Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

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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. 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. 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.

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. 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. I recommend reading "Less is More" because it's a great trigger for starting the most important discussion about creating a sustainable world that is a pleasure for everyone to live on. It contains many ideas we can build upon. It challenges the right things in the right way. 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 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.'

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Leisure time, too, has increased — and hours worked have declined — as the world has gotten wealthier. 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.Our planet is in trouble. But how can we reverse the current crisis and create a sustainable future? The answer is: DEGROWTH.

It might be possible in principle to do better — to decouple, if you will, health and well-being from access to material resources, so that everyone is well-off with many fewer resources. But such articulations of different philosophies of human flourishing should not be mistaken for public policy. a) The Enclosures: The elite enclosed the commons, a violent process known as the Enclosures. The Enclosures destroyed self-sufficient economies, which created a mass supply of workers and a mass supply of consumers. Climate Strike Movement (2019) 7.6 million people demand action after week of climate strikes’, available: https://globalclimatestrike.net/7-million-people-demand-action-after-week-of-climate-strikes/ (accessed 9 September 2020). But I don’t tend to see such efforts as fundamentally futile. Degrowthers do — even when there have been significant successes.If we want to have a shot at halting the crisis, we need to restore the balance. We need to change how we see nature and our place in it, shifting from a philosophy of domination and extraction to one that's rooted in reciprocity and regeneration. We need to evolve beyond the dogmas of capitalism to a new system that is fit for the twenty-first century. But what does such a society look like? What about jobs? What about health? What about progress? Steven Chu, who served as secretary of energy under President Obama, has endorsed it, arguing, “You have to design an economy based on no growth or even shrinking growth.” One of the most important books I have read ... does something extremely rare: it outlines a clear path to a sustainable future for all.' RAOUL MARTINEZ, author of Creating Freedom Indeed, as the magic of capitalism is driven by the abstract force of debt (see the "Great Reversal" in Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails, where capitalism's finance-production-distribution starts with the debt of capital investments, whereas prior economies were production-distribution-finance), needlessly forcing workers and industrial capitalists to exhaust the planet just to pay off parasitic debts to the various layers of creditors (the worst being institutional absentee speculators/rentiers... i.e. rent-seeking/passive income/Ponzi schemes). Insanity.