Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

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So now we get to learn whether he’s an anarchist, communist, anarcho-communist, is he a statist or does he want to decentralise…? However, the first part is excellent at illustrating exactly how destructive capitalism and its mandate of constant, exponential growth has been for our world, and I do hope that everyone can read it and understand fully how we ended up where we are.

More growth means that more people have more money to spend, which means that people lead better lives, right? Rather than making a strong argument for degrowth, he made a straw man argument for growth, which he could then easily tear down and scoff at. To breathe, to pause;To look anew; and by this pause to say we endThe heart-ache and ten thousand unnatural shocksThat Earth is heir to, 'tis a consummationDevoutly to be wished. The baseline is reset and we start off anew, with the goal of squeezing in even more output into the same amount of time. It's safe to say that, along with the ‘Divide’ by the same author, those books had the biggest impact on how I perceive modern economics.

For anyone confused about the process of the Enclosures or M-C-M’, this is definitely a useful resource. 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.

Our society has bought into the myth that the economy of human society must constantly grow to be successful. It’s not clear to me that renewables will be able to support even a substantial portion of our current energy use. It's not just the kind of abstract and sometimes metaphysical philosophising that you often read in degrowth books, especially French ones. In Plato’s Republic “the true state” was one in which people ate moderate vegetarian meals, “not begetting offspring beyond their means lest they fall into poverty or war” (see Republic 372).Less Is More" first makes it crystal clear how and why capitalism is failing, and then succeeds in doing something that most books do not… something that is very hard to accomplish. Later, he quotes Reverend Joseph Townsend in 1786 as saying, "'hunger is not only a peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure, but as the most natural motive to industry. The area is like a urban forest with trees that thrive among numerous residential and industrial areas and wild animals teem freely.

De eerste helft is een uiteenzetting van wat tegelijkertijd als een totale open deur als als een revolutionair verhaal. For years, I (and many others, I suspect) have been feeling this small tug in my head - a slight force that would pull me out of reality for a second. I’m not sure how I felt about him providing “steps” to shifting our economy centered around exchange-value to one centered around use-value.

Less is More is an important book that seeks to popularize the idea of economic “degrowth,” though it is somewhat flawed in significant details. He discusses that investments in clean energy have not replaced use of coal and oil but have simply added to our net energy demands. Even though I agree in pretty much all what the book claims, I find the book very negative and depressing.