Upstream - How Degrowth Will Save the World with Jason Hickel

Episode Date: July 19, 2022

It may not come as a surprise to most of you to hear that capitalism is the root cause of climate change. But if we unpack this a little bit, we see that it’s a specific component of capitalism that’s mostly responsible: the need for exponential and perpetual expansion. Growth isn’t just a byproduct of capitalism, it’s an imperative — an imperative to which we are all hostage. That’s why, according to our guest in this week’s Conversation, unless the climate movement centers degrowth in its strategies and policy proposals, nothing will fundamentally change. Jason Hickel is an economic anthropologist, Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and author most recently of Less is More: How Degrowth will Save the World. We first spoke with Jason five years ago on his book The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions, and then again in 2020 on international capitalism during the pandemic. In this conversation, Jason explains why 'growthism' is so problematic for our health and the health of the planet. He talks us through alternatives to growth, and shares how we could realistically unhook from perpetual expansion and transition to a post-growth, post-capitalist economic system where we are all living healthier, happier lives on a thriving planet.  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

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If you can, if you're in a place where you can afford to do so, and if it's important for you to keep this content free and sustainable, please consider going to upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to make a one-time or recurring monthly donation. Thank you. Like the dominant assumption in economics is that every sector, every industry, every national economy should continue to increase production every year, regardless of whether or not we actually need it to, and regardless of how rich a country has already become.

And if you just stop for a moment and think about that fact, it becomes clear that this is a completely irrational way to think about economics at the best of times, but is particularly irrational in the middle of a crisis of ecological breakdown. So what the whole tradition of post-growth economics has been trying to point out is that we need to be more rational about the economy. Think about, like, think clearly that what we actually want to achieve, like, what is the economy actually for? What do we want it to achieve? What social and ecological goals are we after? Which is more rational than simply vacating our minds and outsourcing our intelligence to this idea that a perpetually increasing GDP will automatically accomplish our social ecological goals, which of course it never actually does.

You are listening to upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Robert Raymond and I'm Dela Duncan. It may not come as a surprise to most of you to hear that capitalism is the root cause of climate change. But if we unpack that a little bit, we see that it's a specific component of capitalism that's mostly responsible, the need for exponential and perpetual expansion.

Growth isn't just a byproduct of capitalism, it's an imperative, an imperative to which we are all hostage. That's why, according to our guest in this week's conversation, unless the climate movement centers de-growth in its strategies and policy proposals, nothing will fundamentally change. Jason Hickle is an economic anthropologist, professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona,

and author, most recently, of less is more, how de-growth will save the world. We first spoke with Jason about five years ago on his book The Divide, a brief guide to global inequality and insolutions. And then again, in 2020, on international capitalism during the pandemic. In this conversation, Jason explains why growthism is so problematic for our health and the health of the planet. He talks us through alternatives to growth and shares how we could realistically unhook from perpetual expansion and transition to a post-growth, post-capitalist economic system

where we're all living healthier, happier lives on a thriving planet. Here's Della in conversation with Jason Hickley. on the show. It's good to be back. Thanks for having me. Yeah, and the last time we spoke, it was on the topic of your book The Divide, and really amazing book where you share kind of who really develops who in terms of money flows and development from the global south to the global north. And now we're here talking about less is more, which is about degrowth. So maybe to start, can you share your journey from the divide to less is more? How did that change or transition happen? What what were the insights or the the curiosities, the questions that led you on that path? Yeah, okay. So the divide focused on global inequality. And the book is about how colonial forms of power

over the past 500 years have basically enriched the core economies of the global North. Well, at the same time, producing poverty and underdevelopment in the global South. So the argument of the book is basically that poverty and inequality are not natural, but are created. There are artifacts of power and effects

of intentional policy choices. In the very last chapter of the divide, I started thinking a little bit about inequalities in resource use. And that really led me down the path of thinking more about ecology and ecological breakdown, which I began researching after the divide. And what I came to understand is that the very same forces that cause global inequality are also responsible for driving ecological breakdown. And it basically has to do with capitalism.

So let me see if I can explain this just very briefly. The thing to understand about capitalism here is that it's not just any system of production in exchange, it's not just a generic system of production in exchange. It's a system where production is organized specifically around maximizing and accumulating profit, right? So surplus appropriation. And toward this end, capital seeks to cheapen its inputs as much as possible.

And the inputs to production are, of course, two things, labor and nature. So the result of the system is that capitalism basically automatically generates inequality and ecological breakdown because the basic logic of the system is that capital must take more from labor and nature than it gives back in return. That's the core logic of capitalism. And so once we understand how this system works, how this particular mode of exchange works, it becomes clear that it's quite dangerous in terms of the social harms that might inflict, and also the ecological harms of my inflicts. So there's that, but the other key connection

for me between the divide and less and more is that the crisis of ecological breakdown we face has clear colonial dimensions, and this is obvious in two key ways. The first, of course, is emissions, right? We know that globally, we produce emissions and excess of the safe planetary boundary, and this is driving climate breakdown and so on. What we need to understand is that the rich countries of the global North are responsible for the vast majority of those excess emissions. A recent paper we published in the Lancet finds that they're responsible for about 92% of those excess emissions that are driving climate breakdown. So, overwhelmingly a problem of over-accumulation in the global north.

