In our modern world, it’s common to judge a country’s success by its gross domestic product (GDP), assuming it’s the best measure of progress. However, Less is More challenges this notion, arguing that GDP doesn’t truly reflect the quality of people’s lives. After all, we’re human, and true growth is about well-being and caring for our planet, not just numbers.
In Less is More, Jason Hickel aims to correct our misunderstandings about capitalism and growth. He introduces the concept of degrowth, which advocates for using fewer resources to live more sustainably. Degrowth emphasizes fair wealth distribution, reducing unnecessary work, and investing in public services like healthcare and education. Hickel argues that wealthy nations can thrive without endless growth by focusing on well-being and sustainability. While the book presents many solutions, such as alternative progress indicators beyond GDP, it also acknowledges that these alone won’t achieve real change.
Degrowth involves shifting from an economy driven by constant consumption to one that coexists with nature. The book explores how we can move towards sustainability and fairness, proposing new ways to measure progress. However, it stresses that we need more than just new metrics to create a balanced and just economy. Less is More highlights the often-misunderstood idea that sometimes, less truly is more.
Summary
Living in a Mass Extinction
We’ve lost touch with the interconnectedness of everything around us. When we talk about climate change, we often focus only on rising temperatures, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Here are some of the broader impacts of increasing temperatures:
- Extreme weather: the number of severe storms has doubled since the 1980s.
- Heatwaves: these have become deadly, claiming lives across the globe.
- Droughts: leading to the collapse of vital wheat crops.
- Wildfires: increasing in frequency and intensity.
- Rising sea levels: transforming our coastlines and altering our world beyond recognition.
- Food shortages: half of Asia’s population relies on water from the Himalayan glaciers. With these glaciers melting rapidly, most will soon vanish, devastating the region’s food supply. This scenario has serious implications for global political stability.
As food shortages hit, affected regions will experience mass displacement as people move in search of stable food sources. This migration pressure is polarizing politics, fueling the rise of fascist movements, and weakening international alliances.
Capitalism’s Growth Dilemma
Capitalism isn’t just about markets and trade, which have existed for thousands of years. It’s a relatively recent system, only about 500 years old. What sets capitalism apart is its focus on perpetual growth. It’s a system that constantly draws in more natural resources and human labor to keep accumulating wealth. The basic principle is simple: take more than you give back.
The incredible productivity of capitalism relies on creating and maintaining artificial scarcity. This scarcity, and the resulting threat of hunger, fuel capitalist growth. The scarcity is artificial because resources themselves weren’t depleted; the same lands, forests, and waters were still there. However, people’s access to them was restricted. The ecological crisis we face today is a direct result of this system. Throughout the history of capitalism, growth has always led to increased energy consumption.
Capitalism depends fundamentally on growth. If the economy doesn’t grow, it collapses into recession: debts mount, people lose their jobs and homes, and lives are shattered. We have many ideas on how to fix these problems, but we hesitate to implement them because they might hinder growth.
The History of GDP as a Measure of Growth
The Origins
The Great Depression devastated the economies of the US and Western Europe. In response, economist Simon Kuznets developed a system to calculate the monetary value of all goods and services produced in the economy, creating the Gross National Product (GNP). This formed the basis for the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) metric we use today. However, Kuznets warned that GDP is flawed. It counts all economic activity, whether beneficial or harmful, and should not be used as a standard measure of economic progress. He believed it needed adjustments to account for the social costs of growth. But with the outbreak of the Second World War and the looming Nazi threat, concerns about well-being took a backseat.
Post-Colonial Era
After the end of colonialism in the 1950s, many newly independent governments started implementing progressive policies to rebuild their countries. They aimed to reverse the extractive policies of colonialism and improve human welfare. However, Western powers were unhappy with these changes, as they lost access to cheap labor, raw materials, and captive markets. During the debt crisis of the 1980s, Western creditors used their influence over the World Bank and the IMF to impose ‘structural adjustment programs’ on Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia (excluding China and a few others).
Impact of Neoliberal Globalization
Neoliberal globalization drastically reshaped the economies of the Global South. Governments were forced to shift their focus from human welfare and economic independence to creating favorable conditions for capital accumulation, all in the name of growth. The consequences were disastrous. Structural adjustment led to two decades of crisis, with rising poverty, inequality, and unemployment.
Technology Innovation Does Not Save Us the Way We Think
Khazzom-Brookes Postulate
When we develop more efficient ways to use energy and resources, overall consumption may initially decrease. However, this reduction is short-lived. Companies often use the savings from these efficiencies to reinvest in increasing production, leading to even higher consumption rates. In the end, the sheer scale of growth overwhelms even the most significant efficiency improvements.
The technological innovations that have driven growth do so not by allowing us to use less of nature’s resources, but by enabling us to use more.
The Real Issue
Our problem isn’t with technology itself; it’s with the relentless pursuit of growth. The growth imperative nullifies the benefits of our best technological advancements. Instead of reducing our impact, growth-driven consumption continues to escalate, rendering efficiency gains ineffective.
Misunderstanding About Recycling
Recycling and Capitalism
The notion that recycling can save capitalism is flawed. Most materials we use cannot be recycled. Even if we could recycle 100% of materials, it would create challenges for GDP growth.
The Economics of Recycling
Recycling is expensive. The cost of processing recycled materials makes it harder to generate the ever-rising surplus that capitalism demands. Additionally, materials degrade each time they are recycled, requiring increasing energy inputs and rising costs to maintain their quality. This growing expense poses a significant challenge to sustained economic growth.
