Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
by Jason Hickel · 12 Aug 2020 · 286pp · 87,168 words
Jason Hickel * * * LESS IS MORE How Degrowth Will Save the World Table of Contents PREFACEBy Kofi Mawuli Klu and Rupert Read of XR INTRODUCTIONWelcome to the Anthropocene Part OneMore is Less ONECapitalism –
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of capitalism. This is an extraordinary story that has been almost completely hidden from view. People around the world are yearning, quietly, for something better. Degrowth Sometimes scientific evidence conflicts with the dominant world view of a civilisation. When that happens, we have to make a choice. Either we ignore science
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energy use makes it much easier for us to accomplish a rapid transition to renewables before dangerous tipping points begin to cascade. This is called ‘degrowth’ – a planned downscaling of energy and resource use to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a safe, just and equitable
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impact on people’s health and well-being. These are the keys to a flourishing society. The evidence is truly inspiring. Let me emphasise that degrowth is not about reducing GDP. Of course, slowing down unnecessary extraction and production may mean that GDP grows more slowly, or stops growing, or even
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down the mad pace of extraction, production and waste, and slow down the mad pace of our lives. This is what we mean by ‘degrowth’. Again, degrowth is not about reducing GDP. It is about reducing the material and energy throughput of the economy to bring it back into balance with the
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. Under normal circumstances, this might cause a recession. But a recession is what happens when a growth-dependent economy stops growing: it’s a disaster. Degrowth is completely different. It is about shifting to a different kind of economy altogether – an economy that doesn’t need growth in the first place
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(mostly in the global South) where the materials for these things are extracted, and less pressure on the communities that live there. In other words, degrowth – reducing material and energy use – is an ecologically coherent solution to a multi-faceted crisis. And the good news is that we can do this
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by up to 13%, while regenerating up to 2.4 billion hectares of land for wildlife habitat and carbon sequestration.14 When it comes to degrowth, this is low-hanging fruit. Some countries are already taking steps in this direction. France and Italy have both recently passed laws preventing supermarkets from
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governments will find themselves struggling to cope with unemployment. This might seem like an impossible bind; and indeed it’s one reason why politicians consider degrowth to be so unthinkable. But there’s a way out. As we shed unnecessary jobs we can shorten the working week, going from forty-seven
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, etc.). This approach would allow everyone to benefit from the time that’s liberated by reducing material throughput. It’s an essential part of any degrowth strategy. The exciting part is that reducing working hours has a substantial positive impact on people’s well-being. This effect has been demonstrated over
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reproductive work (most of which is normally done by women) is totally devalued under capitalism; it is externalised, unpaid, invisible and unrepresented in GDP figures. Degrowth will free us to reallocate labour to what really matters – to things that have real use-value. Care contributes directly to social and ecological well
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labour. But we can also introduce a living wage policy that’s pegged to the week or month, rather than to the hour. In a degrowth scenario, this means shifting income from capital back to labour, reversing the appropriation of productivity gains that has happened since Keynes penned his essay in
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the living world from its grip. As Giorgos Kallis has pointed out, ‘capitalism cannot operate under conditions of abundance’.43 Some critics have claimed that degrowth is nothing more than a new version of austerity. But in fact exactly the opposite is true. Austerity calls for scarcity in order to generate
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more growth. Degrowth calls for abundance in order to render growth unnecessary. If we are to avert climate breakdown, the environmentalism of the twenty-first century must articulate
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must act quickly, for ecosystems are likely to lose their regenerative capacity as global warming continues. From this perspective, I cannot help but feel that degrowth is, ultimately, a process of decolonisation. Capitalist growth has always been organised around an expansionary territorial logic. As capital pulls ever-increasing swathes of nature
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circuits of accumulation, it colonises lands, forests, seas, even the atmosphere itself. For 500 years, capitalist growth has been a process of enclosure and dispossession. Degrowth represents a reversal of this process. It represents release. It represents an opportunity for healing, recovery and repair. This is true in a geopolitical sense
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half a century ago, but – as we’ve seen – those old patterns of plunder continue to this day, with ruinous consequences. To the extent that degrowth in high-income nations releases global South communities from the grip of extractivism, it represents decolonisation in the truest sense of the term. * My years
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of researching degrowth have given me something I didn’t really expect – hope. And yet I have nonetheless found myself worrying, from time to time, that something is
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philosophers teach us: that we must learn to see ourselves once again as part of a broader community of living beings. If our approach to degrowth does not have this ethic at its heart, then we have missed the point. A second Scientific Revolution In the late twentieth century, phenomenology managed
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with the living world. How can we possibly bring all of these together? When I set out to write this book, I worried about using degrowth as a central frame. It is only a first step, after all. But as I think about the journey we’ve been on, I wonder
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if it is also more than that. Degrowth stands for de-colonisation, of both lands and peoples and even our minds. It stands for the de-enclosure of commons, the de-commodification of
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, and the de-intensification of work and life. It stands for the de-thingification of humans and nature, and the de-escalation of ecological crisis. Degrowth begins as a process of taking less. But in the end it opens up whole vistas of possibility. It moves us from scarcity to abundance
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on, mindlessly, unaware of what we’re doing, unaware of what’s happening around us, unaware of what we are sacrificing … who we are sacrificing. Degrowth is an idea that shakes us out of the trance. ‘Sit, be still, and listen,’ Rumi wrote in one of his poems: ‘for you are
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to uphold the principle of equity, they must reduce emissions by 12% per year. Even in a no-growth scenario this is impossible; it requires degrowth. See Jason Hickel and Giorgos Kallis, ‘Is green growth possible?’ New Political Economy, 2019 (note that the figures I have cited here are updated since
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Kerschner and Joan Martinez-Alier, ‘The economics of degrowth,’ Ecological Economics 84, 2012, pp. 172–180; Giacomo D’Alisa et al., eds., Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era (Routledge, 2014); Giorgos Kallis, Degrowth (Agenda Publishing, 2018). 48 For a history and overview of degrowth, see Kallis, Degrowth; for global South perspectives see Arturo Escobar
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, ‘Degrowth, postdevelopment, and transitions: a preliminary conversation,’ Sustainability Science, 2015. 49
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, pp. 765–777. 35 The Circularity Report (PACE, 2015). 36 This idea was initially proposed by Herman Daly. 37 See the final chapter in Kallis, Degrowth. Four: Secrets of the Good Life 1 See Szreter, ‘The population health approach in historical perspective’; Simon Szreter, ‘Rapid economic growth and ‘the four Ds
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: A proposal for Universal Basic Services,’ UCL Institute for Global Prosperity, 2017. 40 Frank Adloff describes this as an ‘infrastructure of conviviality’. See his article ‘Degrowth meets convivialism’, in Resilience. 41 Walasek and Brown, ‘Income inequality and status seeking: Searching for positional goods in unequal US states’. 42 And opportunities to
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music, maintenance, growing food and crafting furniture would contribute to local self-sufficiency. Samuel Alexander and Brendan Gleeson show how this works in their book Degrowth in the Suburbs: A Radical Urban Imaginary (Springer, 2018). 43 Kallis, Limits, p. 66. 44 There is evidence of this from studies done in Canada
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Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Editions, 2013). 30 Marcel Mauss’ book The Gift has been fundamental to degrowth thinking. 31 Rattan Lal, ‘Enhancing crop yields in the developing countries through restoration of the soil organic carbon pool in agricultural lands,’ Land Degradation & Development
Growth: A Reckoning
by Daniel Susskind · 16 Apr 2024 · 358pp · 109,930 words
ONE 1. The Trap 2. The Escape PART TWO 3. The Priority 4. The Promise 5. The Price PART THREE 6. GDP Minimalism 7. Degrowth PART FOUR 8. Unleashing Growth 9. A New Direction PART FIVE 10. The Big Tradeoffs 11. The Moral Questions Conclusion Acknowledgements Notes Index For Grace
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these challenges have emerged far more intensely at the start of the twenty-first. It is not a coincidence that radical movements, from far-left ‘degrowthers’ to far-right national populists, are ascendant. The more moderate parts of political life have slumped to the occasion. Historians, when trying to make
