It has become difficult to talk about making energy policies for combating climate change, for example, without being told that such thinking is actually irrelevant because it doesn’t involve system change,” she recently argued. “We need cheap, clean energy at scale and we need it now.” The strong correlation between child mortality and GDP per capita is apparent on the above graph. There are some outliers — some countries outperform or underperform their GDP somewhat, in terms of preventing child deaths — but in general, wealth strongly predicts child survival. No single, simple medical intervention causes the difference. Wealthier societies on average get better health outcomes across the board. Our World in Data The money aspect, and the abstract concept of GDP, distract us and make it less obvious what it’s actually about. People want to have enough food, they need to go to the doctor, they need childcare, they want a good education. People need lots of stuff, and one thing that people care about are goods and services, and they need to be produced, and economic growth is about an increase in the quality and quantity of the goods and services that people need. 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

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.

Subscribe to our mailing list

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. This objectification facilitated extraction/commodification/privatization (property) of nature, as well as of labour (human body as machines… thus productivity and disciplining of labour).

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. Of the many disconcerting paradoxes of our time, perhaps the most jarring is the idea that as our understanding of the causes and possible consequences of climate change improves, politicians are often unwilling to connect the dots and design policies to avert a catastrophe. This is a catastrophe that is rapidly unfolding before our very eyes. However else the political class may justify their inaction, they won’t be able to claim they weren’t warned.Less is More" is the last piece of knowledge I needed to finally accept that we can invent a better system than neoliberalism. And I had been a neoliberalist for my whole adult life. Our fears of needing more to achieve a “good life” is contrasted with the actual measures of wellness. Historically, this has not been from working to death/destroying our surroundings but from the creation of new Commons: public sanitation, public healthcare, public education, public housing/land reforms, improved working conditions, socialized safety nets/old age pensions/childcare, etc. ( Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital). …Thus, degrowth is the transformation from artificial scarcity to radical abundance. Furthermore, he reminds us, most of the fruits of all this extra effort by Americans go to their richest 1% anyway. In global economic terms, we are actually spending a very high proportion of our time and energy enriching people who already have more money than they can possibly use, so why don’t we revolt? To reverse capitalism’s logic, the ontological change is to dismantle the dualism, to move from dominion to reciprocity. The interconnectivity of systems science has been the new paradigm in the physical sciences, from the human microbiome ( The Human Superorganism: How the Microbiome Is Revolutionizing the Pursuit of a Healthy Life) to Earth Systems science ( Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System). In critical economics: The New Economics: A Manifesto 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.

First, in the world today, there’s an extremely strong association between growth and welfare outcomes of every kind. GDP, while imperfect, is a better predictor of a country’s welfare state, outcomes for poor citizens in that country, and well-being measures like leisure time and life expectancy than any other measure. It is, like every other measure, imperfect and one-dimensional. But ... it is imperfect at the edges while fairly accurate overall. Richer countries are countries that are generally better-off in almost all metrics, from education, life expectancy, child mortality to women’s employment etc. Not only that: richer people are also on average healthier, better educated, and happier. Income indeed buys you health and happiness. (It does not guarantee that you are a better person; but that’s a different topic.) The metric of income or GDP is strongly associated with positive outcomes, whether we compare countries to each other, or people (within a country) to each other. There’s a lot of broad-brush policy prescriptions in the degrowth lit, but those details never really add up.

Rapid Response:

The window for countries to alter earth ’s frightening ecological trajectory is rapidly passing. As climate change has morphed into a climate crisis over the past twenty years, the proposed solutions that would reshape economic life have become more urgent and bold. Especially since legislation for a Green New Deal in the United States was introduced by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey in 2019, progressives have made climate justice focal to how we approach employment and innovation, living standards, and social equity. The core principle is that without climate justice, policies to create a more egalitarian society will fall terribly short—and might have no lasting impact at all. Yet as potent as the concept of a green economy is, the radical requirements that climate justice entails expose a rift between reformers and those seeking systemic change, one that has implications for how activists articulate what’s at stake in the crucial decade ahead. And if temperatures rise by 3 or 4 degrees Celsius, sea levels will go up by as much as 100 cm, and possibly 200 cm. Virtually all of the planet's beaches will be underwater. Much of Bangladesh, home to 164 million people, will disappear. Cities like New York and Amsterdam will be permanently flooded, as will Jakarta, Miami, Rio and Osaka. Countless people will be forced to flee coastal regions. All this century.' 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