Less is More
How Degrowth Will Save the World
Jason Hickel
Having read it
★★★★★
Reading this book helped clarify, focus and make better sense of some of my own thoughts and understandings (especially those I have sort of tried to follow and challenge for about the last decade and a bit or so) about where we seem to have been (since – so say! – the Enlightenment) and are seemingly continuing to travel and heading as a species and the damage we’re leaving our home planet in, apparently just because the economy needs growth.
We need to end society’s (well, mostly the Western world’s) modus operandi with dualism, end capitalism, end the obsession with extraction, growth and profit (and end first-past-the-post politics and the rich finding ways to avoid taxation but pay for and gain political influence) and start to realise everything is actually interconnected and playing collaboratively and lowering inequality (as we can’t just keep taking) is better on many levels for everyone.
It’s a little like how paganism operates, but mostly how animists and Indigenous peoples view life and its workings so that real and legitimate progress can and should be made for all, even if just in their own communities at the present moment. But change (very slowly at the moment) continues to happen and it’s always tricky challenging orthodoxy, which history tells us.
Indigenous scholars 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.
It’ll no doubt be a tough (but tremendously important and relevant) change, but as explained and alluded to throughout this (well-researched) book, the benefits, discoveries and appreciations will be progressive and brilliant for society, biodiversity and the planet.
Apart from this review (and conclusion), less is definitely more and following that idea and its many associative real-world approaches will actually help lessen and even stop many of our existing issues and problems and consequently open up many ways to face and reconsider things in new and more equal, helpful and meaningful ways. Here’s another quoted passage from the book, to conclude the conclusion of my review:
As for the process of innovation itself; it’s important to remember that many of the most important innovations of the modern era, including truly life-changing technologies we use every day, were funded not by growth-oriented firms but rather by public bodies. From plumbing to the internet, vaccines to microchips, even the technologies that make up smartphones – all of these came from publicly funded research. We don’t need aggregate growth to deliver innovation. If the objective is to achieve specific kinds of innovation, then it makes more sense to invest in those directly, or incentivise investment with targeted policy measures, rather than grow the whole economy indiscriminately and hope it will deliver the innovation we want. Is it really reasonable to grow the plastics industry, the timber industry and the advertising industry in order to get more efficient trains? Does it really make sense to grow dirty things in order to get clean things? We have to be smarter than that.
Over and over again, it turns out that the dominant belief in the necessity of growth is under-justified. Those who call for continued growth at the expense of ecological stability are ready to risk everything – literally – for the sake of something we don’t really even need.
A good passage
This is the thing about ecology: everything is interconnected. It’s difficult for us to grasp how this works, because we’re used to thinking of the world in terms of individual parts rather than complex wholes. In fact, that’s even how we’ve been taught to think of ourselves – as individuals. We’ve forgotten how to pay attention to the relationships between things. Insects necessary for pollination; birds that control crop pests, grubs and worms essential to soil fertility; mangroves that purify water; the corals on which fish populations depend: these living systems are not ‘out there’, disconnected from humanity. On the contrary: our fates are intertwined. They are, in a real sense, us.
A second good passage
In the writings of European colonisers and missionaries we see they were dismayed that so many of the people they encountered insisted on seeing the world as alive – seeing mountains, rivers, animals, plants, and even the land as sentient beings with agency and spirit.
Europe’s elites saw animist thought as an obstacle to capitalism – in the colonies just as in Europe itself – and sought to eradicate it. This was conducted in the name of ‘civilisation’. To become civilised, to become fully human (and to become willing participants in the capitalist world economy), Indigenous people would have to be forced to abandon animist principles, and made to see nature as an object.
We all know that the violence of colonisation was justified, by its perpetrators, as part of a ‘civilising mission’. What we tend not to grasp is that one of the key goals of this mission was to eradicate animist thought. The object was to turn the colonised into dualists – to colonise not only lands and bodies, but minds. As the Kenyan writer Ngũgi wa Thiong’o has put it: ‘Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conquest and subsequent political dictatorship. But its most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world.’45
A third good passage
Inequality makes people feel that the material goods they have are inadequate. We constantly want more, not because we need it but because we want to keep up with the Joneses. The more our friends and neighbours have, the more we feel that we need to match them just to feel like we’re doing OK. The data on this is clear: people who live in highly unequal societies are more likely to shop for luxury brands than people who live in more equal societies.21 We keep buying more stuff in order to feel better about ourselves, but it never works because the benchmark against which we measure the good life is pushed perpetually out of reach by the rich (and, these days, by social media influencers). We find ourselves spinning in place on an exhausting treadmill of needless over-consumption.
So, if not income, what does improve well-being? In 2014, the political scientist Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn conducted a review of existing data on this question. He found something remarkable: countries that have robust welfare systems have the highest levels of human happiness, when controlling for other factors. And the more generous and universal the welfare system, the happier everyone becomes.22 This means things like universal health-care, unemployment insurance, pensions, paid holiday and sick leave, affordable housing, daycare and strong minimum wages. When people live in a fair, caring society, where everyone has equal access to social goods, they don’t have to spend their time worrying about how to cover their basic needs day to day – they can enjoy the art of living. And instead of feeling they are in constant competition with their neighbours, they can build bonds of social solidarity.
[...] success is down to strong social provisions.
[...] Intrinsic values are far more powerful, and more durable, than the fleeting rush we might get from a boost in income or material consumption.24 We humans are evolved for sharing, co-operation and community. We flourish in contexts that enable us to express these values, and we suffer in contexts that stifle them.