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policymakers and economists. The other is a more dramatic proposal: to give up on that pursuit altogether and deliberately slow down our economies through ‘degrowth’, the sort of path advocated by influential public figures such as David Attenborough and Greta Thunberg. Neither of these ideas alone can solve the growth
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measure that would capture social value as well. This is a deeply misleading idea – and one that GDP Minimalism, properly embraced, would dispel. 7. Degrowth ‘Growth is one of the stupidest purposes ever invented by any culture … we’ve got to have an “enough”.’ Donella Meadows1 ‘My message is that
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). But it was also a significant intellectual moment. Her disdain for those telling ‘fairy tales of eternal economic growth’ helped raise awareness of the ‘degrowth’ movement, an eclectic collection of thinkers who had spent decades arguing with each other in obscurity about how to deal with climate change but were
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great to ignore. Should we, then, slow down the growth of our economies – or even shrink them? This is the blunt demand that the degrowth movement is famous for supposedly making: if growth is the problem, then ‘less growth’ is their solution. This apparently audacious suggestion has attracted widespread derision
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concluded The Spectator) to more cinematic dismissals (it would ‘kill children to save the planet’, said the writer Tom Chivers).4 In truth, what the degrowth movement actually stands for is not clear. Its literature is large, fast-growing and fascinating. But it is also contradictory and hard to follow, written
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by academese, inflated with political rhetoric and full of distracting disagreements between partisan thinkers with diverging personal motivations. Depending on what the vague demand for ‘degrowth’ really means in practice, it could be catastrophically self-destructive or entirely sensible. And yet, in spite of both the complaints and the ambiguities,
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it is still important to engage with degrowth. To begin with, the idea is influential. Interest in it might have begun among a small group of ecologically minded academics, but it has
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are shaped by it: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the most important organization for sharing scientific knowledge on the environment, did not mention degrowth in its signature report back in 2014, but in preparing for the next edition it has already made more than twenty references to the idea
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.8 Even the confusions involved in the degrowth discussion often turn out to be useful. Many of them, for instance, reflect fundamental misconceptions about the economics of growth, and resolving them can
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brave enough to reach an unpleasant but inevitable conclusion – that something now has to give.9 A Brief History of Going Backwards The story of degrowth begins in the final third of the twentieth century. Though some point to earlier inspirations – the Victorian anti-industrialism of John Ruskin and William
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’, as one biographer put it, no doubt in part because of that less-than-alluring title.13 But the text still became canonical for the degrowth movement, and for good reason. To begin with, it was uncompromisingly interdisciplinary, a provocatively unusual fusion of economics and thermodynamics that would inspire many
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academic boundaries in exciting ways in the future. The book was also one of the first articulations of an insight that would recur in the degrowth movement: the idea that there are ‘planetary limits’ to economic activity, that there are real-world constraints on growth which traditional theoretical economic models
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when today’s skyscrapers have crumbled back to sand’, wrote the economist’s economist Paul Samuelson.14 The other seminal moment in the history of degrowth is connected with a small gathering of intellectuals, businessmen, political figures and policymakers at a grandly decorated villa in the centre of Rome in
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trends of global concern’: population growth, industrialization, malnutrition, environmental destruction and natural resource depletion. The apocalyptic conclusion generated by the model was one that the degrowth movement would embrace: ‘either civilization or growth must end, and soon’, as a review summed it up in The New York Times.18 The report
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waters even further. Others have abandoned the task of boiling the ideas down to something manageable altogether, opting to spin this ambiguity as a strength. Degrowth is a ‘remarkably diverse network’ full of ‘healthy debates’, as one supporter puts it; a ‘meeting space’ and an ‘umbrella term’, in the words
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but also that it is inequality-creating, work-threatening, politics-undermining and community-disrupting. So far, so obvious. But there is another part to the degrowth diagnosis: the more provocative claim that continued growth is infeasible as well.25 Our current economic ascent is not only unpalatable, they say, but also
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support. And the link has indeed put off many potential advocates. The economist Kate Raworth, for instance, whose best-selling book Doughnut Economics echoes many degrowth themes, and who would seem to be a natural ally of the movement, nevertheless distances herself from the term. ‘I just can’t bring
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of gas-guzzling SUVs – while leaving other parts unscathed. It’s clear some supporters believe that the existence of these noble intentions matters, and that degrowth is different because it is ‘planned’ whereas a traditional recession is not.42 The problem with this sort of defence, though, is that all
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these supposedly distinguishing features of degrowth are entirely compatible with a traditional recession. This is because the term ‘recession’ is just the technical label for a period where economic activity declines
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other economic thinking and distort the meaning of a far more established word. The fact that recessions do not tend to feature the outcomes that degrowthers hope to achieve is beside the point. However wonderful those outcomes, if economic activity declined sufficiently then a recession would still be taking place,
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albeit one of an unfamiliar type – a recession with a ‘human face’. In turn, the argument that degrowth is ‘planned’ whereas recessions are ‘unplanned’ is not only irrelevant – intentions have nothing to do with whether a recession is taking place – but factually
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the economy must also necessarily shrink. This is, for all intents and purposes, a deliberate recession. In their more honest moments, some members of the degrowth movement recognize the trap they have set themselves, and the recession-like quality of what they demand. Jason Hickel, for instance, says that ‘if
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would be one of the most misplaced acts of self-harm that humankind could inflict upon itself. As the economist Branko Milanović points out, if degrowth means freezing global GDP at its current level, but abandoning 800 million people to remain in extreme poverty for ever is considered unacceptable, then
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intellectual disaster, drawing our collective attention away from understanding the only process that can help us improve conditions for all humankind. If instead we took degrowth as a solution, interpreting it as the pursuit of a deliberate recession – the inevitable implication, despite the protestations of supporters – then it would be
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us aware of how dangerously we are currently living, prompting the question of how we should respond. For that reason, it is unfortunate that the degrowthers are so defensive when people say they are calling for deliberate recessions. As a matter of public relations, that reaction is understandable. But there
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with both sides of the story, to attempt to balance the promise and the price of growth, and openly confront the tradeoffs that this presents. Degrowth simply replaces the sort of economic zealotry that prevails in some intellectual and practical corners today – the pursuit of growth at all costs – with
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that is total nonsense,’ proclaimed the influential scholar Vaclav Smil in 2019.18 This sort of snark was not uncommon from critics, and particularly from degrowthers, for whom the debate was existential: their case for the necessity of less growth, after all, relies on the impossibility of green growth. Figure
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swinging to the other extreme, ploughing ahead with growth and blindly continuing the pursuit of ever more prosperity. The two are mirror-image mistakes: degrowth implies focusing exclusively on the price of growth and neglecting its promise, prioritizing growth above all else implies doing the exact opposite. We have to
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between these two extremes. The first step, then, is to stop pretending we can avoid all tradeoffs. And as we’ve seen, this is the degrowth movement’s redeeming insight. They make it clear that something has to give. For those in the arena – politicians, policymakers, business leaders – this means
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– but who are also sympathetic towards the criticism I made in that chapter. And so, in response, they have come up with another interpretation of degrowth, where the aim is not to pursue negative growth, but to be ‘indifferent’ about growth while prioritizing other outcomes instead. (Most of the time,
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out growth altogether, and accepting that growth brings with it benefits alongside the costs, it supports a far more balanced position (a balance which strong degrowth, as we have seen, cannot accommodate). That said, the weakness of this milder take is that its recognition of growth’s benefits remains tepid.