And the impacts of climate change, of course, disproportionately harm the global south. The very countries that have done the least to cause this problem. And in some cases have done nothing to cause the problem because they're still well within their fair share of the planetary boundary or the ones that suffer the impacts in terms of human deaths and economic costs and so on. So we have to pay attention to the extent to which emissions are from which countries are effectively colonizing the atmosphere at commons, which we all rely on for our survival. But it's also clear in terms of resource use, right? So we know that excess resource use is a major driver of other forms of ecological breakdown, such as biodiversity loss and soil depletion, land system change, and so on.

And we know that rich countries here too are responsible for the vast majority of the excess resource use that's causing these impacts, right? And so that would benefit attention to that dimension. And here at Sue, there's also colonial effects, because the majority of the excess resource use that rich nations consume is actually net-appropriated from the territories of the global south. There's a dramatic net flow of resources from the south to the north,

which is basically embodied in traded goods, like the wealth of traded goods. And what that means is is the damages of excess resource used in the global north are effectively offshore to the global south. That's where the pain is inflicted. You don't see it in Finland or in Scotland or in Illinois. You see it in Indonesia, in the Congo, in Brazil.

Right? So we have to pay attention to those dimensions, I think. And of course, that very same process of draining resources from the global south also means not just ecological impacts, but also it means depleting the south of resources they need for human development. So resources that could be mobilized around meeting human needs in the global south are instead appropriated for the sake of capital accumulation and corporate expansion in the global north. So what became clear to me is that these two crises, inequality and ecological breakdown are deeply related

to another and can only understand that relationship by understanding the underlying structural drivers, right? That being the capitalist world economy and the colonial dimensions of that world economy. And for not attentive to these issues, and I think we're really missing the points and kind of shooting in the dark. So that's what I'm trying to get across now, I think. Yes, and I do really remember that point specifically from the divide that, you know, that's

why I said, who's developing who? That's really what was really illuminated for me, just like you said, the net flow of resources, but also of money in terms of loans and debt and interest from that area too. So that was super interesting to me and yeah, really important book on, you know, what is development, what's happening, and how are the legacies of colonialism and capitalism still playing out and still causing so much harm around the world. And I also appreciate that you're breaking down the components of capitalism and that like you said it's not just a benign system. And you really focus in this new book, Less is More, on the growth imperative, this part of capitalism. And just to reiterate what you said from your book, you say the goal is to

tear down the barriers to profit, to make humans and nature cheaper for the sake of growth. So can you tell us a little bit more about if we're to take, you know, capitalism down to its components and one of the components is the growth imperative. What is that imperative about and why is that a part of capitalism? Or how does it connect? How central is it to capitalism, for example? And maybe how it works. Yeah, this is really important to understand. So again, when people think about capitalism,

they quite often think of benign things like markets and trade, right? This is the dominant ideology that we have. It's just kind of a generic economy is somehow. And who could possibly be against things like markets and trade? Obviously, humans have been doing this for forever. Indeed, in fact, markets and trade have been around for thousands of years before capitalism. And they are, in fact, innocent enough on their own. So we have to be clear about what capitalism is here, right? Capitalism is only, is a very recent economic system, only 500 years old.

And what makes capitalism distinctive from all previous economic systems is that it is organized around and dependent on perpetual growth, right? And by growth here we mean specifically, perpetually increasing extraction and production at an exponential rate with no identifiable endpoints, which is extraordinary. It is the first and only intrinsically expansionary economic system in history. In fact, if the system does not grow,

then it crashes into crisis, which of course we experience every 10 years or so. Right? And this is actually wild to think about. Economists will say that in order for the economy to be stable, it must grow at an exponential rate. Think about that.

That's a deeply unstable economy, right? It's like being on an airplane, that in order to stay in the air has to continue to accelerate perpetually. That's a very scary prospect. So it's actually a deeply unstable system, and we need to be clear about that. So yeah, in terms of growth, like, look, the objective of growth in a capitalist economy

is not actually to meet concrete human needs, such as need for health care or good housing or whatever it might be. The objective of growth, and we must be very clear about this, as far as capital is concerned, is to maximize and accumulate profits, right? And so these are the key dimensions we have to understand about capitalism. In the book, I use the word growthism to specify what happens when an economy or firm is focused on growth as the core objective. So, again, not in order to meet specific needs or achieve

like a specific social goal, but rather for its own sake. And we see this every time a corporation sets targets for quarterly growth, or every time a politician stands up on the stage and promises to grow the economy, right? They never actually specify, this is remarkable, and I'm a specify really what they're talking about, they never specify growth of what or for what end or for whose interests. They never specify what they really need the growth for. And people don't ask them to specify because we are so trained to take growth for granted as always good, right? Which is not an accident.

I mean, the use of the word growth is effectively a very powerful ideological term because it's such a useful metaphor. I mean, we all assume that growth is good because plants grow, you know, children grow, we grow in knowledge and maturity, et cetera, et cetera. Like what could be that about growth? And so the use of the term growth, the framing of the term growth, gets us to buy into things that we might otherwise reject, right? So if it was specified that a one-of-a-classes of growth, let's say Anglo-American is deciding to maximize its mining extraction, we might ask, is this really necessary? What do we need this for? Whose goals is it serve, et cetera, et cetera?

But when it's sold to us as growth, then we don't ask those questions. We just buy it as though it's just automatically good. But if you think about it, this is a really quite absurd situation because like the dominant assumption in economics is that every sector, every industry, every national economy should continue to increase production every year regardless of whether or not we actually need it to and regardless of how rich a country has already become. And if you just stop for a moment and think about that facts, it becomes clear that this is a completely irrational way to think about economics at the best of times,

but is particularly irrational in the middle of a crisis of ecological breakdown. So what the whole tradition of post-growth economics has been trying to point out is that we need to be more rational about the economy. Think clearly about what we actually want to achieve. Like, what is the economy actually for? What do we want it to achieve? What social and ecological goals are we after? Which is more rational than simply vacating our minds and outsourcing our intelligence

to this idea that a perpetually increasing GDP will automatically accomplish our social and ecological goals, which of course it never actually does. Absolutely, great questions. And yeah, bringing in that word, growth is the central goal and purpose. And one of the things that I learned from your book that I just, I don't know why, but I hadn't quite realized is like you're saying,

it's an exponential function growth and you give this example that was very helpful for me of someone who's an investor and they want returns of say 5% right so they invest in something like Facebook and if Facebook just kept continuing to produce the same amount of profits per year and this is profit okay so same per year, then that would be a zero percent growth. So it would be able to repay initial investments, but not the return on investment, not the, yeah, the interest on the money that I would offer them. And so the only way to do that to generate enough surplus is to exponentially grow their profits.

So that's why it's that growth rate and the same thing for GDP and the same thing for compound interest, right, for for personal people's loans and things. Anything else you want to say about that? Because that was huge to me in terms of I was just I was more like, oh, profit than the profit mechanism is a, you know, key challenge and problem because people are pursuing profit and not like you're saying human and planetary thriving and well-being, but the exponential rate of growth needed and that profit is not just profit,

but the growth of profit. That was really illuminated for me in your book. Anything else you'd add to that? Yeah, no, it's, I think it's important to think about. So if you think about kind of your average, in some kind of ideal world where you have a, let's say a family restaurant in your neighborhood, right? So they obviously hire workers and they buy inputs and they serve you meals and then they take on some profit

that the owners of the firm are going to use for some purpose, right? And if you speak to the owners of this family business, then they'll be like, well, we need this additional profit, which we basically consume for our own needs in terms of we send our kids to school or we go on holiday once a year for a couple of weeks or whatever it might be, put food on the table. So in a sense, such a firm is not actually capitalist in the strict sense. What makes a firm capitalist is when it takes that profits and then reinvests it for the sake of expanding production in order to have a larger quantity of profit in the following year. This is what makes a firm effectively capitalist. And this is the way that the corporations that control

most production in our economy and the capitalist economy operate. And that's important to understand. So if Facebook, for example, was to have the same profits every year, then that would be basically a zero-growth company. And investors would bail out of that company, leaving it to collapse. It would be devalued and collapse, because investors were looking for the highest possible rate of growth to maximize returns on their investments, right? So major companies like Facebook and others are under pressure to expand productive capacity every year so as to expand the quantity of profit they can produce to attract more investment and so on. It's kind of this endless treadmill of expansion. And so that's the

dangerous dimension of this, right? As the use of surplus not to meet specific needs, but rather for the sake of expansion in order to accumulate yet more profit. That's the dimension of capitalism that becomes really dangerous and destabilizing. Yeah, so in this sense, there's kind of these growth imperatives that operate at the level of the firm, but we also see growth imperatives operating at the level of the whole economy, actually. And this is true in capitalist economies, because it basically has to do with employment and labor. We're constantly improving labor productivity, right?

We're getting, like, we're always getting better at producing things with less labor. And what that means is that we need less labor to produce the same amount of stuff, which means that people get laid off unemployment rises. And when you depend on jobs for livelihoods, then this causes a tremendous social crisis, right? Unemployment is devastating.

