Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

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If that sounds unappealing, he devoted much of the book — and much of our interview — to arguing that it wouldn’t be. He points out that some countries, like the United States, are rich but get very little for their spending, in terms of national well-being; poorer countries like Spain have better health care systems. He argues that current levels of well-being could be maintained at a tenth of Finland’s current GDP — assuming that society also adopted wide-scale redistribution and socialist labor policies.

If we want to have a shot at surviving the Anthropocene, we need to restore the balance. We need to change how we see the world and our place within it, shifting from a philosophy of domination and extraction to one that’s rooted in reciprocity with our planet’s ecology. We need to evolve beyond the dusty dogmas of capitalism to a new system that’s fit for the twenty-first century. Ward et al., 2016). High-income countries externalize production, thereby making the appearance of reduced or slowed DMC. I'm recommending this book to everyone with the condition that if you are already in a sad/bad place regarding climate change, just read chapters 5 and 6. The first part of this book is absolutely brutal, and I had to take a lot of breaks and literally walk away from it. However, the first part is excellent at illustrating exactly how destructive capitalism and its mandate of constant, exponential growth has been for our world, and I do hope that everyone can read it and understand fully how we ended up where we are.Even poor people have so many needs for goods and services that you can’t possibly put them on a list and say, ‘Now we’re done here,’” Roser told me. “That’s the beauty of money, that you can just go out there and get what you need rather than what some researcher determines are your needs.” Degrowth is unrealistic — and gaining traction Tamelijk briljant boek. De eerste helft is een uiteenzetting van wat tegelijkertijd als een totale open deur als als een revolutionair verhaal. Onze maatschappij is ingericht op oneindige groei, en dat kan helemaal niet. Het is gewoon inherent onmogelijk, maar in onze maatschappij is het ook bijna onmogelijk om er van af te wijken. Doodeng, doordat het tegelijkertijd zo logisch en zo allesomvattend is. Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2018) ‘Global Warming of 1.5 ºC’, available: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/ (accessed 7 September 2020). In that sense, there’s actually something anti-radical about any climate plan so radical that it can’t be concretely brought about in the next decade. Marx’s M-C-M’ (Money invested into Commodity production for the goal of more Money) representing capitalist production's logic in contrast to pre-capitalist market exchange C-M-C (Commodity exchanged via Money for another Commodity). Thus, the capitalist logic is fundamentally about growing money.

Inequality creates a sense of unfairness: it erodes public trust, cohesion and solidarity. It’s also linked to poorer health, higher levels of crime and less social mobility. People who live in unequal societies tend to be more frustrated, anxious, insecure and discontent with their lives” (Ibid.: 179).b. Ultimately, we must shift our exchange-value-based economy to one centered around use-value. This will rely on a philosophy of animism, reciprocity, and radical abundance. While it’s not a short book, Less Is More feels surprisingly sparse when it comes to envisioning how the changes it recommends could be brought about. The chapter on solutions recommends cutting the workweek and changing tax policy — two solid proposals — but then rounds that out by recommending ending technological obsolescence, advertising, food waste, and student debt. In addition to the “crisis of elite disaccumulation,” Europe’s capitalists had created a system of mass production and needed somewhere to sell it. Enclosures and colonization became the solution (also acting as a source of primitive accumulation): We cannot view the enclosures, slavery, and colonization as separate processes. All operate under the same logic/system (the latter experiencing much worse conditions than the latter, of course) and are fundamental to the functioning of capitalism.

The second book was "The Divide" by the same author as "Less is More" that showed me how the core of the wealth of the rich countries was built in an almost zero-sum game. A lot of what rich people got came from what poor people lost. And there is still enormous pressure to not change the rules of that game. Nearly half of the book is spent looking at the origins of capitalism in Western thought, and praising primitive cultures and their animistic, nature-oriented beliefs. He mentions the “dominion” passages in the Old Testament (Genesis 1:26), the Axial Age in which we saw the rise of the dominion ideology (p. 64), Plato (whom he says is dualist, p. 65), and the transition from feudalism to capitalism. In general, degrowthers believe that in the modern world, economic growth has become unmoored from improvements in the human condition. Perhaps the greatest problem with “degrowth” is the one-word label has a lot of baggage and confuses even those who should know better:

Ten slotte volgen enkele losse voorbeelden van interventies die de transitie naar “degrowth” zouden kunnen ondersteunen. Er worden echter geen concrete oplossingen aangeboden voor hoe dit effectief bereikt kan worden. Daar wringt het schoentje toch wat: directe democratie is allemaal goed en wel, maar in deze gepolariseerde maatschappij waar macht vaak corrupt is kan ik me niet voorstellen dat deze noodzakelijke snelle en wereldwijde overgang zonder slag of stoot zou kunnen gebeuren, of zonder dat totalitaire leiders zich hier en daar in het machtsvacuüm wringen. I'd like to synthesize this with Michael Hudson's focus on Finance Capitalism's debt overhead (the aforementioned M-M’) and fictitious speculative growth (as opposed to industrial growth and its material use): The Bubble and Beyond. Hudson portrays "Industrial capitalism" being cannibalized by "Finance capitalism", which might sound like less raw materials use! One common ground is that high debt overhead forces more work to simply pay off the debts, thus more resource use. Alston, P (2020) ‘The Parlous State of Poverty Eradication: Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights’, 2 July, available: https://chrgj.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Alston-Poverty-Report-FINAL.pdf (accessed 7 September 2020).