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. Asking people to ‘ignore’ growth, to put it at the bottom of their pile of possible priorities, suggests that even this milder version of degrowth continues to underestimate the extraordinary promise of what economic growth can do for humanity. So I think we should seek to adopt a third interpretation
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ideal philosophical antidote to having prioritized economic growth for so long: growth currently sits right at the top of that hierarchy, and adopting a weak degrowth mindset would help to correct that. If taken seriously, the practical implication of this philosophy would be the sort of GDP Minimalism set out
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value that people attach to those ends, abandoning any attempt to capture them in a single number. For each tradeoff, we can imagine how weak degrowth might shape decision-making. Take the climate, for instance. A serious frustration for the environmental movement is the persistence of fossil fuel subsidies: worth
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61 Michael Sandel, ‘What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets’, Tanner Lectures, delivered at Brasenose College, 11 and 12 May 1998. 7. Degrowth 1 Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist (London: Penguin, 2017), p. 35. 2 Greta Thunberg, ‘Greta Thunberg
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07/11/exponential/. 4 Noah Smith, ‘The Metaverse and (Near-)infinite Growth’, Substack, 9 November 2021; Benedict McAleenan, ‘The Coronavirus Crisis Reveals the Misery of “Degrowth”’, The Spectator, 27 March 2020; Tom Chivers, ‘Who Would Kill Children to Save the Planet?’, Unherd, 13 August 2021: twitter.com/timparrique/status/1430155819404963841. 5
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rigorously puts the focus on the many things that will have to go’, p. 9, Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter and Aaron Vansintjan, The Future is Degrowth (London: Verso, 2022). 10 ‘Apprentice’ was his word. See Sylvia Nasar, ‘Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Leading Economist, Dies at 88’, The New York Times, 5
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Vandana Singh, ‘The Delusion of Infinite Economic Growth’, Scientific American, 20 June 2021. 27 Summers and Romer quoted in Timothée Parrique, ‘The Political Economy of Degrowth’, Economics and Finance, Université Clermont Auvergne, 2017; Stockholm University, 2019, English, NNT: 2019CLFAD003 (2019), p. 77, fn 2. 28 Chad Jones, ‘Growth and Ideas’,
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Union, 10 October 2015, ~14.30 minutes, www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTUrwO9-B_I. 52 See, for instance, Schmeltzer et al., The Future is Degrowth. 53 Berlin, The Crooked Timber, p. 20. 54 Thomas Nagel, Equality and Partiality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 21: ‘Political theory typically has
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own political path forward’, www.nytimes.com/2021/08/31/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-ask-me-anything.html. 59 Kallis et al., The Case for Degrowth, p. 114. 60 Quoted in Daniel Susskind and Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p.xvii. 61 ‘[C
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]entral target’, in Schmelzer et al., The Future is Degrowth, p. 38. See, for instance, Jackson, Prosperity Without Growth, pp. 162–3. 8. Unleashing Growth 1 See Dietrich Vollrath, Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant
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Friends Don’t Seem to Realise That”, The Guardian, 21 September 2019. 19 For example, Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter and Aaron Vansintjan, The Future is Degrowth (London: Verso, 2022), p. 88. 20 ‘Economic Growth No Longer Means Higher Carbon Emissions’, The Economist, 8 November 2022. 21 This chart is from:
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Need to Contest Everything – Including the Experts’, Prospect Magazine, 22 May 2018. 4 Cathérine Lehmann, Olivier Delbard and Steffen Lange, ‘Green Growth, A-Growth or Degrowth? Investing the Attitudes of Environmental Protection Specialists at the German Environment Agency’, Journal of Cleaner Production, 336 (2022). 5 Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways
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to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist (London: Penguin, 2017); Tim Jackson, Prosperity Without Growth (Oxford: Routledge, 2017). 6 Jason Hickel, ‘What Does Degrowth Mean? A Few Points of Clarification’, Globalizations, 18:7, 1105–1111 (2021), p. 1107. 7 These figures are £1,185.6bn in 2021–22 vs
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293n6 Daly, Herman, Toward a Steady-State Economy (1973), 154 Darwin, Charles, 280n30 DeepMind (company), 189, 200, 202, 244 Deepwater Horizon oil spill (2010), 136 degrowth movement, 149–51 DeLong, Brad, Slouching Towards Utopia, 176 Dene, William de la, 17 Dennett, Daniel, 281n35 Diamond, Jared, Guns, Germs, and Steel, 45–6
American Marxism
by Mark R. Levin · 12 Jul 2021 · 314pp · 88,524 words
the existence of environmental racism targeting minority communities. Some of the movement’s masterminds insist that Marxism does not go far enough in establishing their degrowth utopianism as they imagine life in a perpetual state of nature, where productivity, growth, and material acquisition are toxic to the human spirit. Of course
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, it all involves a form of repression and autocracy. At the core of this mind-numbing amalgamated Marxist-centric or Marxist-like crusade is the “degrowth movement.” Mankind consumes and produces too much, and the blame resides with capitalism and America. Again, there are a variety of movements within movements targeting
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way to explain this is to expose what certain of its leading advocates have to say. In their essay, “What Is Degrowth—From an Activist Slogan to a Social Movement,” leading degrowthers Federico Demaria, Francois Schneider, Filka Sekulova, and Joan Martin-Alier write that “[d]egrowth was launched in the beginning of
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. It quickly became a slogan against economic growth and developed into a social movement…. Unlike sustainable development, which is a concept based on false consensus, degrowth does not aspire to be adopted as a common goal by the United Nations, the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] or the
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European Commission. The idea of ‘socially sustainable degrowth,’ or simply degrowth, was born as a proposal for radical change. The contemporary context of neo-liberal capitalism appears as a post-political condition, meaning a political
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formation that forecloses the political and prevents the politicization of particular demands. Within this context, degrowth is an attempt to re-politicize the debate on much needed socio-ecological transformation, affirming dissidence with the current world representations and search for alternative
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ones…. Degrowth… challenges the ideas of ‘green growth’ or ‘green economy’ and the associated belief in economic growth as a desirable path in political agendas…. Degrowth is not just an economic concept. [I]t is a frame constituted by
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a large array of concerns, goals, strategies and actions. As a result, degrowth has now become a confluence point where streams of critical ideas and political action converge.”8 Hence, the goal is to reverse the massive economic
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Revolution, which created a huge, vibrant middle class and infinite technological, scientific, and medical advancements that have overwhelmingly improved the human condition. The quartet continues: “Degrowth has evolved into an interpretative frame for a social movement, understood as the mechanism through which actors engage in a collective action. For instance, anti
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activists, cyclists and pedestrian rights campaigners, partisans of organic agriculture, critics of urban sprawl, and promoters of solar energy and local currencies have started seeing degrowth as an appropriate common representative frame for their world view.”9 The social movement envisioned by these utopians would drag America into a regressive, impoverished
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, experience shows that for those among them who are famous, wealthy, and/or powerful, they will continue to luxuriate in a lifestyle created by capitalism. “Degrowth is [also] an interpretative frame diagnosis that disparate social phenomena such as the social and environmental crises are related to economic growth,” write the foursome
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. “Degrowth actors are thus ‘signifying agents’ engaged in the production of alternative and contentious meanings which differ from the ones defended by the mainstream…. The prognosis,
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spawn myriad sub-movements aimed at taking down the capitalist system. As I explained in 2015 in Plunder and Deceit, among other things, “[t]he degrowthers seek to eliminate carbon sources of energy and redistribute wealth according to terms they consider equitable. They reject the traditional economic reality that acknowledges growth
