If adults won’t have it, the next generation will, and aging capitalists will have to sulkily put up with the better world they create despite them. Besides, young people are not afraid of this conversation. But Hickel has little time for this, and says that shutting down the conversation about capitalism is to be naive about the power of human creativity. Obviously talking about capitalism is anything other than glowing deference is a kind of heresy. Wealthier countries take from the global atmosphere in yet another form of colonialism. Historically, that process has driven empire and slavery, and today it drives climate change and ecological breakdown. Capitalism “has a kind of totalitarian logic to it: every industry, every sector, every national economy must grow, all the time, with no identifiable end-point.” A central principle of capitalism is to take more than you give. It digs back through climate change to fossil fuels, to economic growth and to capitalism. Just as The Divide looked to history to account for global inequality, Less is More looks back to trace the origins of ‘growthism’. There is a nuanced view of what the world needs less of and what it needs more of, creating an inspiringly holistic vision for “how we can shift from an economy that’s organised around domination and extraction to one that’s rooted in reciprocity with the living world”. He has a better chance than most at backing that up.ĭegrowth is often used as a confrontational word, but here it is used more hopefully.

That’s a big claim, but this is by Jason Hickel, one of the most thoughtful proponents of postgrowth thinking, and author of The Divide, one of my favourite books of 2018.

Less is More is a book with an ambitious subtitle: How Degrowth Will Save the World.

The divide jason hickel