Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

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Second, the developing countries disproportionally bear the cost as most of the damage from ecological degradation. Third, they will also need most of the minimal growth budget the world has left to raise their rather low living standards and feed their growing population. Drop the GDP

First, in the world today, there’s an extremely strong association between growth and welfare outcomes of every kind. GDP, while imperfect, is a better predictor of a country’s welfare state, outcomes for poor citizens in that country, and well-being measures like leisure time and life expectancy than any other measure. There have been really big changes since 2005,” when people were debating whether decoupling was even possible, Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute, told me. “Green energy has gotten cheap. Solar power is the cheapest energy at the margins in every country today. Global coal use has peaked.” His research finds evidence of “absolute decoupling” — emissions shrinking while GDP grows — in 32 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. One big problem with degrowth is this simple fact: In the coming decades, most carbon emissions won’t be coming from rich countries like the US — they’ll be happening in newly middle-income countries, like India, China, or Indonesia. Already, developing nations account for 63 percent of emissions, and they’re expected to account for even more as they develop further and as the rich world decarbonizes.

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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). The things degrowthers care about — leisure time, health care, life expectancy — are strongly correlated with societal wealth. The generosity of a welfare state and the availability of transfers to a state’s poorest people are also strongly correlated with societal wealth. Innovation, discovery, invention, and medical technology improvements are also strongly correlated with societal wealth. Our World in Data In general, degrowthers believe that in the modern world, economic growth has become unmoored from improvements in the human condition. The Axial Age (800 BCE to 200 BCE) actually produced a decline in the scale of violence between humans (see Peter Turchin’s book Ultrasociety). The rise of large empires in China and Rome was only possible because of the acceptance of these new universalist ethical ideas from such Axial Age thinkers as Buddha, Pythagoras, Plato, and Confucius, who promoted the idea of cooperation among humans. By modern standards these ancient empires were not exactly apostles of nonviolence, but compared to the “constant battles” that came before, they were an important step forward, and everyday life became much less violent.

The first two chapters provide an easy-to-understand “creation story” of capitalism that is in line with the tradition of dialectics. The history of capitalism is marked by material productivity and by famines and economic impoverishment. For anyone confused about the process of the Enclosures or M-C-M’, this is definitely a useful resource. The third book was "Capital in the 21st Century" by Thomas Piketty. Not an easy read but fundamental for me to understand that there is a problem when capital is becoming a lot more important than labor. It's hard to build an equal society when being a rent-seeker is enormously more profitable than being a hard-worker without capital. It's serfdom in disguise. This book has some excellent criticisms of modern capitalist systems and proposes some practical methods that could be used to reduce our obsession with and dependence on economic growth. Enclosures, slavery, and colonization were (and still are) fundamental to capitalism��s objective of perpetual growth.This book shows us that there are alternatives out there, there are different ways we can live in this world without doing harm to it, and the result will be a freer, happier population. If we shift our perceptions from one based around profit to one based on necessity, we can eliminate waste and even reduce the need for gruelling work schedules and pointless stress. Of the many disconcerting paradoxes of our time, perhaps the most jarring is the idea that as our understanding of the causes and possible consequences of climate change improves, politicians are often unwilling to connect the dots and design policies to avert a catastrophe. This is a catastrophe that is rapidly unfolding before our very eyes. However else the political class may justify their inaction, they won’t be able to claim they weren’t warned. i) Technocratic climate “solutions”: “decoupling” myth of more efficient processes meaning we can “dematerialize” economic growth vs. Jevons paradox where savings are reinvested to grow production (“efficiency” for what? ...under capitalism, it is to endlessly grow profits and survive competition); the delusional assumptions behind mainstream negative emissions technology (esp. BECCS), etc.

