the opposite view. Spinoza pointed out that the universe must emerge from one ultimate cause – what today we might recognise as the Big Bang. Once we accept this fact, Spinoza argued, then we have to accept that while God and souls and humans and nature might seem to be fundamentally different kinds of entities, they are really just different aspects of a single, grand Reality – a single substance – and governed by the same forces. This has radical implications for the way we think

The Christian establishment threw him out too; and the Catholic Church went so far as to list his works in the Index of Forbidden Books.

Without this body, without this tongue or these ears, you could neither speak nor hear another’s voice. Nor could you have anything to speak about, or even to reflect on, or to think, since without any contact, any encounter, without any glimmer of sensory experience, there could be nothing to question or to know. The living body is thus the very possibility of contact, not just with others but with oneself – the very possibility of reflection, of thought, of knowledge.

If you were to count up all the cells that constitute your body, you’d find that more of them belong to other lifeforms than belong to ‘you’ as such.14 Let this fact sink in, and it upends the way we think about ourselves.

Trees co-operate. They communicate. They share. Not only among members of the same species, but across species barriers: Douglas firs and birches feed each other. And it’s not just trees; we now know that all plants – except for a handful of species – have this same relationship with mycorrhiza. Just as with our gut bacteria, these findings challenge how we think about the boundaries between species. Is a tree really an individual? Can it really be conceived as a separate unit? Or is it an aspect of a broader, multi-species organism?

There’s also something else going on here – something perhaps even more revolutionary. Dr Suzanne Simard, a professor in the department of forest & conservation at the University of British Columbia, has argued that mycorrhizal networks among plants operate like neural networks in humans and other animals; they function in remarkably similar ways, passing information between nodes. And just as the structure of neural networks enables cognition and intelligence in animals, mycorrhizal networks provide similar capacities to plants. Recent research shows that the network not only facilitates transmission, communication and co-operation – just like our neurons do – it also facilitates problem-solving, learning, memory and decision-making.

A team of scientists in Japan conducted an experiment with hundreds of people around the country. They asked half of the participants to walk for fifteen minutes through a forest, and the other half to walk through an urban setting, and then they tested their emotional states. In every case, the forest walkers experienced significant mood improvements when compared to the urban walkers, plus a decline in tension, anxiety, anger, hostility, depression and fatigue.21 The benefits were immediate and effective.

Living near trees has been found to reduce cardiovascular risk.24 Walking in forests has been found to lower blood pressure, cortisol levels, pulse rates and other indicators of stress and anxiety.