Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

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 familiar in these ways, the new economy is fundamentally different from our existing economy, in that it is not organised around the prime objective of capitalism: accumulation.