Second, they contend that there is some path to economic growth in poor countries that doesn’t rely on trade with rich ones — certainly some countries managed economic growth when the whole world was poor, after all. If we want to have a shot at halting the crisis, we need to slow down and restore the balance. We need to change how we see nature and our place in it, shifting from a philosophy of domination and extraction to one that’s rooted in reciprocity and regeneration. We need to evolve beyond the dogmas of capitalism to a new system that’s fit for the twenty-first century. His answer is that not only do the rich nations not need to grow, but they need to stop growing – degrowth. For growth is the ultimate driver of our clear and present ecological crisis. It’s what dumps greenhouse gas into the atmosphere and heats the planet. It’s what wastes the earth’s non-renewable resources. It’s what is killing off species at an unprecedented rate. It’s what is pumping so much pollution into the earth’s living systems that the earth can no longer process it. T]his is the core principle of capitalism: that the world is not really alive, and it is not certainly our kin, but rather just stuff to be extracted and discarded – and that includes most of the human beings living here too. From its very first principles, capitalism has set itself at war against life itself.” The sleepwalkers

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Firstly, proper system change moving away from equilibrium economics and using the loss and damage agenda to ensure proper north-south redistribution, a global universal basic income, a shorter working week and skipping the fossil fuel driven stage of development into renewable energy in the Global South would not at all be about pro-growth and increased consumption. It must be remembered that currently a form of modern colonial resource extraction continues to extract wealth from south to north via the World Bank, the IMF with Structural Adjustment Programmes and the iniquitous State Investor Dispute System. Het tweede deel schetst, in hele grove lijnen, wat je wel moet willen. Wat kan een wereld waarin groei niet meer het overkoepelende doel is betekenen? Zoals wel vaker in dit type boeken is dat utopistischer, misschien een beetje naïef. Maar tegelijkertijd vond ik het wel inspirerend. Een wereld gericht op overvloed aan wat nodig is, en die niet meer de harde natuur/mens grens hanteert. Volstrekt utopisch natuurlijk, maar niet absurd. Een alternatief op het kapitalisme waar ik wel over wil dromen. Capitalism has robbed us of our ability to even imagine something different; Less is More gives us the ability to not only dream of another world, but also the tools by which we can make that vision real.' ASAD REHMAN, director of War on Want Through a brisk but vivid history of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, Less Is More sketches the concepts and practices that, over time, equated growth with progress, and thus made it a precondition of public policy on a global scale. A slow but critical turning point arrived in Europe during the early modern period, when the gains of successive peasant rebellions were reversed through the enclosure of the commons under the emergent capitalist theory of “improvement.” This practice justified the dispossession of land if it could be put to more productive use under private ownership, thereby prioritizing exchange-value over use-value and extending the commodification of agriculture, petty manufacture, and human labour throughout society. The embryonic nation-state and capitalist class created artificial scarcity for the now propertyless, wage-dependent masses, while extending the logic of improvement to distant colonies that would supply, often through slavery or other comparably brutal methods, many of the raw materials fuelling industrialization. I feel quite conflicted about this book. On one hand, I believe everyone should read this book. However, I was a bit disappointed.

Furthermore, he reminds us, most of the fruits of all this extra effort by Americans go to their richest 1% anyway. In global economic terms, we are actually spending a very high proportion of our time and energy enriching people who already have more money than they can possibly use, so why don’t we revolt? Marx’s exchange-value (selling private commodity on market for profit) triumphing over use-value (intrinsic use). In particular, Commons have intrinsic value despite abundance, whereas capitalist exchange-value requires artificial scarcity (central in the commodification market-creation of the Enclosures/colonialism/Neoliberal globalization). 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): Less is More" is the last piece of knowledge I needed to finally accept that we can invent a better system than neoliberalism. And I had been a neoliberalist for my whole adult life. 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.Take solar panels. Two decades ago, cheap solar panels were just a dream. Now they’re everywhere and have become a crucial tool in the fight against climate change. Degrowthers I spoke to don’t dispute that decoupling is possible. But they argue it won’t be enough to shrink emissions as rapidly as they need to. And there’s a compelling bit of evidence for that view: Even as some countries have decoupled, others have increased emissions, and overall atmospheric carbon is at its highest level ever recorded. GDP measures the transactions within an economy — all the occasions when money changes hands in exchange for goods and services. It’s not wealth, but it’s one of the primary ways we measure wealth. 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.