So politicians then come under heavy pressure to grow the economy to create more jobs every year just to keep the society afloat. So gains and labor productivity lead to these social growth imperatives. And if you don't get that, then you have a crisis, it's wild. Of course there's an alternative that politicians could introduce which ecological economists have been calling for for a long time, which is simply as labor becomes more productive then you shorten the working week and share

necessary work more evenly, right, so is to prevent any possible unemployment. So the solution to unemployment does not in fact growth. The solution is shortening the working week and taking the yields in the form of more free time for care and for learning and for, you know, et cetera. But of course, that's against the interests of a capitalist economy that requires perpetual expansion. So in our existing economy, what we do is we take the gains

from labor productivity to produce yet more, right? We leverage those gains from more growth rather than taking the gains in the form of meeting human needs and other kinds of ways. Yes, and yeah, you give a lot of examples of the things that have been created to facilitate the expansion of capital. You talk about limited liability, corporate personhood, stock markets, shareholder value rules, credit ratings, and things like this. And you also talk about how this growth imperative has driven neoliberalism and austerity,

both in the global north, but also, of course, global south, structural adjustment, and all of that as well. And that was really fascinating to me. Can you talk about that? How the growth in parity is kind of eating away or consuming any social safety nets or commons or public utilities that exist? And really, we can see, we can see

then how capitalism has then morphed into or now led to really austerity capitalism or neoliberal capitalism. Yeah, absolutely. This is so important, right? So there's a tendency among progressives to see neoliberalism as some kind of mistake, like an accident, right? As though, you know, from the 1980s, like before the 1980s, we had kind of a more reasonable, more humane form of capitalism. And then Reagan and Thatcher came into power and they ruined everything and now we have neoliberalism which is terrible, right? And of course it is terrible, but this is actually the wrong way to understand where neoliberalism came from. Neoliberalism was not a mistake or an accident. It was the

necessary next stage in the development of a capitalist economy that requires perpetual growth. Let me explain why that is. So what was going on in the 1970s was basically a confluence of two factors. On the one hand, labor unions in the global north had been gaining strength and were increasing the wages and the social welfare state. On the other hand, the anti-colonial movement in the global south was achieving gains in economic sovereignty. They were developing their own economies for their own national needs and so on and that was leading to an increase in the supply price of key resources that northern economies relied on. So this increase in wages domestically and the increase in the supply price

globally caused a slowdown of growth and profits in the global North. This was regarded as a crisis for capitalism and global North states faced a choice. They could either accept this new era of emerging global justice and decolonization and abandon capital accumulation, right, because capital accumulation is becoming too difficult under these conditions, or they could try to maintain capital accumulation is becoming too difficult under these conditions. Or they could try to maintain capital accumulation by somehow sabotaging the labor movements and the global south and pushing wages and resource prices back down.

And they bent hard on that latter objective. Okay, so they introduced structural investment programs across the global south, which were devastating. I won't go into what they entailed, but they, but the global south, which were devastating. I won't go into what they entailed, but some privatization, forced liberalization, cutting labor centers, etc. They cheapened labor and resources in the global south again. In the north, of course, we know how Reagan and Thatcher, for example, attacked the labor movements in the US and the UK, again pushing down real wages. This project was successful at restoring growth in the global North and restoring corporate profits,

but of course, the expense of dramatic social harms. So I think we have to understand where neoliberalism came from. Again, it's not an accident. It was a kind of planned intervention to restore the conditions for growth. And the same is true of austerity, more broadly, right? Literally whenever growth starts to slow down, then politicians

try to jumpstart it by cutting spending on social services, cutting public sector wages, etc. And the idea, of course, here again, is, is first, of course, to drive down wages, making labor cheaper, and therefore making it easier to accumulate profits. But also, the idea is that if you cut people's access to public goods, and this is so important, if you cut people's access to public goods, you put people in a situation where they're forced to earn more income, simply in order to survive, to access those basic goods that used to access for much more affordedly or even for free, right? And that survive, to access those basic goods that used to access for much more affordably or even for free, right? And that forces them to produce more.

And so people are put in a position where they're forced to produce more things that they don't actually need in order to access basic things that they do need, things like housing, things like healthcare, things like education. So in this sense, austerity is clearly a tool of growthism. It's a tool of capital accumulation. And we have to recognize that as such. And we have to fight against that tendency with the exact opposite policies, which is simply to do the opposite, to expand public services and distribute income more fairly,

ensure good wages for all, so that additional growth is not necessary in order to improve people's lives. So doing that delinks human well-being from perpetual growth and that's the approach we need to be taking. For listening to an upstream conversation with Jason Hickle, we'll be right back. Well, I think I see another side, maybe Mr. It's not a lie that shines, and I look sober now Through the door and I still belong to no one else Maybe I'll hold you to blame for all the reasons I've been left And close my eyes till I see your surprise and your bleeding Before my time Baby won't you change your mind Surely don't stay long now Missing you now

It's like I told you I'll over you somehow Before I close the door I'm reaching Here you say goodbye Baby won't change your mind I guess that hasn't changed someone maybe nobody else could understand I guess that you believe you are a woman and that I'm someone else's man But just before I see that you're late I want you to hold all the things that you said Baby I will show up there Surely don't stay long now, you're singing now

It's like I told you I'm over this long time Before I close the door I'm meeting. Here you say goodbye. Baby, what you should know about? That was Hala by Massey Star. Now back to our conversation with Jason Hickle. So we're hearing that when we go upstream from the ecological crises that we're facing, from inequality, from our sense of precariousness as people, and also our inability to meet our needs together, or we have to work in order to meet our needs.

When we go upstream from this, we're finding growth and the growth imperative and the addiction to growth and growth ism, as you say. So let's go into the alternatives, and there are many that folks offer. So there is green growth, right? There's what if we made it renewable and sustainable and less impactful to the environment, there's post growth in general, like a post growth movement. As you mentioned, there's degrowth, which is really the center of your book, less is more, and then there's steady state. So if someone was not really familiar

with these alternatives, how might you just introduce them to these terms? So green growth is the idea that we can keep growing GDP forever, while also at the same time reducing ecological impacts down to sustainable levels, right? And this is basically the dominance political discourse out there. The only problem with this discourse

is that it doesn't enjoy any empirical support. So scientists have for several years now been publishing review papers of existing evidence, finding over and over again that green growth is basically not a thing. Like there's no evidence that we can absolutely decouple GDP from resource use. And there's no evidence that we can reduce emissions fast enough in high-income nations to stay under 1.5 or 2 degrees

while pursuing growth at the same time. So in light of the scientific evidence, we need some kind of alternative and the alternative basically falls under the broad umbrella of post-growth, which basically, in its most general sense, criticizes growth as a person, criticizes growth in paratism, and calls for a shift to an economy that prioritizes human well-being and ecological stability rather than growth in capital accumulation, simplest acts, quite straightforward.

And they propose policies toward that end. D-growth is simply a position within post-growth that quite simply points out that high incommunations need to achieve a dramatic reduction of resource use and energy use in order to reach sustainable levels and keep emissions under 1.5 degrees. So the idea here is that while efficiency improvements and technology change are important here,

they're not enough in another cells. High incognitions also need to scale down less necessary forms of production, right? To more directly reduce resource use and energy use. Again, because production, like the production system is what is the major driver of resource and energy use, if we do less of it, less of the forms of production that are actually not socially necessary,

then we can achieve our ecological objectives much more quickly. I mean, people often ask me, what's the relation to between donut economics and degrowth, and it's quite simple, really. I mean huge supporter of donut economics, that's exactly what we need. Degrowth is simply the recognition that for high incommations,

the way to get back into the donuts is with degrowth. This is the way, this is the path we need to take, actively scaling down less necessary forms of production. As far as steady state economics goes, this is effectively a position within ecological economics, and it's a little bit wonky, but it simply states this, it's got two major propositions. The economy should never extract more than ecosystems can regenerate and should never waste or pollute more than ecosystems can safely absorb. Simple as that. And the idea is that if an economy follows those rules, then it's in a steady state with its ecology. So the goal of post growth and degrowth and donor economics is basically to achieve a steady state. For lower income nations, there's plenty of room

for them to increase resource use. In fact, they need to, in order to meet human needs at a good standard, and for high income nations to get to a study state, they need to reduce resource use down to sustainable levels. Thank you for that overview. And thanks for bringing in Kate Rayworth and donor economics because I have appreciated her frame

of being growth agnostic, growth as a means to an end, and not the end in itself. And so I also hear what you're saying, though, that yes, growth agnostic and changing the goal of the economy is important, but degrowth is absolutely needed right now, particularly for countries in the global North.

It's really necessary for getting back into ecological health and balance. And one thing that you brought up that I really hadn't looked into steady state very much. And so the book really brought that more clearly to me. Can you tell us the story of the, I think, Harvard study about the power of democracy and what a group of people might decide

if they were collectively making the decision about this and and steady state what we learn there. Okay, first of all, I should I should frank this with respect to the broader discourse which is from neoclassical economics. The assumption neoclassical economics is that human beings will naturally pursue their own self-interest when it comes to making decisions over ecology and resources, and they will sabotage the future and future generations for their own immediate financial gain. That's the assumption. A team of researchers from Harvard and Yale decided to study empirically in the real world how actual people operate, when they're given control over how to manage

a collective resource. And what they found is that under conditions of democratic control, when people have a kind of direct democracy control over a collective resource, 68% of them will in fact do the opposite. They will forego their own immediate financial gain in order to manage the resource sustainably for future generations indefinitely. And they did this over and over again and they found the same result. It's incredible. So it totally flies in the face of neoclassical assumptions about ecological decision making.

And it raises the question for us, why does our own economy not work this way? After all, we claim that we live in a democracy, right? And the reason is basically because, sure, we live in an electoral democracy, as flawed and polluted as it is by big money, etc., etc., which is its own problem. But the big issue to point to here is that our economic system is not democratic. In fact, it is anti-democratic. So think about this. This is quite striking because people will often associate capitalism and democracy as part of the same package, but in fact, it is anti-democratic. So think about this, this is quite striking because people will often associate capitalism and democracy as part of the same package, but in fact capitalism is not at all democratic. Under capitalism, production is controlled by corporations. The vast majority of the

productive activity in a capitalist economy is controlled by corporate firms. Now who controls corporate firms? It's controlled by shareholders. Interestingly, the 1% own the vast majority of shares and corporations more than 60%. So already we can see that a concentration of power over the institutions that govern productive activity in our economies is concentrated in the 1%. They're the ones that make the big decisions and crucially elect directors of these firms. So this cabal of people, of extremely wealthy people, basically make decisions over what

to produce in our economy, over how to use resources and labor, and most importantly, how to use the surplus of the economy generates. So every economy generates a surplus, human beings naturally are capable of producing more than is necessary to meet their most basic needs. The question is, who controls the surplus? How do you use it?

