I feel quite conflicted about this book. On one hand, I believe everyone should read this book. However, I was a bit disappointed. This fuels a politics of fear and resentment at what could be lost, at the expense of what could be gained —both for society and the world. In turn, the conflation of values with hollow consumerism bodes awfully for any kind of meaningful solidarity with the Global South, and makes a future in which US politics is charged over the plight of domestic climate refugees more imminent with each passing year. If I sound unhinged, it's because I am (slightly). This book ripped the door right off my temple and has brought into full view the grinding paradox that I have been blithely skipping around on my way through the rat race. Thankfully, this violent breach has also exposed a revolutionary fervor that I didn't know I possessed. Never before have I been so motivated to find a way to fix the problems I see. This objectification facilitated extraction/commodification/privatization (property) of nature, as well as of labour (human body as machines… thus productivity and disciplining of labour).

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. 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. 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. The second book was "The Divide" by the same author as "Less is More" that showed me how the core of the wealth of the rich countries was built in an almost zero-sum game. A lot of what rich people got came from what poor people lost. And there is still enormous pressure to not change the rules of that game.But in many ways, it’s a vision more wildly optimistic — disconnected from actual policy results — than any of the more standard “sustainable development” models degrowthers criticize for being out of touch. i) Political Economy: Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik: Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present, The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry, etc. Most countries measure their progress by measuring the growth of GDP. But they measure and set goals for it just for the sake of it. They don't focus on the actual effects of the growth - desirable or not.

This book shows us that there are alternatives out there, there are different ways we can live in this world without doing harm to it, and the result will be a freer, happier population. If we shift our perceptions from one based around profit to one based on necessity, we can eliminate waste and even reduce the need for gruelling work schedules and pointless stress. 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. But for all the immiseration around us, one thing is undeniable: For the past several centuries — and especially for the past 70 years, since the end of World War II — the world has been getting much richer. i) Technocratic climate “solutions”: “decoupling” myth of more efficient processes meaning we can “dematerialize” economic growth vs. Jevons paradox where savings are reinvested to grow production (“efficiency” for what? ...under capitalism, it is to endlessly grow profits and survive competition); the delusional assumptions behind mainstream negative emissions technology (esp. BECCS), etc.

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We still need growth to ensure that billions rise out of poverty in developing nations. But not everything needs to grow, all the time. For example, growth in fossil fuel consumption is clearly detrimental to the planet. Thus, by managing the amount that countries and industries are allowed to grow, we can ensure a more equitable state of things and prevent ecological collapse. 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 The third book was "Capital in the 21st Century" by Thomas Piketty. Not an easy read but fundamental for me to understand that there is a problem when capital is becoming a lot more important than labor. It's hard to build an equal society when being a rent-seeker is enormously more profitable than being a hard-worker without capital. It's serfdom in disguise. He also links economic inequality and ecological destruction: “any policy that reduces the incomes of the very rich will have a positive ecological benefit” (p. 186). I was a bit surprised, though, to find that he doesn’t mention a universal basic income, which elsewhere he champions. When I was reading about why capitalism is destructive for the world (climate change, the sixth extinction) there is always a "but"? "But, the technology will save us" or "We just need a bigger carbon tax" etc.. The author did a great job of gathering most of the "buts" and explained why they are not enough.

I was ready to change my views, but to what? "Less is More" convinced me that the idea of degrowth is something that we can build upon. What if we measure our progress not by the amount of money circulating in the economy (GDP), but by the value it creates for humans and the world? We cannot view the enclosures, slavery, and colonization as separate processes. All operate under the same logic/system (the latter experiencing much worse conditions than the latter, of course) and are fundamental to the functioning of capitalism. Firstly, proper system change moving away from equilibrium economics and using the loss and damage agenda to ensure proper north-south redistribution, a global universal basic income, a shorter working week and skipping the fossil fuel driven stage of development into renewable energy in the Global South would not at all be about pro-growth and increased consumption. It must be remembered that currently a form of modern colonial resource extraction continues to extract wealth from south to north via the World Bank, the IMF with Structural Adjustment Programmes and the iniquitous State Investor Dispute System. This is a book which has confirmed a nagging suspicion I have had for some time – that recycling, solar panels and electric cars are not enough: to save the world, or more precisely to save humanity along with a huge slice of our fellow species, we have to be far more radical. It is not that this book is bringing only information that you totally didnt know. This is not the point. The point is that it describes in a clear, straight to the point manner the expected effects in the short, medium and long term of climate change, without being alarmistic, but rather more to raise awareness. Despite this, the introduction got me depressed more than the best novel of Dostoyevsky or so.

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But the examples degrowthers point to remain speculative ones; if we ought to be skeptical, as degrowthers argue we should be, about the decoupling of wealth from ecological impact, we ought to be at least as skeptical about the prospects of decoupling wealth from living standards. Negative emissions technology: NET (and BECCS, in particular) is included in the IPCC’s scenarios for carbon drawdown, but the technology doesn’t even exist yet. Where degrowth literature is relentlessly pessimistic about the prospect of our problems being solved under our current economic system, it turns oddly optimistic about the prospect that they’ll be solved once we embrace a different way of viewing wealth and progress. If cutting carbon emissions fast enough to matter requires shrinking the global economy by 0.5 percent a year indefinitely, starting right now, as the Nature paper estimates, that’ll take policy measures much larger and more ambitious than any proposed in Less Is More.

For years, I (and many others, I suspect) have been reacting to this tug the same way: Saying Yeah, something is wrong here and then continuing to go about my day. I can't do that anymore. I can't. The way that everyone interacts with the world is a product of a system that is fundamentally flawed. A system that has taught us to assign value to a thing not based on utility, but based on how hard it is to get, on scarcity, on how it makes people look at us, on how much we can get for it when we sell it. Capitalism. I’ve heard this story elsewhere (fellow anthropologist David Graeber, those influenced by Fernand Braudel like Immanuel Wallerstein), and of course this is a messy topic with many inner debates, but this was a refreshing summary: capitalism did not “evolve” from feudalism in a linear, progressive manner.

A powerfully disruptive book for disrupted times ... If you're looking for transformative ideas, this book is for you.' KATE RAWORTH, economist and author of Doughnut Economics Degrowth’s radicalism isn’t where I part ways with it: The future will almost certainly require us to eat much less meat, dramatically change land use, and potentially invest a significant chunk of society’s resources in mitigation indefinitely.