Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

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Hickels debunks this, and he also debunks the very simple idea that growth for growth's sake simply doesn't exist in nature. And so too, increases in quality of human life level off, regardless of how much more quickly GDP grows. I found the book to be extremely encouraging and positive - degrowth is not about everyone having to tighten their belts but about everyone living well together, and living according to shared, meaningful values.

Hickels also thoroughly explores our childish expectation that technology in "clean" energy will save us. Although decoupling is sometimes talked about within the environmental community as a feasible solution, many scholars have debunked it.

Less is More” is a propaganda piece convincing us to become complacent, read this and think “yes, I don’t need to do anything, I just vote for the good guys and they’ll pass the legislation and the problems will go away, Jason Hickel said the solutions are legislative, he’s a clever dude, he must be right. I'd like to synthesize this with Michael Hudson's focus on Finance Capitalism's debt overhead (the aforementioned M-M’) and fictitious speculative growth (as opposed to industrial growth and its material use): The Bubble and Beyond. All products are made to be sold, and when a company figures out how to make a product better/faster, they simply want to sell MORE of it.

Capitalism is organized around exchange-value rather than use-value, and profit (M’) becomes capital. The solution is to instead focus on the end goal itself - why not measure people's satisfaction with their lives? Dream book = tackling the most urgent questions in an accessible synthesis of numerous sources that I was already sifting through. Horrifyingly, this connected to a screenshot I saw from our favorite non-news, entertainment program, FOX News.

It is perhaps well enough that the people of the nation do not know or understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. This forced them to serve as a source for raw materials and an important market for mass-produced goods. The impact of these are shown to be relatively minor compared with the changes needed to avoid climate disaster. The first two chapters provide an easy-to-understand “creation story” of capitalism that is in line with the tradition of dialectics. The abandonment of animism is what allowed capitalists to exploit nature and fellow humans to the point of billionaires.

ii) History: Vijay Prashad: The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations, etc. The Black Death reduced the reserve of laborers, thereby increasing the bargaining power of laborers. Part two is the most brilliantly pulled off piece of capitalist propaganda I’ve ever seen in my life. First part starts off with describing the origins of capitalism, then moves on to diving into structural laws and tendencies of capitalism that led us to the verge of ecological collapse and finishes up by investigating the potential of technological solutions within capitalism to this collapse, concluding that those are not only insufficient but, within the current system, mainly a distraction. The baseline is reset and we start off anew, with the goal of squeezing in even more output into the same amount of time.

Think water, for example - how long are our ground water supplies supposed to last if both industries and population keep rising at their current rate? Hickel derides Plato, but Plato actually addresses both population and food limits much more directly than does Less is More. I am aware that this book has its problems (cherry-picked data, details conveniently missing for the sake of a stronger argument, a cover that forces me to tell everyone "this isn't a book about minimalism") but it did what it set out to do. These policies can achieve “significant reductions in material throughput” (substantially reduced resource use) “without any negative impact on human welfare” (p.

it’s a remarkable invention that enables loggers to fell trees, ten times faster than they are able to do by hand. Because after the brilliantly constructed 164 pages of explaining why capitalism doesn’t work and won’t work, surely he’s not just going to suggest MORE CAPITALISM BUT BETTER, right?He very much stands on the shoulders of the late greats, Frantz Fanon and David Graeber to name a couple. Degrowth is a deliberate attempt to reduce the physical size of the economy — for example, we should prefer bicycles to cars, and plant foods to animal foods. We need to evolve beyond the dogmas of capitalism to a new system that is fit for the twenty-first century.