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as improving living conditions generally but especially for the impoverished. They embrace ‘less competition, large scale redistribution, sharing and reduction of excessive incomes and wealth.’ Degrowthers want to engage in policies that will set ‘a maximum income, or maximum wealth, to weaken envy as a motor of consumerism, and opening borders
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a ‘concept of ecological debt, or the demand that the Global North pays for past and present colonial exploitation of the Global South.’ ”11 The degrowthers also demand that government establish a living wage and reduce the workweek to twenty hours.12 Serge Latouche, a French emeritus professor of economics at
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the University of Paris-Sud, is among the leading degrowthers. “In the 1970s, Serge Latouche spent several years in South Africa, where he conducted extensive research on traditional Marxism, where he formed his own ideology
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based on ‘progresses and development.’ He is among the pioneers of the degrowth theory.”13 Latouche emphasizes a utopian-type doctrine in which even Marxism fails to make the grade. In Farewell to Growth, he declared: “We do
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ICTA–Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, whose influence is considerable among the eco-radicals in the United States, explains in his book In Defense of Degrowth that “[s]ustainable degrowth is defined as an equitable downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions. [It] envision[s] a
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the Marxist paradise. The picture Kallis and other radicals paint is nothing like the inevitable, horrific nightmare their abstract dreams would unleash. Kallis continues: “Sustainable degrowth denotes an intentional process of a smooth and ‘prosperous way down,’ through a range of social, environmental, and economic policies and institutions, orchestrated to guarantee
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that while production and consumption decline, human welfare improves and is more equally distributed. Various concrete and practical proposals are being debated for enabling such degrowth transitions. These include both policy-institutional changes within the current system—such as drastic changes to financial institutions, resource and pollution caps and sanctuaries, infrastructure
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regulated currencies, barter and non-money market exchanges. ‘Exiting the economy,’ to create new spaces of simplicity, sharing and conviviality, is the driving motto of degrowth.”20 But Marxism dressed up as a green movement is still Marxism, at least in significant part. Moreover, “exiting the economy” would create not “sharing
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the economy is a political creation, not a spontaneous aggregation of untold commercial and financial interactions among a free people. “[T]he economy in the degrowth literature is political. It is not an independent system governed by the laws of supply and demand. The imaginary free market does not exist…. In
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resources to his political priorities, and imposing unprecedented regulatory controls on American industry, not only to take initial steps to fulfill the demands of the degrowth activists and their Green New Deal, but to rearrange major aspects of American society and daily life.79 On March 31, 2021, Biden announced a
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decisions, this has all the markings of an economic and property-rights catastrophe. Unfortunately, true science, experience, and knowledge are not hallmarks of the anticapitalist degrowth zealots. As I explained in Plunder and Deceit, their Marxist-oriented mind-set “has… developed into a pseudo-religion and public policy obsession. In fact
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, the degrowthers insist their ideology reaches far beyond the environment or even its odium for capitalism and is an all-encompassing lifestyle and governing philosophy.”91 And
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the media are now well suited as propagandists for an anti-American, pro-Marxist agenda—from Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project to the degrowth movement and its war on capitalism. Writing in Jacobin magazine, a self-described socialist publication, Steven Sherman notes that Marx “was a journalist more or
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Congress to end its special exemption from antitrust laws. CLIMATE As discussed earlier, the “climate change” movement (previously, global cooling and global warming) is a degrowth, anticapitalism movement that will impoverish Americans. At bottom, it is a broad-based war on your property rights, liberty, and way of life. More broadly
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, 8. 4 Ibid., 9. 5 Ibid., 10. 6 Reisman, 77. 7 Ibid. 8 Federico Demaria, Francois Schneider, Filka Sekulova, and Joan Martinez-Alier, “What Is Degrowth? From Activist Slogan to a Social Movement,” Environmental Values 22, no. 1 (2013), 192. 9 Ibid., 194. 10 Ibid. 11 Mark R. Levin, Plunder and
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Deceit (New York: Threshold Editions, 2015), 112; Demaria, Schneider, Sekulova, and Martinez-Alier, “What is Degrowth?” 12 Mackenzie Mount, “Green Biz, Work Less to Live More,” Sierra Club, March 6, 2014, https://contentdev.sierraclub.org/www/www/sierra/2014-2-march
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-Marxism,” in Political Theory and Global Climate Change, ed. Steve Vanderheiden (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 153. 18 Ibid. 19 Giorgos Kallis, In Defense of Degrowth: Opinions and Minifestos (Brussels: Uneven Earth Press, 2017), 10. 20 Ibid., 12. 21 Ibid., 13, 14. 22 Ibid., 71. 23 Ibid., 72. 24 Ayn Rand
Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition
by Charles Eisenstein · 11 Jul 2011 · 448pp · 142,946 words
Application and Theory The Debt Crisis: Opportunity for Transition Thinking for the Future More for Me Is More for You Chapter 13: Steady-State and Degrowth Economics Sustainability Reconsidered Transition to Steady-State: Bump or Crash? Shrinking Money, Growing Wealth Disintermediation and the P2P Revolution Chapter 14: The Social Dividend The
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, and Compensation for Depletion of the Commons 3. Internalization of Social and Environmental Costs 4. Economic and Monetary Localization 5. The Social Dividend 6. Economic Degrowth 7. Gift Culture and P2P Economics PART III: LIVING THE NEW ECONOMY Chapter 18: Relearning Gift Culture Chapter 19: Nonaccumulation Chapter 20: Right Livelihood and
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among the great powers, and against anyone who resisted colonization and imperialism. Limiting resource consumption is one of the pillars of a steady-state or degrowth economy, which short-circuits this primary driving force for war and frees up vast resources to turn toward the goal of healing the planet. The
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starts growing again, at which point, presumably, interest rates would rise back into positive territory. If, however, we are entering a permanent zero-growth or degrowth economy, negative interest rates could become permanent too. The proper rate of interest, positive or negative, depends on whether the economy is to grow or
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to restrain it to a sustainable level. In the new thinking, monetary policy strives to match the base interest rate to the economic growth (or degrowth) rate. Keynes estimated that it should be “roughly equal to the excess of the money-rate of interest over the marginal efficiency of capital corresponding
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make payments by the due date. It would mean, however, that the longer they waited, the less they could collect. CHAPTER 13 STEADY-STATE AND DEGROWTH ECONOMICS Infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility. —E. F. Schumacher SUSTAINABILITY RECONSIDERED The last two chapters have outlined an
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real economy—what people make and do for each other—grows richer. I will not mince words: in this book I am calling for economic degrowth, a shrinking of the economy, a recession that will last decades or centuries. Obviously, the word “recession” has negative connotations today, though it really just
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concert venue, and so on are all scarce resources, and they fit much more easily into the money realm. Nonetheless, the net result is economic degrowth: as one writer puts it, Their basic idea, which is great as far as it goes, is to use free content to piggyback monetized auxiliary
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weeds. A shift toward herbal medicine, homeopathic medicine, and the myriad mind-body modalities blossoming today promises economic degrowth, yet it entails no reduction in our quality of life.4 Another area for economic degrowth is architecture and urban design. In addition to disconnecting us from community, nature, and place, the expansive
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reduce GDP by lowering spending on “financial services.” Because these ever-cheaper “information economy” services are a factor of production in nearly every other sector, degrowth here is contagious. This is true even in industries that we think of as growth industries. In 2000, for example, $371 billion was spent on
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. The key difference is that we won’t rely on technological improvements in efficiency alone to enable greater leisure. The key is degrowth, not efficiency. It seems very counterintuitive: that degrowth—economic recession—will be what ushers in true affluence for the many. In a growth economy, the labor that could be
