Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

It’s about how we can shift from an economy that’s organised around domination and extraction to one that’s rooted in reciprocity with the living world.

In 1965, CEOs earned about twenty times more than the average worker. Today they earn on average 300 times more.

Ending planned obsolescence, capping resource use, shortening the working week, reducing inequality and expanding public goods – these are all essential steps to reducing energy demand and enabling a faster transition to renewables.

As we saw in Chapter 1, it required violence and dispossession and enslavement; but even more than that it required crafting a new story about nature. It required getting people to see nature, for the first time, as something fundamentally distinct from humans; something not only inferior and subordinate, but devoid of the animating spirit we ascribe to people. It required splitting the world in two.