276°
Posted 20 hours ago

Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

£9.9£99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

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.” -Henry Ford While it’s not a short book, Less Is More feels surprisingly sparse when it comes to envisioning how the changes it recommends could be brought about. The chapter on solutions recommends cutting the workweek and changing tax policy — two solid proposals — but then rounds that out by recommending ending technological obsolescence, advertising, food waste, and student debt. An excellent and fascinating introduction and primer to the concept of degrowth as an alternative to the growth-fixated paradigm under neoliberal capitalism. We will not be able to grow ourselves out of the current and imminent climate catastrophe, nor will magical thinking about technology as some sort of savior of humanity prevent or offset the catastrophe. Degrowth is not a call for primitivism, but it is a call for reduced production and consumption, equal distribution of income and wealth, and elimination of parasitic practices such as compound interest, food waste, enclosure of commons, artificial scarcity (planned obsolescence, advertising aimed for increased consumption) that have eroded our ability to imbibe our lives with meaning. Even poor people have so many needs for goods and services that you can’t possibly put them on a list and say, ‘Now we’re done here,’” Roser told me. “That’s the beauty of money, that you can just go out there and get what you need rather than what some researcher determines are your needs.” Degrowth is unrealistic — and gaining traction

I’m not particularly opposed to those policies. But they seem laughably inadequate for the magnitude of the task at hand: confronting the climate crisis. Degrowth successfully persuades that guiding humanity and our planet through the 21st century will be really, really hard — but not in a way degrowth particularly solves . Marx’s exchange-value (selling private commodity on market for profit) triumphing over use-value (intrinsic use). In particular, Commons have intrinsic value despite abundance, whereas capitalist exchange-value requires artificial scarcity (central in the commodification market-creation of the Enclosures/colonialism/Neoliberal globalization). The charred remains of a home destroyed by the Bootleg Fire just north of Bly, Oregon, on July 24. Maranie Staab/Bloomberg/Getty Images Eindelijk is een goed onderbouwd boek verschenen waarin aangetoond wordt dat de hardnekkige economische dogma’s van deze tijd, die door links en rechts algemeen aangenomen worden, helemaal geen goddelijke natuurwetten zijn. In minder dan 300 vlot geschreven pagina’s wordt duidelijk gemaakt dat het blijvend nastreven van continue economische groei niet alleen overbodig, maar ook onhaalbaar is en zelfs enorm schadelijk voor onze planeet. Als we willen vermijden dat hele ecosystemen op zeer korte tijd onherstelbaar beschadigd geraken, is een snelle overstap naar een ander soort economie nodig. Vooral de economieën van rijke westerse landen moeten juist snel krimpen, of beter “ontgroeien” om een catastrofe af te wenden. Dit klinkt misschien dramatisch of zelfs een beetje radicaal, maar het goede nieuws is dat dit mogelijk is zonder dat we moeten inboeten op vlak van welvaart en welzijn, integendeel.

Rapid Response:

Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2018) ‘Global Warming of 1.5 ºC’, available: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/ (accessed 7 September 2020). Less is More is an important book that seeks to popularize the idea of economic “degrowth,” though it is somewhat flawed in significant details. 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. Degrowth is widely discussed in Europe, where the idea originated. In America, the “heart” of the capitalist beast, it is still a relatively unknown idea. 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.

Ward et al., 2016). High-income countries externalize production, thereby making the appearance of reduced or slowed DMC. Two radical conclusions flow from this. First, “any policy that reduces the incomes of the very rich will have positive ecological benefit.” Second, “justice is the antidote to the growth imperative – and key to solving the climate crisis.” Perhaps such ideas are not as fanciful or unrealisable as they seem, as we are currently being given a reminder of what states can do when they feel they must. b) Colonization: Similarly, colonization broke up sufficient Asian trade networks and destroyed global South Industries through asymmetric trade policies. This forced them to serve as a source for raw materials and an important market for mass-produced goods. Less is more. It’s a paradox whose time has come, and which should not be startling to the members of a faith who believe in a God whose son emptied himself and lost everything for the sake of our ultimate human flourishing.

Subscribe to our mailing list

Degrowth will reduce carbon emissions in a variety of ways. Changing focus from “wants” to “needs” in the Global North with reduce the wastage of fast fashion and lessen the heavy burden of environmental externalities from off-shoring production. Promotion of world-wide plant-based diets, staycations and active travel will have many health benefits as well as reducing carbon emissions.[3]

So what do we do? It is important to realize that growth started out as a means to an end - as GDP grows, people move out of poverty and their standard of living improves. But this is not true exponentially. Beyond a point, people's satisfaction with their lives does not improve as GDP rises. The gains accrue only to a few. The solution is to instead focus on the end goal itself - why not measure people's satisfaction with their lives? Why not adopt measures such as HDI, Gross National Happiness as indicators of a nation's progress. If your nation is already a "developed" country, why obsesses over further GDP size increase and growth? In a way, the debate over degrowth is a debate over the meaning of one economic indicator: gross domestic product (GDP). This graph looks at child mortality not just by comparing rich countries to poor ones but also by comparing countries over time, as they get richer: Getting richer improves outcomes for children. Our World in Data But, this uncompromising and urgent approach is wholly warranted giving the scale of the challenge, to counter a narrative that perpetual growth is good. An idea which is so deeply ingrained in society few of us ever question it (even though, as we learn, this idea is based on questionable evidence). The world has finally awoken to the reality of climate breakdown and ecological collapse. Now we must face up to its primary cause: capitalism. Our economic system is based on perpetual expansion, which is devastating the living world. There is only one solution that will lead to meaningful and immediate change: degrowth.His answer is that not only do the rich nations not need to grow, but they need to stop growing – degrowth. For growth is the ultimate driver of our clear and present ecological crisis. It’s what dumps greenhouse gas into the atmosphere and heats the planet. It’s what wastes the earth’s non-renewable resources. It’s what is killing off species at an unprecedented rate. It’s what is pumping so much pollution into the earth’s living systems that the earth can no longer process it. 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 In addition to his academic work, Jason writes regularly for The Guardian and Foreign Policy, and contributes to a number of other online outlets including Al Jazeera, Fast Company, Prospect, Jacobin, Le Monde Diplomatique, New Internationalist, Red Pepper, Truthout, and Monthly Review. His media appearances include Viewsnight, the Financial Times, the BBC World Service, Sky News All Out Politics, BBC Business Matters, Thinking Allowed, Renegade TV, NPR, Doha Debates, TRT World, the LA Times, Citations Needed, and Russell Brand's podcast Under the Skin.

One big problem with degrowth is this simple fact: In the coming decades, most carbon emissions won’t be coming from rich countries like the US — they’ll be happening in newly middle-income countries, like India, China, or Indonesia. Already, developing nations account for 63 percent of emissions, and they’re expected to account for even more as they develop further and as the rich world decarbonizes. But such articulations of different philosophies of human flourishing should not be mistaken for public policy. 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.” This book has some excellent criticisms of modern capitalist systems and proposes some practical methods that could be used to reduce our obsession with and dependence on economic growth. If we want to have a shot at surviving the Anthropocene, we need to restore the balance. We need to change how we see the world and our place within it, shifting from a philosophy of domination and extraction to one that’s rooted in reciprocity with our planet’s ecology. We need to evolve beyond the dusty dogmas of capitalism to a new system that’s fit for the twenty-first century.It should go without saying that since rich governments got us into this climate mess, they should be at the forefront of getting us out of it. We need massive investments in carbon capture, green energy, plant-based meat, mitigation, and straight-up cash transfers to poor countries disproportionately affected by the climate crisis.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment