Review: Jason Hickel “Less is More — How Degrowth will Save the World.”

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I’ve read this book twice now. It’s brilliant, erudite and it answers poor Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ unasked question: why should we Go for GDP Growth?

Hickel calls this Growthism: the worship of GDP Growth, the idea that by forcing the economy to expand we can have a free ride to ever-increasing prosperity forever.

Actually, as anyone who has ever heard of physics knows, we can’t.

We can’t extract our way to happiness, nor mine our way to wealth except for a few oligarchs. Capitalism gets bigger and ever more ravenous for cheap natural resources.

The Chancellor is blinded by her religion of GDP Growth. GDP Growth extracts from the planet and turns it into more and more stuff. It doesn’t measure us, it measures capitalism. And Rachel Reeves thinks we can have infinite growth on a finite planet.

We can’t.

Also that way lies the destruction of our civilization, the ruin of the biosphere, the death of billions.

However nobody wants to believe this, especially desperate politicians trying to kick-start our anaemic economy.

It gets worse. The subtitle of the book is ‘How Degrowth will Save the World.’

Every time I see that word ‘Degrowth’ I flinch.

Sure, it’s the opposite of Growth and probably the right way to go but… but…

‘Degrowth’ is such an ugly word. It has a miserable poverty-stricken sound to it. Do you want to try Degrowth? Nope, me neither.

Then Hickel makes an easily understood mistake. He starts the book explaining the rise of Capitalism over the past 500 years, how it was connected to Descartes’ split between Mind (only in white men) and Matter (everything else). He looks at why it was always about wealth for the rich and scarcity and poverty for everybody else.

He explains how industrialisation impoverished and starved the workers who had lost their commons, how scarcity was a feature not a bug because it forced people to work for very little while their masters stacked up their bank accounts.