Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

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. 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.