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indulge our gentle disposition and allow that the habits of slavery are of long standing and may need some time to unwind. I foresee a degrowth rate of around 2 percent, so that our use of raw materials, our pollution of the air and water, and our time spent working for
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money not love falls by about half with each generation, until eventually the pace of degrowth slows as the economy approaches an equilibrium relationship with the planet a couple hundred years from now. The system I have described offers an alternative
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double the productivity of every worker. Now the same amount of goods is available with half the labor. If (as in a steady-state or degrowth economy) demand does not increase, then half the workers are now superfluous. To stay competitive, firms must fire half their workers, make them part-time
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the planet and its people as the age turns. There is a vast amount of important work to be done, work that is consistent with degrowth because it won’t necessarily produce salable product. There are forests to replant, sick people to care for, an entire planet to be healed. I
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areas that money cannot reach. The growth of leisure, or, more accurately, the growth of labor done for love, goes hand in hand with the degrowth of the money economy. Humanity is entering its adulthood, a time when physical growth ends and we turn our attention to that which we want
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they are so cheap, maybe I’ll install some new ones in my backyard in case we have a party next summer. Applied to the degrowth factors I described above, Jevon’s paradox says that cheaper advertising will mean even more of it. But this, again, assumes an infinite upward elasticity
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have a place in human life for many centuries to come. It will occupy a diminished role, however, as I described in the chapter on degrowth. Instead of obsessively fulfilling and overfulfilling our finite needs to the present degree of obscene hypertrophy, we will turn our energy to the unmet qualitative
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, the scope of recognized contribution has been limited to contribution to the “ascent” of humanity, the growing of the human realm. But even with a degrowth currency, the deeper problem remains that money by nature can operate only in the realm of the quantifiable. We face the question of how to
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systems such as Giftflow, Neighborgoods, Shareable, GIFTegrity, and many others recognize and remedy this flaw. Notice that all I have described so far accelerates the degrowth of the economy. When we give each other rides to the airport instead of hiring a taxi, when we share power tools instead of buying
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that freedom from survival pressure will lead to dissipation and indolence, please go back and reread “The Will to Work” in Chapter 14.) 6. ECONOMIC DEGROWTH Motivation: Over hundreds of years of inventing labor-saving devices, from the spinning jenny to the digital computer, we have at every turn chosen to
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us. Absent the driving force of positive risk-free interest, economic growth will no longer be necessary to promote the flow of capital, and a degrowth economy will become feasible. Technology will continue to advance, and we will be left with the second option: to work less or, more accurately, to
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of life into two exclusive zones, work and leisure. Decaying currency, resource-based economics (2 and 3 above), and the social dividend all support a degrowth economy. We must also deprogram ourselves from the growth-is-good mantra that guides public policy today. In the 2009 stimulus program, the rationale for
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and easier employment that ordinarily only happen in a context of growth-driven business investment will be able to happen in a steady-state or degrowth economy. People will spend more and more of their time in noneconomic activities as the money realm shrinks and the realm of gifts, voluntarism, leisure
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with less. People will also share more and consume less, borrow more and rent less, give more and sell less—all reflecting and engendering economic degrowth. 7. GIFT CULTURE AND P2P ECONOMICS Motivation: The expansion of the money realm has come at the expense of other forms of economic circulation, in
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and development of the unquantifiable things that truly make life rich. Transition and policy: Thankfully, the money realm is already beginning to shrink, and that degrowth allows new space for gift economics. The internet is in important respects a gift network, and it has made it easy to give away information
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have already laid out in this book the monetary equivalent of nonaccumulation (decaying currency), of nonownership (elimination of economic rents), and of underproduction (leisure and degrowth). Tellingly, many people feel a pull toward these values on a personal level too, such as in the movement toward “voluntary simplicity” and in questioning
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contribution as a reward. The venture capitalist identifies high-growth opportunities and provides the money to bring them to fruition. In a steady-state or degrowth economy, this model is no longer appropriate, just as it feels no longer appropriate for more and more people in the investing class—hence the
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. All of the movements I have described in this book are carrying us toward a world that beautiful. The social dividend, the internalization of costs, degrowth, abundance and the gift economy, all take us away from the mentality of struggle, of survival, and therefore of utilitarian efficiency, and toward our true
Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow
by Tim Jackson · 8 Dec 2016 · 573pp · 115,489 words
dilemma of growth? Where do the foundations laid down in the previous chapter leave us in relation to the two horns of that dilemma? ‘Our degrowth is not their recession’ The dilemma of growth has us caught between the desire to maintain economic stability and the need to remain within ecological
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limits. On the one hand, endless growth looks environmentally unsustainable; on the other hand, degrowth appears to be socially and economically unstable. Logically speaking, there are two distinct escape routes from this dilemma. One is to make growth more sustainable
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; the other is to make degrowth more stable. There’s a particularly striking (and sometimes acrimonious) division between those who choose differently between these two options. Some continue to argue, with
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increasing vehemence, for growth at all costs. Others have begun, sometimes vociferously, to campaign against it. Into this latter category falls the degrowth movement: an intellectual challenge to the mainstream paradigm that was in its infancy when the first edition of this book was published. In the intervening
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starts running into trouble. Investment falls, jobs are lost, businesses go bust, government deficits rise and the economy risks falling into a deflationary spiral. The degrowth response to this challenge is an interesting but not entirely satisfactory one. One of the catchphrases of the movement insists that ‘our
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degrowth is not their recession’. Degrowth is not the opposite of growth or even the absence of growth. Rather it is, in the words of its proponents, a ‘missile concept’ designed
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does this mean for the economy as a whole? Is production expanding or is it contracting? Is demand rising or is it falling? The word ‘degrowth’ suggests that one or other of these things is falling. In which case, the challenge is to show how the consequences associated with the second
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debts managed? How is stability ensured? Oddly, the questions themselves have not always met with approval from the degrowth movement, many of whom call for an ‘exit from the economy’ and regard degrowth as ‘an invitation to abandon economistic thinking’.8 From a philosophical point of view, it’s easy to have
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ceases to surprise me. At a conference recently, where I presented some of the economic modelling I will describe later in this chapter, a prominent degrowth advocate challenged me directly afterwards. ‘The idea of post-growth economics is an oxymoron’, he told me. There is clearly a question mark over how
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; but rather an opportunity to build a new economics, fit for purpose in addressing the enormous challenges we are already facing. In a sense, the degrowth advocates have no problem at all accepting the first horn of the growth dilemma: that growth is unsustainable. But they tend to deny the validity
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, or at least diminish the importance, of the second. Degrowth is not necessarily the same thing as negative growth, argue its advocates. And so it doesn’t have to lead to instability. But this isn
