Lucía’s Reviews > Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World > Status Update

We humans are evolved for sharing, co-operation and community. We flourish in contexts that enable us to express these values, and we suffer in contexts that stifle them.

When people live in a fair, caring society, where everyone has equal access to social goods, they don’t have to spend their time worrying about how to cover their basic needs day to day – they can enjoy the art of living. And instead of feeling they are in constant competition with their neighbours, they can build bonds of social solidarity.

We keep buying more stuff in order to feel better about ourselves, but it never works because the benchmark against which we measure the good life is pushed perpetually out of reach by the rich (and, these days, by social media influencers). We find ourselves spinning in place on an exhausting treadmill of needless over-consumption.

If you get a raise at work it’s bound to boost your happiness. But what happens when you discover that your colleagues got a raise that was twice what you received? Suddenly you’re not happy at all – you’re upset. You feel devalued. Your sense of trust in your boss takes a hit, and your sense of solidarity with your colleagues falls apart.

strangely enough, when we look at measures of overall happiness and well-being, it turns out that even these indicators have a tenuous relationship with GDP. This rather puzzling result is known as the Easterlin Paradox, after the economist who first pointed it out.

As the ecologist Herman Daly has put it, after a certain point growth begins to become ‘uneconomic’: it begins to create more ‘illth’ than wealth: the continued pursuit of growth in high-income nations is exacerbating inequality and political instability, and contributing to problems like stress and depression from overwork and lack of sleep, ill health from pollution, diabetes and obesity, and so on.

Past a certain threshold, more growth actually begins to have a negative impact.

According to data from the UN, it is possible for nations to reach the very highest category on the life expectancy index with as little as $8,000 per capita, and very high levels on the education index with as little as $9,000 per capita.

universal public services are significantly more cost-effective to run than their private counterparts.

Spain spends only $2,300 per person to deliver high-quality healthcare to everyone as a fundamental right, achieving one of the highest life expectancies in the world: 83.5 years; a full five years longer than Americans. By contrast, the private, for-profit system in the United States sucks up an eye-watering $9,500 per person, while delivering lower life expectancy and worse health outcomes.