Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

Clean energy might help deal with emissions, but it does nothing to reverse deforestation, overfishing, soil depletion and mass extinction. A growth-obsessed economy powered by clean energy will still tip us into ecological disaster.

This is called ‘degrowth’ – a planned reduction of excess energy and resource use to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a safe, just and equitable way.

Dualist philosophy was leveraged to cheapen life for the sake of growth; and it is responsible at a deep level for our ecological crisis.

What makes capitalism distinctive isn’t that it has markets, but that it is organised around perpetual growth; indeed, it is the first intrinsically expansionist economic system in history. It pulls ever-rising quantities of nature and human labour into circuits of commodity production. And because the goal of capital is to extract and accumulate surplus, it has to get these things for as cheap as possible. In other words, capital works according to a simple, straightforward formula: take more – from nature and from labour – than you give back.

Capitalism rose on the back of organised violence, mass impoverishment, and the systematic destruction of self-sufficient subsistence economies.

Today, British politicians often seek to defend colonialism by claiming that Britain helped ‘develop’ India. But in fact exactly the opposite is true: Britain exploited India to develop itself.

Improvement became the alibi for appropriation.

Today, the very same alibi is routinely leveraged to justify new rounds of enclosure and colonisation – of lands, forests, fisheries, of the atmosphere itself; but instead of ‘improvement’ we call it ‘development’, or ‘growth’. Virtually anything can be justified if it contributes to GDP growth.

The proponents of capitalism themselves believed it was necessary to impoverish people in order to generate growth.

Poverty was recast not as the consequence of dispossession, but as the sign of personal moral failing.

There is nothing natural or innate about the productivist behaviours we associate with homo economicus. That creature is the product of five centuries of cultural re-programming.

the main contribution that technology makes to growth is not that it produces money out of thin air, but rather that it enables capital to expand and intensify the process of appropriation.1

For capitalists, profit isn’t just money at the end of the day, to be used for satisfying some specific need – profit becomes capital. And the whole point of capital is that it must be reinvested to produce more capital. This process never ends – it just continues expanding.

The real per capita income gap between the global North and global South is four times larger today than it was at the end of colonialism.

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.

Just like companies, governments face a stark choice: grow the economy or collapse.

Growth is so deeply embedded in our economics and politics that the system can’t survive without it. If growth stops, companies go bust, governments struggle to fund social services, people lose their jobs, poverty rises, and states become politically vulnerable. Under capitalism, growth is not just an optional feature of human social organisation – it’s an imperative to which all are hostage. If the economy doesn’t grow, everything falls apart. We’re in a straight-jacket. So it’s no surprise that governments around the world have placed the full force of the state behind perpetuating the treadmill of accumulation.

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.

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.

Under capitalism, the rate of growth is the rate at which nature and human lives are being commodified and roped into circuits of accumulation.

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 that.

As the political ecologist Giorgos Kallis has put it, the problem isn’t that there are near-term limits to growth – it’s that there aren’t.

To make it work would require that we create a global carbon-capture-and-storage (CCS) system capable of sucking up some 15 billion tons of CO2 a year. Right now we have capacity to handle about 0.028 billion tons – and only a fraction of that is verified.

The latest assessments show that safe use of BECCS – in a way that respects planetary boundaries and human food systems – will allow us to reduce global emissions by at most 1%. That’s an important contribution, to be sure; but it’s a far cry from the saviour technology that people once hoped it would be.12

while it’s possible to transition to 100% renewable energy, we cannot do it fast enough to stay under 1.5°C or 2°C if we continue to grow the global economy at existing rates.

Today the world is producing 8 billion more megawatt hours of clean energy each year than in 2000. That’s a lot – enough to power all of Russia. But over exactly the same period, economic growth has caused energy demand to increase by 48 billion megawatt hours.

If we don’t take precautions, clean energy firms could become as destructive as fossil fuel companies

It’s not growth itself that matters – what matters is what we are producing, whether people have access to essential goods and services, and how income is distributed. And past a certain point, more GDP isn’t necessary for improving human welfare at all.

Samuel Preston’s original paper in 1975 would have noticed that he himself observed that up to 90% of improvements in global life expectancy between the 1930s and the 1960s were attributable to factors ‘exogenous to income’, such as public health programmes and other social technologies.

in theory we could achieve all of our social goals, for every person in the world, with less GDP than we presently have, simply by organising production around human well-being, investing in public goods, and distributing income and opportunity more fairly.

From the perspective of human welfare, the high levels of GDP that characterise the United States, Britain and other higher-income countries turn out to be vastly in excess of what they actually need.

We know exactly what works: reduce inequality, invest in universal public goods, and distribute income and opportunity more fairly.

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 for all without needing any additional growth. Justice is the antidote to the growth imperative – and key to solving the climate crisis.

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?

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.

As soon as we shake ourselves free from the tyranny of GDP, we can have an open discussion about what we really value. This is the ultimate democratic act, and yet so far the ideological lockdown on growthism has effectively prevented us from doing so.

Degrowth is about reducing the material and energy throughput of the economy to bring it back into balance with the living world, while distributing income and resources more fairly, liberating people from needless work, and investing in the public goods that people need to thrive.

introduce a ‘right to repair’, making it illegal for companies to produce things that can’t be repaired by ordinary users, or by independent mechanics, with affordable replacement parts.

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.

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.

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.

France and Italy have both recently passed laws preventing supermarkets from wasting food (they have to donate unsold food to charities instead). South Korea has banned food waste from landfills altogether, and requires households and restaurants to use special composting receptacles that charge fees by weight.

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.

we place all sorts of limits on capital’s exploitation of people, including minimum wage laws, child labour laws and the weekend. So too we need to place limits on capital’s exploitation of nature.

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.

A study of French households found that longer working hours are directly associated with higher consumption of environmentally intensive goods, even when correcting for income.31 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.

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.

introducing a living wage policy that’s pegged to the week or month, rather than to the hour.

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.

The economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman have proposed a 10% annual marginal tax on wealth holdings over $1 billion.