Book review: Less is More by Jason Hickel

How degrowth will save the world

Recently, Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, wrote an article with the headline “Market forces are not enough to halt climate change.” He points out that electricity generation from fossil fuels has increased since 1985, even though the proportion of renewable energy has increased significantly since 2005.

Wolf writes that,

Until recently, I still hoped we could be lucky: market forces (plus massive investment by China) might drive the world towards renewables fast enough. This no longer seems plausible, because the pace of the switch to renewables needs to be vastly accelerated (quite apart from the many other needed investments).

The only solution is faster decarbonisation, Wolf writes, which means more investment in “renewables, nuclear, indeed any source other than burning fossil fuels”.

He argues that the decisions made by investors are leading us to a “destabilised climate” and argues in favour of governments influencing or overriding such decisions.

Wolf dismisses the degrowth movement as “politically irrelevant”. He writes that;

[H]alting growth, even it were politically acceptable (which it is not!), would not eliminate demand for electricity. That would require us to reverse the growth of the past 150 years instead.

Wolf makes no mention of the destruction caused by capitalism and extractivism, the ever increasing pollution and waste, or the fact that infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible.

Wolf is correct that markets won’t address the climate crisis. But he’s wrong to dismiss degrowth.

Less is more

Compare Wolf’s approach to that of Jason Hickel in his 2020 book “Less is More”:

The ecological crisis requires a radical policy response. We need high-income countries to scale down excess energy and material use; we need a rapid transition to renewables; and we need to shift to a post-capitalist economy that’s focused on human well-being and ecological stability rather than on perpetual growth. But we also need more than this — we need a new way of thinking about our relationship with the living world.

This is a superb book.

Hickel, who is an anthropologist and professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, starts with an overview of the crises we are facing.

In 2018, researchers published a study of insects in the El Yuque rainforest in Puerto Rico. This is a protected area. There are no farms or roads anywhere near it. Yet the researchers found that insect biomass had fallen by up to 98% over the past 36 years. “The whole system seemed to be unravelling,” Hickel writes.

Enclosure and colonialism

Hickel gives a detailed history of the social and environmental impacts of capitalism, starting from the enclosure of the European commons in the 16th century. He writes that,

Enclosure was a process of internal colonisation; and colonisation was a process of enclosure. Europe’s peasants were dispossessed from their lands just as Indigenous Americans were (although, notably, the latter were treated much worse, excluded from the realm of rights, and even humanity, altogether). And the slave trade is nothing if not the enclosure and colonisation of bodies — bodies that were appropriated for the sake of surplus accumulation just as land was, and treated as property in the same way.

Neoclassical economics

With the development of neoclassical economics in the 19th century perpetual growth became a goal in itself. Warnings about limits to growth from classical economists including John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith were overlooked. Even John Maynard Keynes did not believe in infinite economic growth.

Hickel notes that Simon Kuznets, the inventor of gross domestic product, “warned that we should never use GDP as a normal measure of economic progress”. The problem with GDP is that it fails to differentiate between good and bad. If pollution leads to more hospital visits, GDP goes up. It also ignores unpaid work like bringing up children, or looking after an elderly relative.

Hickel agrees with Wolf’s analysis that markets aren’t going to come to the rescue. He writes that,

While for decades we have been relying on market mechanisms to somehow magically fix the climate crisis, it’s now clear that this approach isn’t going to do. The only way to make it work is with co-ordinated government action on a massive scale.

But Hickel makes clear that transitioning to clean energy will not address the impacts that capitalism has on the environment. More growth, Hickel writes, “means more energy demand, and more energy demand makes it all the more difficult (and probably impossible) to generate enough renewable capacity to meet it in the short time we have left”.

And while renewables are way better than fossil fuels, they will require a massive increase in the extraction of metals and rare-earth minerals, “with real ecological and social costs” Hickel writes.

Global justice

Under degrowth, countries in the Global South would not be expected to shrink or even stabilise their economies. Hinkel notes the urgent need for investment in healthcare, education, water, housing, and social security in many countries in the Global South.

Hickel argues against the imposition of structural adjustment policies on the Global South which have made this sort of government investment almost impossible.

Hickel takes the example of the Philippines. The country is “well within safe planetary boundaries, in terms of their use of land, water, energy, material resources and so on,” he writes.

There’s no reason the the Philippines shouldn’t increase its use of these resources to the extent that doing so is necessary to meet people’s needs. The same is true for most countries in the global South.

He adds that,

What the South needs, then; is to be free of structural adjustment — in other words, free from control by foreign creditors — so governments can pursue the progressive economic policies that we know to be so effective at developing human development. And this bring me to an important point: when it comes to progress in the South, this is about more than just domestic policy — it’s about global justice.

Degrowth requires the reduction of over-consumption in the Global North — as well as the rich in the Global South.

Hickel ends the book with three questions:

Ultimately, what we call ‘the economy’ is our material relationship with each other and with the rest of the living world. We must ask ourselves: what do we want that relationship to be like? Do we want it to be about domination and extraction? Or do we want it to be about reciprocity and care?

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