Pricing Nature
Some suggest that by putting a price on nature, we can solve the ecological crisis and preserve capitalism. If we could charge for ‘ecosystem services’, the market would theoretically adjust, and the crisis would be mitigated. However, growth requires an ‘outside’—resources and opportunities not yet capitalized. Pricing nature would internalize production costs, limiting growth prospects. This is why no capitalist government has fully embraced this approach.
In summary, the belief that recycling and pricing nature can sustain capitalism and solve our ecological problems is a misunderstanding. The inherent need for growth in capitalism conflicts with these solutions.
Degrowth
For decades, we’ve been told that growth is essential to improve people’s lives. However, it’s not growth itself that matters, but how income and resources are distributed. Currently, they are distributed very unequally. Over the past 40 years, 28% of all new income from global GDP growth has gone to the richest 1%, all of whom are millionaires.
The Problem with Growthism
It’s not growth that’s the problem, but growthism: the pursuit of growth for its own sake, or for capital accumulation, rather than meeting concrete human needs and social objectives.
What is Degrowth?
Degrowth is not about reducing GDP. It’s about transitioning to a different kind of economy. Once we realize we don’t need growth, we can think more rationally about how to address the crises we face. Reducing resource use relieves pressure on ecosystems and allows the natural world to heal. Degrowth involves a planned reduction of energy and resource use to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a safe, just, and equitable way.
Practical Steps for Degrowth
- Reevaluating Economic Growth: The first step is to abandon the irrational belief that all sectors of the economy must grow constantly. We need to decide which areas should grow (like clean energy, public healthcare, and essential services) and which should drastically reduce (like fossil fuels, private jets, and SUVs).
- Reshaping the Economy: Scale down parts of the economy focused solely on maximizing profits rather than meeting human needs.
- Reducing Work and Redistributing Wealth: By freeing people from unnecessary labor, we can shorten the working week to maintain full employment, distribute income and wealth more fairly, and invest in public goods like universal healthcare, education, and affordable housing.
Degrowth is about creating a sustainable and equitable economy that prioritizes human well-being and environmental health over relentless growth.
We Can Flourish Without Growth
Once we understand that flourishing doesn’t depend on growth, new possibilities open up for us. Here’s what we need to focus on:
Scaling Down Energy Use in High-Income Countries: To achieve this, we need to slow everything down—slowing the frantic pace of extraction, production, and waste, as well as our own hectic lives. This concept is at the heart of degrowth. It’s about reducing the material and energy throughput of the economy to bring it into balance with the natural world.
Key Elements of Degrowth:
- Reducing Material and Energy Throughput: By slowing down economic activities, we reduce the strain on natural resources and ecosystems.
- Fair Distribution: Ensuring that incomes and resources are shared more equitably across society.
- Liberating People from Needless Work: Reducing unnecessary labor allows people to lead more fulfilling lives.
- Investing in Public Goods: Allocating resources to essential public services such as healthcare, education, and affordable housing ensures that everyone can thrive.
By focusing on these elements, we can create a sustainable and equitable society that values human well-being and environmental health over perpetual growth.
Growth Is Not Equal to Good Life
The Relationship Between GDP and Human Welfare
The link between GDP and human welfare follows a saturation curve, with diminishing returns. Beyond a certain point—already surpassed by high-income nations—more GDP adds little to human flourishing. Some countries achieve high levels of human welfare with relatively low GDP per capita by investing in high-quality universal healthcare and education systems. These investments are crucial for delivering long, healthy, and fulfilling lives.
Impact of Income Inequality
Societies with unequal income distributions tend to be less happy. It’s not the amount of income that matters but how it’s distributed. Inequality creates a sense of unfairness and erodes social trust, cohesion, and solidarity. It’s also linked to poorer health, higher crime rates, and less social mobility. People in unequal societies often feel more frustrated, anxious, insecure, and discontented. They have higher rates of depression and addiction.
What Improves Well-being
Research shows that robust welfare systems make societies happier. Key components include universal healthcare, unemployment insurance, pensions, paid holidays, sick leave, affordable housing, daycare, and strong minimum wages. In fair and caring societies, people don’t worry about basic needs and can enjoy life and build social bonds instead of competing constantly.
Beyond happiness, a profound sense of meaning is crucial. People find meaning when they have opportunities for compassion, cooperation, community, and human connection. This deeper fulfillment is less connected to GDP.
Effective Strategies
- Reduce Inequality: Ensure fair distribution of income and opportunities.
- Invest in Universal Public Goods: Build and maintain systems like healthcare and education that everyone can access.
- Distribute Income and Opportunity Fairly: Focus on equitable economic policies.
Addressing Global Inequality
While rich countries can achieve human progress without growth, this isn’t true for poorer nations. Solutions include:
- Global Minimum Wage: Address the flow of resources from the global South to the global North. Workers in export industries in the global South are often underpaid compared to the value of their labor.
- Combat Illicit Financial Flows: Prevent companies from shifting profits to tax havens, which deprives poorer countries of necessary revenue for public services.
- Democratize International Institutions: Reform the IMF and WTO to ensure fair representation and bargaining power for all countries, not just the high-income ones.
- Cancel Odious Debts: Free poor countries to invest in public services rather than paying off foreign debts.
- Redistribute Land: Return land to small farmers to ensure fair agricultural practices.
- Reform Subsidy Regimes: Adjust subsidies that give high-income countries an unfair advantage in the global agricultural industry.
By implementing these measures, we can create a more equitable global economy where all nations have the opportunity to thrive.
Author: Jason Hickel
Publication date: 1 November 2021
Number of pages: 336 pages