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, equally passionate and often much more powerful lobby who take almost exactly the opposite position. That is, they have no problem accepting the proposition that degrowth is unstable but they insist absolutely that economic growth is (or at least can become) sustainable. They refuse, almost out of principle, to countenance a
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economics. It is not yet clear where they leave us in terms of the dilemma of growth. Beyond the rhetorical divide that separates growth from degrowth lie two serious questions still worth asking. Is the economy of tomorrow a growth-based economy or is it not? Is the economy of tomorrow
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, almost anything can happen. In some circumstances, Piketty is right: declining growth can lead to rising inequality. In others, the exact reverse can happen: even degrowth can be compatible with improved equality.37 This was certainly good news of a kind. Even more striking were the circumstances under which this reverse
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, because interest has to be paid on almost all of it, the economy must grow continuously if it is not to collapse.’38 Likewise, US degrowth activist Charles Eisenstein maintains that ‘our present money system can only function in a growing economy. Money is created as interest-bearing debt: it only
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, the contributions from those who speak of a ‘post-growth’ economy, such as Blewitt and Cunningham (2015). 7 http://newint.org/blog/2015/05/14/degrowth-federico-demaria/ (accessed 29 October 2015). See also D’Alisa et al. (2014). Quotes are taken from Kallis (2015). 8 See Kallis (2015). 9 Keynes
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Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity. Newhaven and London: Yale University Press. Baycan, Baris Gencer 2007. ‘From limits to growth to degrowth within French green politics’. Environmental Politics 16(3): 513–517. Becker, Ernest 1973. The Denial of Death, reprinted 1997. New York: Simon and Schuster. Begg
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and Howard Cutler 2009. The Art of Happiness, 10th anniversary edition. London: Hodder and Stoughton. D’Alisa, Giacomo, Federico Damaria and Giorgos Kallis (eds) 2014. Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era. London: Routledge. Daly, Herman 2014. From Uneconomic Growth to a Steady-State Economy. Advances in Ecological Economics. Northampton, MA
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January 2016). Defra 2007. Sustainable Development Indicators in Your Pocket. London: TSO. Demaria, Federico, Francois Schneider, Filka Sekulova and Joan Martinez-Alier 2013. ‘What is degrowth? From an activist slogan to a social movement’. Environmental Values 22(2): 191–215. Dichter, E. 1964. The Handbook of Consumer Motivations: The Psychology of
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(eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 87–104. Fournier, Valérie 2008. ‘Escaping from the economy: the politics of degrowth’. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 28(11–12): 528–545. Franco, Manuel, Pedro Orduñez, Benjamín Caballero, José A. Tapia Granados, Mariana Lazo, José
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evaluation’. Environmental and Resource Economics 32: 161–181. Kallis, Giorgos 2015. ‘The degrowth alternative, essay for the great transition initiative’. Online at www.greattransition.org/publication/the-degrowth-alternative (accessed 14 October 2015). Kallis, Giorgos 2011. ‘In defence of degrowth’. Ecological Economics 70(5): 873–880. Kasser, Tim 2008. A Vision of Prosperity
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, Serge 2007. ‘De-growth: an electoral stake?’ International Journal of inclusive Democracy 3(1) (January). Online at www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/vol3/vol3_no1_Latouche_degrowth.htm. Law Commission 2014. ‘Fiduciary duties of financial intermediaries’. Law Com 350. London: House of Commons. Online at www.lawcom.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads
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.forsaetisraduneyti.is/media/Skyrslur/monetary-reform.pdf (accessed 9 March 2016). Sippel, Alexandra 2009. ‘Back to the future: today’s and tomorrow’s politics of degrowth economics (décroissance) in light of the debate over luxury among eighteenth and early nineteenth century utopists’. International Labor and Working-Class History 75: 13–29
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between relative and absolute 96–101 deep emission and resource cuts 99, 102 deficit spending 41, 43 deflationary forces, post-financial crisis 43–7, 45 degrowth movement 161–3, 177 demand 104, 113–16, 166–7; post-financial crisis 44–5; post-growth economy 162, 164, 166–9, 171–2, 174
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digital economy 44, 219–20 dilemma of growth xxxi, 66–7, 104, 210; basic entitlements 72–9, 74, 75, 76, 78; decoupling 85, 87, 164; degrowth movement 160–3; economic stability 79–83, 174–6; material abundance 67–72; moving beyond 165, 166, 183–4; role of the state 198 diminishing
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, 72 see also social comparison positive feedback loops 16–17 post-growth capitalism 224 post-growth macroeconomics 159–60, 183–4, 221; credit 178–80; degrowth movement 161–3; economic stability 174–6; green growth 163–5; inequality 176–8; role of state 181–3, 182, 200–8, 206; services 170
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the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (2015) 19 UBS (Swiss bank) 46 Ubuntu, African philosophy 227 unemployment 77; consumer goods 215; degrowth movement 162; financial crisis 24, 40, 41, 43; Great Depression 39–40; and growth 38; labour productivity 80–1; post-growth economy 174, 175, 183
Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI
by John Cassidy · 12 May 2025 · 774pp · 238,244 words
mentioned above, the basic legitimacy of the system was being questioned. The accelerating impact of climate change spurred the rise of radical environmentalism and the “degrowth” movement, the origins of which can be traced to yet another of my subjects, the Romanian-American economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, who argued in the
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after his death. As a new millennium dawned, however, a new generation of environmental activists and progressives hailed him as a prophet of sustainability and degrowth, a status he certainly earned. “This is not an impossible ‘heaven on earth’ that we are seeking,” he wrote at the end of Gandhian Economic
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countries, calls to curb the pace of economic development and make the economy less resource intensive were garnering support from environmentalists and young people. The “degrowth” movement was taking off. Georgescu-Roegen would surely have welcomed these developments: in many ways, he was the intellectual godfather of
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degrowth. But he wouldn’t necessarily have been reassured. Perhaps because of his experience of Nazism as a young man, he didn’t hold high hopes
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activist, said at a UN climate change summit in 2019.28 For years a figurehead of the environmental movement, Thunberg was now associating herself with “degrowth,” the idea that had its origins in turn-of-the-millennium France and the works of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. The
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degrowth movement encompassed a number of different viewpoints, but they all shared the rejection of maximizing GDP growth as the primary goal of economic policy. “The
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and consume goods, the more we damage the environment,” Giorgos Kallis, an ecological economist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, wrote in his 2018 book Degrowth.29 “If humanity is not to destroy the planet’s life support systems, the global economy should slow down.” In a widely read manifesto, Prosperity
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human wellbeing, while also accelerating technological change and efficiency improvements.”35 The emphasis on well-being and equity has long been a part of the degrowth movement. Although it is closely associated with the environmental movement, its intellectual roots also go back to the skepticism about capitalism and mass production that
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helped keep distributional conflicts in check. The subsequent slowdown in growth coincided with rising political polarization and extremism. Another vital issue is whether shifting to degrowth would impose intolerable burdens on the world’s poorest countries, many of which would dearly like to follow the growth path that China and India
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hardly surprising. On a global basis, according to the World Bank, the median household income in 2022 was just $7.75 a day.37 Can degrowth policies be reconciled with allowing poor countries to raise the living standards of their populations toward Western levels? In a 2021 blog post, Branko Milanović
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, the CUNY economist and expert on global inequality, explored two possible options for keeping global GDP constant, which is the most literal definition of degrowth. The first one involved freezing the world income distribution, so that everybody kept their current incomes. Under this option, Milanović pointed out, half of the
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population would have to live permanently on seven dollars a day or less, which surely wouldn’t be acceptable to developing countries or proponents of degrowth. The second option involved reducing the living standards of people with incomes above the global average and raising the living standards of those below the
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calculations, anybody living on more than sixteen dollars a day, which in Western countries is about 86 percent of the population, would be affected. The degrowthers “cannot condemn to perpetual poverty people in developing countries who are just seeing the glimpses of a better life, nor can they reasonably argue that
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and then outright magical thinking.”38 In a blog post responding to Milanović, Jason Hickel, the author of the 2020 book Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, argued that in rich countries zero growth in GDP, or even declines, would be consistent with increases in human well-being
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Obituary Essay,” Ecological Economics 13, no. 3 (June 1995), 149–54. 49. See Federico Demaria, Filka Sekulova, Joan Martinez-Alier, and Francois Schneider, “What Is Degrowth? From an Activist Slogan to a Social Movement,” Environmental Values 22, no. 2 (April 2013), 191–215. 50. Georgescu-Roegen, “Energy and Economic Myths,” 379
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, September 23, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/09/23/763452863/transcript-greta-thunbergs-speech-at-the-u-n-climate-action-summit. 29. Giorgos Kallis, Degrowth (New York: Agenda Publishing, Columbia University Press, 2018), 1. 30. Tim Jackson, Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet (London: Earthscan, 2009), 15. 31
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or Consumption per Day, 1963–2023,” Our World in Data, March 27, 2024, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=table. 38. Branko Milanović, “Degrowth: Solving the Impasse by Magical Thinking,” Global Inequality and More 3.0 (blog), June 27, 2021, https://branko2f7.substack.com/p
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/degrowth-solving-the-impasse-by-magical. 39. Jason Hickel, “Degrowth: A Response to Branko Milanovic,” October 27, 2020, https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2017/11/19/why-branko-milanovic-is-wrong-about
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-de-growth. 40. Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (London: William Heinemann, 2020), https://blackbooksdotpub.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/jason-hickel-less-is-more-random-house-2020
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Alighieri Darmstadter Bank Darwin, Charles Davenport, Herbert J. Davies, R. Trevor Davis, Joseph H. Davitt, Michael De Beers de Castro, Sergio Décroissance, La Décroissance movement Degrowth (Kallis) DeLong, Brad demand; aggregate; supply and democracy; Mussolini on; Polanyi on; see also social democracy Democratic Party Demszky, Gábor Demuth, Helene Deng Xiaoping Denmark
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; ancient Greeley, Horace Green, T. H. Greenspan, Alan Greider, William Grey, Charles Grinevald, Jacques Griswold v. Connecticut Groener, Karl Groman, Vladimir Groote Schuur estate growth; degrowth movement; environment and; Georgescu-Roegen on; Limits to Growth report on; natural resource depletion as limit to; social divisions and; steady-state economy and; sustainability
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, William Life life expectancy Limits to Growth, The (Meadows and Meadows) Lincoln, Abraham Lindley, Mark Linlithgow, Victor Hope, Marquess of Literature Liverpool Liversedge living standards; degrowth policies and Lloyd George, David Lloyd’s of London Locke, John Łódź London; City of London; Engels’s move to; Marx’s move to; Tristan
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Porter, Noah Portugal Postcapitalism (Mason) Postlethwayt, Malachy potential economic surplus Potere Operaio poverty; in Britain; child; in Chile; in China; in colonies and former colonies; degrowth and; George on; growth and; in India; in Latin America; threshold of; see also inequality Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (Naoroji) Powell, Enoch
Abundance
by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson · 18 Mar 2025 · 227pp · 84,566 words
close to it, requires us to remake the world we have built. One vision that is popular in some corners of the left is called “degrowth.” It holds that climate change reflects humanity’s thrall to an impossible dream of endless growth. Rich countries must accept stasis, shuttering or scaling down
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major industries, and poorer countries must grow more gently and prudently. Degrowth is simultaneously much more and much less than an answer to the climate crisis. It is much more than an answer because it is not
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other, more holistic ways of seeing the world, and either convince or force people to become dualists,” writes Jason Hickel in Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. “Dualist philosophy was leveraged to cheapen life for the sake of growth; and it is responsible at a deep level for
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our ecological crisis.”2 Hickel compares the scale of the philosophical and economic revolution degrowth imagines to Darwin persuading the world of evolution or Copernicus spreading the knowledge that the earth revolves around the sun.3 He envisions a wholesale
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victory is yet only partial. We do not have decades or centuries to convince the world to act on climate change. To the extent that degrowth has a specific climate plan, it is to shut off or scale down areas of production it deems destructive, like military investment, meat and dairy
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to 1.5 degrees Celsius.5 And that is even assuming you could pass a global or multinational tax on meat. Which you could not. Degrowth criticizes other approaches as unrealistic, noting the ease with which countries slip from their climate commitments or the ways that clean energy may allow other
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fuels: raze more forests, trawl more fish, mine more mountains, build more roads, expand industrial farming, and send more waste to landfill.” In this sense, degrowth recognizes the difficulty that politics poses to climate policy. It knows people want more of what they have, and although it blames capitalism and plutocracy
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for these wants, it sees the challenges these wants pose to traditional climate politics. But those challenges apply to the degrowth vision with even greater force. If you cannot imagine convincing people to change their desires in the presence of energy abundance, how do you imagine
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convincing them to accept the rapid, collective scarcity that degrowth demands? We know what it looks like when governments face the political fury of rising energy prices or fuel rationing. In 2022, ninety countries and
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of fuel between January and September, according to a BBC analysis.7 In Sri Lanka—a country that Hickel holds out as a model for degrowth development—those protests led to the collapse of the ruling government. It is not much easier in rich countries, where
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degrowthers insist on the most radical restrictions in energy use. In France, the 2018 “yellow vest” protests followed a modest hike in the fuel tax. In
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politics into a zero-sum contest for allotted energy rations will not deliver a greener future. The cost of trying and failing to implement the degrowth vision would not merely be missing our climate targets by a few tenths of a percentage point. It is to deliver a future of populist
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treasured nostrums and splitting old alliances. It will also require opposing visions of scarcity that are gaining adherents on the left. The values of the degrowther movement have gained momentum among Western intellectuals. The environmental devastation that has accompanied modernity seems like an equation with an obvious solution: If this is
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Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need (New York: Vintage Books, 2021), 19, 24. 2. Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (London: Penguin Books, 2022), Kindle, 32. 3. Hickel, Less Is More, Kindle, 28, 203. 4. Hickel, Less Is More, Kindle, 217
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The Day the Earth Stood Still (film), 41 DeepMind, 28, 142 Deese, Brian, 77 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 161–65, 167–68, 199 degrowth abundance potential and, 213–14 defined, 58–59 energy policy and, 58–62 Delaware, construction productivity in, 80 Delhi, air pollution in, 63–64 Deloitte
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Laboratory, 70 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 66–67 Legislative Analyst’s Office (California), 38 Lehrer, Jim, 89 Leonardo da Vinci, 131 Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (Hickel), 58, 60, 61 liberalism, 101–28 abundance as potential for, 1–4, 16–19, 211–15 (see also abundance) big
