10-minute read
keywords: degrowth, economics

I have been promising/threatening for a while to cover degrowth, and thanks to a United States Society for Ecological Economics book club, now I will. In Less is More, economic anthropologist Jason Hickel identifies capitalism as the cause of our problems—the sort of criticism that makes many people really uncomfortable. Fortunately, he is an eloquent and charismatic spokesman who patiently but firmly walks you through the history of capitalism, exposes flaws of proposed fixes, and then lays out a litany of sensible solutions. It quickly confirms that sinking feeling most of us will have: that the economy is not working for us. What is perhaps eye-opening is that this is not by accident, but by design.

Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, written by Jason Hickel, published by William Heinemann in December 2020 (hardback, 318 pages)

It helps, as Hickel quickly does, to clarify two things. First, he does not object to economic growth per se. Indeed, many of the world’s poorest countries need to grow further to meet basic human needs. The problem is growth for growth’s sake. In nature, growth is ubiquitous but normally follows a sigmoidal curve of some kind, eventually coming to a halt. Capitalism is different, which brings us to point two. People often confuse capitalism with markets and trade, but they pre-date capitalism by millennia. This is all textbook Marx, but, Hickel explains, markets and trade are organised around use-value: we trade for what is useful to us. Capitalism, on the other hand, is organised around exchange-value: goods are sold to make a profit, which is then reinvested to generate more profit. Growth is a structural imperative of capitalism: “It is a system that pulls ever-expanding quantities of nature and human labour into circuits of accumulation” (p. 40). The results are plain for all to see: environmental destruction and human immiseration benefitting a small minority.

In the first half of the book, Hickel prepares the reader by providing a history of capitalism. He starts in medieval Europe, where commoners violently revolted against feudalism, their success partially due to the bubonic plague killing so many people that labour became scarcer. For a while, a more egalitarian society developed but was soon crushed by economic elites violently enclosing the commons, especially in England, forcing people into wage labour. The profits thus reaped were reinvested overseas in the even more violent practices of colonialism and slavery. Once in motion, this self-reinforcing cycle has kept going for the last five centuries, taking us to neoliberalism today. Along the way, economists forgot about the natural world, blithely ignoring that infinite growth on a finite planet is a recipe for disaster.

I could dwell more on this fascinating history, but we have to keep moving, though not before highlighting one other aspect. Capitalism was enabled as much by a changing worldview for which Hickel blames thinkers such as Francis Bacon and René Descartes. Especially the latter’s dualism, which cast humans as apart from nature rather than a part of nature, removed any remaining sense of restraint. “Land became property. Living beings became things. Ecosystems became resources” (p. 70). This echoes Eileen Crist’s furious argument that language powerfully shapes our worldview. He returns to this in the final and possibly most challenging chapter. The animist views of our ancestors imbued our living world with spirit and agency; something Western religions and philosophies tried to stamp out, declaring it heretical or irrational. Now, think of animism what you will, but it usefully is characterised by a respect for the natural world and by cultural taboos on rampant extraction. We can draw lessons from this and Hickel contends 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” (p. 271).

“The fundamental flaw with [prominent technological and economic “solutions”] is that they refuse to question whether more growth is necessary.”

Hickel’s other task in this first part is to patiently pick over some prominent technological and economic “solutions” and expose their flaws. This includes the IPCC incorporating untested negative-emissions technology in most of its models, “green growth” solutions that are little more than corporations and governments greenwashing business-as-usual in sometimes inventive ways, and the lure of techno-fixes including risky geo-engineering proposals to tinker with our global climate. The fundamental flaw uniting them is that they refuse to question whether more growth is necessary. Hickel also disarms the claim that resource use and economic growth have decoupled and our economies are dematerialising. This confirms what I suspected about Andrew McAfee’s book More from Less: look at the global flow of materials and energy, and it is revealed for the accounting trick it is because you ignored outsourcing of industries. The Jevons paradox, the observation that efficiency gains somehow never translate into less resource use, is no paradox at all when hitched to the growth imperative: “technology is used not to do the same amount of stuff in less time, but rather to do more stuff in the same amount of time” (p. 153).

So what does this growth achieve? Hickel admits that, up to a certain point, economic growth is good, necessary even, but research shows it has rapidly diminishing returns after that. Numerous poor countries score higher on measures of human well-being than wealthy ones. Why? Turns out that investing in public goods and services (healthcare, housing, education, public transport, etc.) matters more to people’s everyday lives. Who would have thought?!

