How Degrowth Will Save the World

I finally got to the brilliant Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel. It is exquisitely researched, informative, insightful, and well worth reading. It is a worthy edition to the ecosystem of ideas emerging around After Capitalism. It is hard-hitting. It is a take-down of capitalism in the sense of finding it guilty for practically all that ails us today (in fairness, not without merit). It is framed as the Global North (bad) versus the Global South (good).

That’s not the approach to After Capitalism that we take here, but that’s okay. It is useful to have a range of views and perspectives. Hickel’s approach is black and white. I think it is fair to say most futurists would be more gray … less strident, less sure, and more in the spirit of trying to keep the space more open for discussion. Our experience suggests future is uncertain, complex and usefully approached by thinking in alternatives.

As a professional futurist for the last 35+ years, I’ve been client-centered in the sense of seeing my role as helping clients come to their own conclusions. Some of our colleagues are normative futurists who have a view of the future that they believe strongly in and their goal is to persuade others to adopt their view. Totally cool …as long as one is upfront that they are in the persuading business. My approach to After Capitalism follows my lifelong practice. I present the After Capitalism images in the spirit of helping others come to their views. Hickel is toward the normative approach. He wants us to believe capitalism is bad and the root of our problems. But he is totally upfront about it. Totally cool. [And he makes a pretty darn good case for it.] The connection to degrowth, of course, is that “growth is the prime directive of capital.” Capitalism has to go. Fair enough!

I love how he frames the what he’s exploring: “how we can shift from an economy that’s organized around domination and extraction to one that’s rooted in reciprocity with the living world.” Yes! And he goes on: “Degrowth is about reducing the material and energy throughput of the economy to bring it back into balance with the living world , while distributing income and resources more fairly , liberating people from needless work , and investing in the public goods that people need to thrive.” Yes again. He presents a lot of evidence on why this shift makes sense, and suggests five pathways to a post-capitalist world:

Step 1 . End planned obsolescence

Step 2 . Cut advertising

Step 3 . Shift from ownership to usership

Step 4 . End food waste

Step 5 . Scale down ecologically destructive industries

He’s not afraid to provoke: “We are sleepwalking into a mass extinction event.”  He pulls no punches about the Global North being primarily responsible for the mess we are in. He is clear that the “struggle before us is more than just a struggle over economics. It is a struggle over our very theory of being. It requires decolonizing not only lands and forests and peoples , but decolonizing our minds.”

He puts degrowth at the center of what needs to be done. He defines it as “a planned reduction of excess energy and resource use to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a safe, just, and equitable way.“

It’s a strong argument that is well-researched, well-written, and well worth our time. Bravo! – Andy Hines