In a capitalist economy, that surplus is controlled by the owners of these firms and is used to maximize their profits and power and interests. And this is why, because we don't live in an economic democracy, used to maximize their profits and power and interests. And this is why, because we don't live in an economic democracy, this is why we have these perverse outcomes in our economy where we have extremely high levels of resource use in rich nations.

And at the same time, our economy is actually incapable of meeting basic human needs. And this is true of the global economy as a whole. It overuses resources and fails to meet the basic needs of a majority of humanity, right? And the only way to explain this is because ordinary human beings don't have control over economic decision making. So the antidote to this needs to be what we call economic

democracy. And that can start at the level of the firm, shifting from corporate ownership to cooperative forms of ownership Is the key first step to making sure that ordinary people have control over decisions About how to use resources, what to produce, and how to distribute surplus. And when they do, then they prioritize ecological stability and meeting human needs. Right? It's an amazing finding.

And this is very inspiring because it shows that we're not locked into some doomsday machine. It's not like human beings that are innately, ecologically destructive. It is a particular economic system that is innately, ecologically destructive. And we can get out of that. We can democratize our economy and shift to a post-capitalist economy and succeed in accomplishing both our social and ecological goals. Absolutely. Yes, I found that story about the Harvard and Yale study

very hopeful. And what a plug for participatory budgeting and participatory democracy practices and citizens assemblies. And also, yeah, I really appreciate what you said about growthism and scarcity and that connection where we think kind of growth would meet more and more abundance or more and more production. We'd have more and more.

But actually, you said something like the other side of the coin is scarcity, right? And that's that inability to meet our needs and having to work more and more to meet those needs and financialized ways. And this gets to the title of your book Less is More. And one of the other things that you brought up is around happiness and one of the assumptions in mainstream economic thinking is that more GDP means more happiness for folks. And you really, you really point out that that is not true, that they are not coupled or paired. And you give the example

of the US and Britain. So can you tell us a little bit more about that and also what you learned really did bring greater happiness or well-being to people in terms of, you know, the most recent, let's say, 50 years. Yeah, that's really interesting. We've seen in places like the US and Britain, despite an extraordinary growth in GDP or capita over the past several decades. There's been basically a stagnation and even a decline in happiness, right? Which is a problem. But it's not just happiness. It's also all sorts of others, social outcomes

that are actually not very closely related to GDP. So the key point to understand here is that past a certain point, which rich countries have long exceeded, the correlation between GDP and social outcomes basically starts breaking down. And this should not be surprising, right? What actually matters is not aggregate commodity production.

But rather, what we're producing, whether people have access to the things they need, and how income is distributed. That's what matters when it comes to human wellbeing, right? So if your economy is producing a hundred dollars worth of tear gas versus a hundred dollars worth of tear gas versus a hundred dollars worth of healthcare, I mean obviously the latter is going to be much better at meeting people's needs and improving social outcomes.

So we have to pay attention to this disaggregation. And this is exactly why we see that dozens of economies are able to outperform the United States on key social indicators with a fraction of the GDP per capita the US has, right? The US is one of the richest countries in the world, but it's social indicators are very poor. Costa Rica has a life expectancy higher than the USA with a GDP per capita that is one fifth or less

that of the US, the same is true of Spain and Portugal and again dozens of others. So what enables that? Like what enables these more efficient economies to operate? The key is that, well, there's two things. The key is that they focus on universal public services. That's one real important determinant of strong social outcomes. And the second is that they distribute income more fairly, simple as that.

We know that these are the main drivers of improved social outcomes. That ends democratic quality, right? So the more economic democracy you have, the more efficiently you convert resources and production into human well-being. So that's the key. These are the policies we need to focus on if social outcomes are actually our goal. So reducing inequality, giving everyone access to universal basic services. You also brought up better sanitation in terms of history, had brought more health and well-being, obviously. And then, earlier in this conversation,

you brought up some maybe more future proposals and things that are being prototyped or tried around the world. You brought up the four-day work week. You brought up worker cooperatives, that switch, but just a couple others that I appreciated that you brought in. You have a whole section offering many alternatives, you know, after unhooking from growth, different things that could, you know, support or uplift the degrowth world. You brought up the right to repair. So the right to repair are like, I'm thinking of the computer in front of me. Could I repair it? Could I take it to a local

shop to repair it? Or do I have to go to Apple HQ? Going from ownership to user ship? I thought that was interesting. I'm thinking about my visits to a share shop and how not everyone needs a drill or a chocolate fondue machine. Could we instead of owning each and every one of these objects, sharing and going from ownership to user ship? And then you go kind of big picture and talk about debt jubilies and moving from compound interest to simple interest and abolishing debt-based currency and abolishing planned obsolescence. I mean, it's just, it's so inspiring and also I just love that there are so many alternatives and invitations for moving to a degrowth world. So which ones are some of your

favorites or what are you thinking about right now? Which ones would you uplift as we, as we look towards, okay, so let's say we do unhook from growth. What would that look and feel like and how might our lives be different? Yeah, okay, let's think about this in the most concrete possible terms as if we are policymakers right now. What would we do?