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Syverson, Chad, 78–80, 84 Tahanan, 101–4, 106 Taiwan, semiconductor chips manufacturing in, 26, 116 Tanenbaum, Morris, 165 taxes child tax-credit payments, 122 degrowth proposals, 60 housing and, 44–47, 107–10 Taylor, Bob, 162 Tea Party, 33 technology; see also energy cities and innovation of, 25–30 politics
The Fair Trade Scandal: Marketing Poverty to Benefit the Rich
by Ndongo Sylla · 21 Jan 2014 · 193pp · 63,618 words
: the neoliberal critique 68 The alterglobalist critique: the flaws of the promotion of social justice via the free market 74 The point of view of degrowth 81 Conclusion 83 4 Redeeming the Free Market as a Solution to Poverty: The Limitations of the FT Economic Model85 Limitations of accounting for
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per cent of the French people know the difference between the many labels that claim to practise Fair Trade.14 The Point of View of Degrowth Among alterglobalist critics, a form of critique with environmentalist undertones deserves particular attention due to the originality of its assumption: the
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degrowth movement. This perspective is notable in France. Its partisans are self-proclaimed ‘growth objectors’ who radically challenge the contemporary productivist model and its corollary, the
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relentless quest for economic growth. 81 Sylla T02779 01 text 81 28/11/2013 13:04 the fair trade scandal Décroissance, Entropie-Écologie-Économie [Degrowth: Entropy–Ecology– Economy] (1995 [1979]), by the eminent Romanian economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, is the theoretical basis of the
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degrowth movement. In this book, Georgescu-Roegen engages in an epistemological critique of neoclassical economics (and of Marxist economics to a lesser extent). According to him,
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reproducible, and – from the point of view of outputs – to the irreversible destruction caused by the progress of civilisation (pollution, waste, etc.). From this perspective, degrowth is an inevitable process. Scientific and technical progress will not change this, according to Georgescu-Roegen. The more we consume, the more entropy increases. More
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as, in theory, this one is already good. Another development would be meaningless. What we need therefore is an ‘alternative to development’, such as ‘friendly degrowth’ and ‘localism’. By entering into the paradigm of sustainable development, Fair Trade still did not escape the wrath of
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degrowth partisans. Although they espouse many alterglobalist arguments, such as the opportunistic takeover of Fair Trade by the ‘Big Capital’, they go further yet (see Pedregal,
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2006 for a presentation of these arguments). First, they challenge its ‘consumerist’ model. According to the degrowth movement, Fair Trade promotes more consumption to solve human problems. However, degrowth is not only inevitable, but also, in terms of a societal choice, the only means of maximising the life expectancy
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, who described the inconsistencies of Fair Trade which seeks to transform the free market while subscribing to its logic. Finally, there is the perspective of degrowth, which, while it is a minority view, forces us to think off the beaten track and to envisage other forms of living together that we
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Bananas! Farmers, Workers and Consumers Strive to Change an Industry (Tucson: University of Arizona Press). Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas (1995 [1979]) La Décroissance: entropie–écologie– économie [Degrowth : Entropy–Ecology–Economy] (Paris: Éditions Sang de la Terre). Gereffi, Gary and Korzeniewicz, Miguel (eds) (1994) Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism (London: Praeger). Gereffi, Gary
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Cotonou Agreement 155(n2) Cropper, James, 62; see also abolitionist movement Cuba, 61 Currency Reform for Fair Trade Act, 71 Daily Telegraph (the), 155(n6) Degrowth, 81–3, 84 Denmark, 162(n29) Dependency theory, 37–8, 76 Developing countries, 5–6, 8–33, 38, 42, 43, 48, 49, 53, 66, 73
More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next
by Andrew McAfee · 30 Sep 2019 · 372pp · 94,153 words
economic thinking that Marshall helped define. The Austrian-French philosopher André Gorz is credited with introducing the term degrowth in 1972, asking, “Is the earth’s balance, for which no-growth—or even degrowth—of material production is a necessary condition, compatible with the survival of the capitalist system?” As you can
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from consuming more and more, but to consume less and less—there is no other way of conserving the available reserves for future generations.” The “degrowth” movement that Gorz helped launch faced no shortage of obstacles in achieving its goals, but it had on its side a simple, pure, and obvious
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1970, and by 1 percent annually from 1971 to 2016. So while we have slowed down some, we certainly haven’t come close to embracing degrowth in our population or consumption. But the American economy has changed significantly since Earth Day and has become relatively less oriented around making and building
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resource use has done much more than slow down—it has reversed course and is now generally negative. We have not as a society embraced degrowth. Instead, we’ve done something far stranger and more profound: we’ve decoupled growth—in consumption, prosperity, and our economy—from resource use. Early in
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following the CRIB strategies. Except for the excellent idea of imposing limits on polluting and pursuing animals, these strategies were ignored (we didn’t embrace degrowth and stop consuming), abandoned (we stopping going back to the land), irrelevant (dematerialization has nothing to do with recycling), or deeply misguided (China’s attempt
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, 1981), 111–20. “Is the earth’s balance… compatible with the survival of the capitalist system?”: “A History of Degrowth,” Degrowth, accessed March 25, 2019, https://www.degrowth.info/en/a-history-of-degrowth/. “there is no other way of conserving the available reserves for future generations”: André Gorz, Ecology as Politics, trans. Patsy
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, 182 death penalty, 176 deaths of despair, 214, 216, 219–20, 247 Deaton, Angus, 210, 213–14, 220 DeepMind, 239–40 deforestation, 43, 184–85 degrowth, 63–64, 88 demand, 50–51 dematerialization, 4–5, 71, 72–73, 75–85, 87, 125, 141, 144, 151–52, 160, 167, 168, 235, 247
A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth
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perhaps in some sense liberating – implications. First, it seems impossible to ‘degrow’ the global economy in its present form energetically without fundamentally changing it. Otherwise, degrowth would equate simply with recession, joblessness and economic stagnation. Second, even if energy use could be made carbon neutral and effectively limitless, it’s likely
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continue, freeing us to work towards other kinds of economy. This is the lodestar of an emerging movement in economics working under the banner of ‘degrowth’ that aims to rethink the whole basis of economic action.49 It speaks to the mature human energetic ecosystem, in which energetic throughput is reduced
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-fuelled bonanza of the 20th-century economy, while human well-being is retained or enhanced. My position in this book is in keeping with the degrowth project, but I argue for a strong focus on agriculture as the key point of energetic transformation. I also have some sympathy for mainstream economists
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who struggle to differentiate the unfamiliar new world of degrowth economics from the familiar scourge of negative gross domestic product (GDP) growth, or recession. Moving to a mature post-carbon human energetic ecosystem would probably
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fruitful than others. The ones inspiring this book include such various and overlapping but not entirely congruent ideas as peasant or producer republicanism, political localism, degrowth, steady-state economics, deindustrialisation, bioregionalism, home economics and agrarian populism. Even though a lot of people are receptive to these ideas and although there are
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task … is not about wrestling with the controls of economics to force it in the direction of degrowth, but about getting ready for the moment when the coming climacteric does the heavy work of degrowth for us.’28 I’m more sympathetic to Fleming’s argument than I once was. After all
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, I think it makes sense to prepare for a time when the current of events delivers degrowth by default. The sobering thing is that there are so many ways in which the heavy work of degrowth could be destructive of human well-being, and only a few in which it’s otherwise
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Twenty-First Century. London: Institute for Fiscal Studies. Judson, Pieter. 2016. The Habsburg Empire: A New History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kallis, Giorgos. 2018. Degrowth. Newcastle: Agenda. _______. 2019. Limits: Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kautsky, Karl. (1899) 1988. The Agrarian Question. London
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