The second half of the book presents solutions. Hickel acknowledges Giorgos Kallis’s call for a culture of self-limitation but thinks on a bigger canvas. To stave off ecological collapse we need to limit growth by reorganising the economy. This is 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 way” (p. 29). Is that not a recession? No, responds Hickel, recessions happen in a growth-dependent economy. Degrowth calls for “a different kind of economy altogether – an economy that doesn’t need growth in the first place” (p. 205), one organised around human needs rather than capital accumulation. What I feel is insufficiently emphasized here, and led to objections that I have seen more explicitly addressed in subsequent writing, is that degrowth is not forever either. It is a necessary course correction to a system in overshoot, a transitional phase towards a steady-state economy, or (in Hickel’s words) a post-capitalist world.

“[Hickel’s solutions] rely on both changing the (currently perverse) incentives inherent in the system and active government intervention and regulation.”

For Hickel, degrowth has two important components. The first one is obvious: reduce material and energy use to bring us back to within planetary boundaries (this refers to the framework of Johan Rockström and colleagues). How? We could end planned obsolescence, curb advertising, shift from ownership to “usership” (i.e. share things such as cars or power tools), address food waste, and scale down or eliminate ecologically destructive industries. The second component, vital to the success of the first, is to address economic inequality (the subject of his previous book). How? We could tax the ultra-wealthy more or cap income and wealth and redistribute the excess, eliminate tax havens, and renationalise public services. According to Hickel, there is enough money sloshing around the system to finance public services globally.

What about jobs? Hickel admits that “here’s where things get tricky” (p. 221) as decreasing production will eliminate jobs. He suggests retraining programmes, job guarantees, and especially a shorter working week. That last one already has a proven track record. People’s sense of happiness increases when they can finally reap the benefits of all those efficiency improvements we have achieved and spend time on more meaningful activities such as volunteering or caring for children and elderly relatives. Keep in mind, Hickel adds, that when the aim of goods and services is not to maximize profit, we could get by with less money. What ultimately matters is “welfare purchasing power”: what your money can buy you.

In short, his proposals rely on both changing the (currently perverse) incentives inherent in the system and active government intervention and regulation. Given that capitalism is the water in which we all swim, this will take a certain amount of deprogramming your mind. However, consider his suggestions and it is hard to disagree with his assessment that “In a growth-oriented system, the objective is not to satisfy human needs, but to avoid satisfying human needs” (p. 233). Capitalism has always artificially and often violently created scarcities of all kinds. Much here lines up with ideas in ecological economics and, if not quite the same, the two currents of thought seem close bedfellows to me.

“Of all the proposals I have come across, [degrowth] strikes me as the only sensible one, calling out the roots of the problem instead of meekly tinkering around the edges.”

Less is More resonated with me to an exceptional degree but did leave me with some questions and concerns. First is the how. I will give Hickel bonus points for going beyond mere exhortations to “do something”, providing an actionable roadmap, and admitting that none of this will be easy. The rich will be extremely hostile to the suggestion that governments play Robin Hood and redistribute their wealth to the poor, so how do you effect this when they exert undue influence on politics? Furthermore, I think even many “regular” people will have a hard time voluntarily abandoning certain ecologically destructive habits and activities. Entrenched cultural values and societal norms create a lot of inertia. Will introducing certain measures have unexpected consequences? How do you get nations to cooperate to achieve this vision globally? Hickel admits that he is no political strategist, adding only “that [it] will require a movement, as with every struggle for social and ecological justice in history” (p. 242). Given Walter Scheidel’s work that suggests that, historically, economic inequality has never died peacefully, I worry that this might well involve bloody violence. Simultaneously, past civil movements managed to enter the political arena, so what can we learn from their struggles?

My second concern is material (literally). Hickel urges that addressing climate change means transitioning away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy. Though he acknowledges that constructing the needed infrastructure has an immense material footprint and will require large amounts of mining, he omits that, once built, we have to maintain and replace machines as they wear out, requiring continuous material input. He briefly mentions the problem of declining ore grades but omits any mention of the hard limit of energy return on investment: at some point, we will face an endgame where it will take more energy to extract certain materials than they will generate. Even if we curb the worst excesses of capitalism and consumerism, we are still grinding our way through vast reserves of materials, including metals and minerals, that are not renewable on a human time scale, or not at all.

Hickel makes an incredibly compelling case for degrowth. Of all the proposals I have come across, it strikes me as the only sensible one, calling out the roots of the problem instead of meekly tinkering around the edges. This will not be the last book I will review on this intriguing topic. Less is More was published in 2020 so since will have been extensively analysed and criticized. The degrowth movement likely has responded to the points I raised above, and many others besides. And, with all due respect to Hickel, this movement is bigger than him. The Future Is Degrowth was already on my radar but I am particularly excited by the upcoming English translation (finally!) of the French book by the equally eloquent Timothée Parrique.

Less is More

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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