I think the first step is simply this. Instead of assuming that all sectors of the economy should grow all the time, right? Let's have a conversation, a democratic conversation about what forms of production we actually want to improve. We know that we need more renewable energy. We know that we need public transit. We know that we need better healthcare access.

So focus on those. And then think about what sectors are clearly too big and are socially less necessary and should be scaled down. So private jets, SUVs, fast fashion, industrial beef farming, advertising, the practice and planned obsolescence whereby products are designed to break down after a short period of time. The arms industry, I mean, so on and so forth,

that there are clearly huge parts of our economy that are organized mostly around corporate profit and power rather than around human well-being, right? So scale those down. Really this is the simple core of degrowth. And most people would agree with that. The question that arises immediately is what about jobs and livelihoods, right? Think about it. If we're producing less than we also require less labor, okay? That means people are going to lose their jobs. And if that happens,

no one's going to buy into such a program and nor should they, because that's disastrous. So the question is how do you respond to that? And again, here, ecological economists have proposed for a long time a simple solution, which is you shorten the working week and share necessary labor more fairly. So as your society requires less labor, you shorten the working week. That ensures that you can achieve a D-Grips transition without causing any unemployment at all, and you can back that up with a public job guarantee. A climate job guarantee we could call it and focus that job guarantee on ensuring that anybody who wants to can train to participate in the most

important collective projects of our generation. Things that have significant social use value, like staffing public services, retrofitting buildings, insulating them, expanding renewable energy capacity, regenerating ecosystems, restoring woodlands, whatever it might be, things that we actually really need right now and quickly, people want to participate in that kind of labor, because doing work that is socially

meaningful is more dignified and more important to us than doing work for the sake of some corporate accumulation. So with these two policies alone, immediately you have, you've got solid protection against any loss of employment and livelihood during a degrowth transition. And this is important because it's crucial to have a broad base of political support for this kind of program. I mean, really, if it hurts ordinary people and working class people at all, then it's a failure.

And we saw this happen with the Gilles de Jean's. That's what happens when you have climate policy balanced on the backs of the poor. So this needs to be deeply geared towards social justice and class struggle to ensure that there's no loss of livelihoods. In fact, there's an improvement in people's livelihoods. And the way that you improve people's livelihoods is with a third core policy, which

is universal basic services or universal public services, to ensure that everyone has access to high quality services that they need to live a good life, housing, healthcare, education, energy, transit, etc. The core things that are required for flourishing should be available and accessible to all. With this kind of policy, again, you basically delink human well-being from the need for perpetual growth, and you organize productive capacity and resource use around meeting human needs rather than around capital accumulation. So if I was to advise a policymaker, these

would be the key policies that I would suggest. And I guess the final little piece here is that redistributing income is absolutely essential. We know that the rich are the major drivers of excess emissions and excess resource use. we need to reduce their purchase and power dramatically. And again, focus resources on what's required to meet human needs, right? So things like living wages, stronger working rights, stronger labor rights, et cetera, et cetera, to ensure that labor has better bargaining power

and can achieve a fair share of what we produce. That's essential, I think. Absolutely. And yeah, I'm on board and I'm wondering, you know, what's been the reception to your book and the clarity that you're offering and also you're bringing in so many movements from around the world and folks who've been offering

these solutions. But do you see that there's people taking interest in this, listening to this, are people knocking on your door? Like, what's been the reception or the conversations or like what you've done since you offered the book? Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I think there's been a lot of interest, which is exciting to see. And I think, you know, a few years ago, people thought, there's no way that a word like degrowth can ever take off,

but it actually has. It's become a really popular idea. And it's not because of me. It's because there's no way that a word like degrowth can ever take off, but it actually has. It's become a really popular idea, and it's not because of me, it's because there's dozens, hundreds of scholars who are working on this and teaching about it and developing concrete policy proposals and so on. And it's just so obviously an effective way to deal with the double crisis of ecological breakdown and a failure of our economy to meet basic human needs

that I think it's capturing people's attention and that's exciting to see. But I'll say this, look, the kinds of transition that is required here will not happen on its own. It clearly will require a strong social and political movements of bringing about. And that's what we need to focus on is building that movement because there are clear class factions that would stand to lose quite a lot in a degrowth or post capitalist transition. And they will fight such a transition with everything they have.

And so it's crucially we build the alliances and the solidarities and the momentum that is required to bring this kind of change about, which means a movement powerful enough to unseat politicians that are not working for us or otherwise forced them to change course. And that requires a stronger social movement than I think presently exists. So, and for that we need to take insights and lessons from successful social movements in the past, like the civil rights movement,

the abolitionist movement, the movement for women's suffrage. I mean, these movements change the world, and that's the kind of movement that we need again today. So you didn't just stop at the policy proposals, then you go even further upstream to have this beautiful conversation around the mechanistic worldview and the animate worldview. Kind of like, yeah, going to the root of why we even have growthism and the current economic system of capitalism that we do now. So can you talk a little bit about those insights that you had around our connectedness and the shift in our paradigms that needs to happen or that you know is a part of the shift to a degrowth world? Yeah yeah it's interesting you know when I was

when I was researching the history of capitalism, what I noticed is that in these early centuries, in the 1500s and 1600s, with the early rise of capitalism, then what we see is that Europe's elites are intense not only on the process of enclosure and colonization, which were central to the possibility of the rise of capitalism, and as much as it had made available a huge chunks of cheap nature and cheap labor, right? But they also needed a new story about nature, right?

Because at the time, most of Europe and most of the rest of the world had a particular belief about nature that we might gloss very, very roughly as animists. And the idea here was basically that there's no fundamental distinction between humans and the non-human world. In fact, there's an unimportant interrelatedness. We depend on the ecosystems, on the lions, on non-human beings, for our survival and for our flourishing. And when you have a world view of interdependence like that, then there are strong, moral and cultural barriers that prevent you from exploiting and damaging the ecosystems on which you depend. This kind of barrier was an impact to the possibility

of the forms of accumulation that capitalism required. An early capitalist knew this, and so there was a concerted effort to try to destroy that story about nature, that story of inter-conventing madness, and replace it with something else. And that something else was a philosophy known as dualism. And the rise of dualist philosophy in the 1516, specifically with figures like René Descartes and Francis Bacon and so on. The idea was that humans are fundamentally separate from nature, are unique in being

close to the divine, unique in having consciousness and minds and reason and so on, right? And all other non-human beings are simply objects. So if humans are subjects, the non-human beings are objects, and what you do with an object, you treat it like one. You can exploit it with impunity. The idea was that there is no ethical barrier to the exploitation of nature, as long as we can recognize that it is simply an object with no spirit and no life and no consciousness. So this transformation in the story about nature was essential to the possibility of an economic system

that would set out to extract on an extraordinary scale without any reciprocity with the land, cheapening nature, but it was not only nature that capital sought to cheapen, it was also lives, human lives, particularly in the global south, and here too at leverage dualist ideology, by putting people of color in the global south into the category of nature, using terms like barbarian and savage to justify the exploitation of mass enslavement and dispossession and colonization of whole populations by suggesting they're somehow not fully human. And so we can see how the rise of racist ideology

and the use of the very same dualism that was used to exploit nature was also used to exploit people in the global South, right? The same also was true of women by the way. There was a clear dualist line drawn when it came to gender, even in Europe, where women were considered somehow a little bit closer to nature and somehow a little bit less human than men, and therefore they could be exploited more aggressively than men. This was also a crucial for the possibility

of the rise of capitalism in Europe, because of its need for unpaid care labor in the home, right? And so dualists on talleges were used to cheapen women's lives as well. And so what emerges from this history is that the kind of exploitation that capitalism requires produces these axes of domination along the lines of the human nature domination, but also racial inequalities and gender inequalities.

And what we need to do is if we want to fight against these forms of exploitation, we have to recognize the core problem, which is an economic system that requires the cheapening of nature and human lives, and shifting to a post-capitalist economy is going to be crucial to taking away that pressure. So we don't have to deal with these problems anymore. Yeah, so again, I'm hearing an upstream journey of going from gender inequality and inequality, global inequality, right? And then racial challenges, racism, etc. You're going upstream from that, you find a bunch of supremacist, right? Anthropocentrism, growthism, right? Supremacy of growth, patriarchal supremacy, Christian supremacy, white supremacy, and then going up from that, you're really naming dualism and separation

from nature, so that supremacy and domination over can happen. So just incredible the amount of ground that you cover in the book, less is more how degrowth will save the world. So not to say that you need to keep producing or keep growing, but I'm curious what's the next conversation or topic or question that you're exploring now in your work since you produced less is more? Oh gosh. Well, I continue to be mostly interested in questions and imperialism. And so I think that's in my work coming up, I have plans to focus on this a little bit more and connect a bit more the problem of imperialism and the problem

of ecological breakdown more than I was able to do in Less Is More. So stay tuned for that. So stay tuned for that and see what it goes. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Jason Hickle, author of Less Is More, How DeGroath Will Save the World. To learn more about Donut Economics, which Della and Jason spoke about in today's conversation, check out our conversation with Kate Rayworth on her excellent book, Donut Economics, seven ways to think like a 21st century economist. Thank you to Masey Star for the intermission music. Upstreamed The Music was composed by me, Robbie.

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