Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

"Well, it’s really readable, it’s very short, it’s funny, it’s kind of outrageous, and it’s just kind of mind-blowing, the force of his argument. It’s a really fun read, so it’s no surprise that it has been a bestseller. I think as many people as possible should read it. It is a little bit unrealistic, in terms of the utopianism of what he proposes. But it’s also hard to fault the coherence of the argument. The key thing about degrowth is that it is not about shrinking living standards. It’s about prioritising which sectors of the economy should grow and which should contract, in order to stay within planetary limits and to live sustainably. He shows the self-evident wisdom of that, and backs it up with lots of social science from the progressive tradition. For example—the fact that a universal basic income is proven to promote wellbeing and to increase levels of happiness. There’s a really good discussion of progressive taxation—the fact that after World War Two, America had a 95% tax rate—and he knocks down a lot of myths and shows that a fairer, happier, progressive future is not only possible, but actually really affordable. You want to put it in the hands of politicians and say: What’s the problem? It’s easy-to-read and common sense. I think that’s why it’s so compelling. It’s not a thought experiment. What he’s doing is taking lots of social science arguments from different spheres to their logical conclusion, and bringing them together to say: Here is a vision of a happier society, which is not fixated on economic growth. He uses really practical examples from lots of different parts of the world. So it is utopianism, in the sense that it’s ambitious—given the retrograde governments that we have—but it’s not utopian in the sense of its plausibility. In fact, it’s highly plausible, and rooted in practical examples."

"As a scientist, the whole subject of economics is mysterious to me, and I really had my eyes opened by Less is More . Certainly I was educated about the history of capitalism and the meaning of GDP . Jason Hickel charts how humans have historically prospered by destroying ecosystems, and how using GDP, which doesn’t ‘care’ that resources are destroyed as it increases, is such a dangerously flawed way of assessing our civilisation. What we need instead of a focus on relentless growth, Hickel says, is degrowth. Fortunately, the idea of spending a trillion dollars to fix the world’s problems is compatible with degrowth because of the concept of something called depense . Basically this means we take some of the money created by our capitalist economy and instead of allowing it to just pile up in assets, we spend it on projects for the public good. Spending it, of course, is easy—it’s getting hold of that money that’s the difficult thing. Hickel says degrowth is the downscaling of the amount of resources we use, in order to get to a sustainable state. It sounds very reasonable when you put it like that but God knows how we go about getting to that place. Perhaps one way is by somehow galvanising those billions of people in the world who suffer from inequality , and recognising that the inequality in the world is by far the worst it has ever been, and that is not a happy place to be. Degrowth is also about smoothing out this inequality. I examined this in chapter one of my book, when I looked at whether you can eliminate extreme global poverty by giving away the trillion dollars. From what we know from studies on cash transfers to the poorest people in the world, giving money away in one-off handouts really can lift them sustainably out of extreme poverty. This actually blows my mind."