But for all the immiseration around us, one thing is undeniable: For the past several centuries — and especially for the past 70 years, since the end of World War II — the world has been getting much richer.

Leisure time, too, has increased — and hours worked have declined — as the world has gotten wealthier. It’s a bold, even romantic vision. But there are two problems with it: It doesn’t add up — and it would be nearly impossible to implement.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): Steven Chu, who served as secretary of energy under President Obama, has endorsed it, arguing, “You have to design an economy based on no growth or even shrinking growth.” What makes degrowth necessary is capitalism’s addiction to fossil fuels and its fetishisation of growth at all costs. Capitalism demands that GDP grow by 2 or 3 per cent a year, which means doubling the size of the global economy every 23 years (Ibid.: 20). This, in turn, has resulted in an endless cycle of production and consumption, quite often of commodities without any social value, with the ‘prime directive’ of sustaining growth and profit (Ibid). The ecological breakdown has resulted from where the global economy churns ‘through more resources and waste each year, to the point where it is now dramatically overshooting what scientists have defined as safe planetary boundaries’ (Ibid.). A chilling introduction to the book starkly conveys the extent of the crisis: a projected rise in sea levels between 30 and 90 cm by the end of the century will cause much of Bangladesh to disappear; the Middle-East will experience ‘extreme droughts and desertification’ and will be ‘inhospitable to agriculture’; ‘coral eco-systems are being bleached into dead, colourless skeletons’; bush fires in Australia in 2020 killed ‘as many as one billion wild animals’ (Ibid: 8-12). In short, ‘We are sleepwalking into a mass extinction event – the sixth in our planet’s history and the first to be caused by human economic activity’ (Ibid.: 8). Al jaren worstel ik met wat ik als de grootste paradox van onze tijd beschouw: we moeten als brave burgers zo veel mogelijk consumeren, en dit om ervoor te zorgen dat iedereen aan zijn basisbehoeften kan voldoen. Hoe meer er geconsumeerd wordt - of we het nu nodig hebben of niet - hoe beter, en als we te weinig consumeren, komen grote groepen mensen in de miserie terecht omdat ze de eindjes niet meer aan elkaar kunnen knopen. Waarom? Omdat het de economie is, natuurlijk. Hoezo, dingen hergebruiken en zuinig omspringen met middelen? Dat is slecht voor de economie!

Circular economy: Most of what is produced is either still in use (e.g., infrastructure) or is wasted/cannot be reused (e.g., waste generated from mining activities). Only a small fraction has circular potential, but economic growth would keep driving total resource use up. In essence, a circular economy would be ineffective in reducing net material use (e.g., Kasulaitis et al., 2018) 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 Even when Pollin considers “degrowth” of GDP, his progressive reformism barely registers as he compares this with economic crises which also “degrow” GDP! Who needs reactionary conservatives?! The amount of fetishization for an abstract macroeconomic measure rather than directly considering social health measures is appalling. We are not talking about basic accounting here; this is pure ideology! 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.The world has finally awoken to the reality of climate breakdown and ecological collapse. Now we must face up to its primary cause. Capitalism demands perpetual expansion, which is devastating the living world. There is only one solution that will lead to meaningful and immediate change: DEGROWTH. ii) “Overpopulation”: I don't think we can stress enough how important the unequal distribution of per capita ecological footprint is here (see Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis and video); only after this is made clear should we then add that population growth is the one growth curve we know how to flatten in a socially-just manner, i.e. infant/women's health, reproductive rights, education, and of course overall improved living standards. It has become difficult to talk about making energy policies for combating climate change, for example, without being told that such thinking is actually irrelevant because it doesn’t involve system change,” she recently argued. “We need cheap, clean energy at scale and we need it now.” A masterpiece... Less is More covers centuries and continents, spans academic disciplines, and connects contemporary and ancient events in a way which cannot be put down until it's finished. So much needs to change; although beginning that change might require nothing more than asking the right question. Danny Dorling, Professor of Geography, University of Oxford 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).

There’s a lot of broad-brush policy prescriptions in the degrowth lit, but those details never really add up. The world has finally awoken to the reality of climate breakdown and ecological collapse. Now we must face up to its primary cause. Capitalism demands perpetual expansion, which is devastating the living world. There is only one solution that will lead to meaningful and immediate change: degrowth. One of the most important books I have read ... does something extremely rare: it outlines a clear path to a sustainable future for all.' RAOUL MARTINEZ, author of Creating Freedom The second book was "The Divide" by the same author as "Less is More" that showed me how the core of the wealth of the rich countries was built in an almost zero-sum game. A lot of what rich people got came from what poor people lost. And there is still enormous pressure to not change the rules of that game. Where degrowth literature is relentlessly pessimistic about the prospect of our problems being solved under our current economic system, it turns oddly optimistic about the prospect that they’ll be solved once we embrace a different way of viewing wealth and progress. If cutting carbon emissions fast enough to matter requires shrinking the global economy by 0.5 percent a year indefinitely, starting right now, as the Nature paper estimates, that’ll take policy measures much larger and more ambitious than any proposed in Less Is More.

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However, it seems to spend more time positing a concept of an idyllic past where humans were happy and at one with nature. Even if this is accurate, the subsequent proposition that we can return to such a state and resolve our current ecological crises is unworkable and has very little logical support in the book. In the final chapter he revisits some of the philosophical and ideological issues discussed in the first two chapters, and suggests the idea of a new social and economic paradigm based on the idea that “everything is connected,” learning from primitive tribes and from animistic religions.

Not only that, solar panels have democratized electricity. Just one small-scale instance: In rural Kenya, you can see donkeys saddled with solar panels so that farmers can charge their phones. And there are many such examples that count as a win for both human progress and our fight against climate change. Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer.” -Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2018) ‘Global Warming of 1.5 ºC’, available: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/ (accessed 7 September 2020). 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. In that sense, there’s actually something anti-radical about any climate plan so radical that it can’t be concretely brought about in the next decade.

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Jason is able to personalise the global and swarm the mind with ideas ... Heed his beautifully rendered warning. Russell Brand 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 Varoufakis' elegant primer: Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails