Did you know that a country with 80% less income than the United States has a higher life expectancy, and that we’re extracting twice as much from the Earth as scientists say is safe?
Overview
Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel is a 9-hour intellectual journey that systematically dismantles the most sacred cow of modern economics: the idea that endless GDP growth is both necessary and desirable.
Hickel, an economic anthropologist and professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, builds a case that’s equal parts history lesson, ecological wake-up call, and policy blueprint.
The book has two halves.
The first traces capitalism’s 500-year rise through enclosure, colonisation, and the deliberate creation of artificial scarcity, showing that growth was never a natural evolution but a violently enforced project.
The second half offers a vision of what a post-growth economy could actually look like: shorter working weeks, universal public services, ending planned obsolescence, and rethinking our relationship with the living world.
Who will love this book: Anyone who’s ever felt that something is fundamentally wrong with our economic system but couldn’t quite articulate why. People working in tech who’ve wondered if “optimising for scale” is actually making things worse. Climate activists looking for intellectual ammunition.
Readers who enjoyed Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics or Mariana Mazzucato’s The Value of Everything.
Who should probably skip: If you’re convinced that markets and technological innovation will solve climate change without structural change, you’ll find this book frustrating. If you’re looking for a detailed political playbook with step-by-step implementation plans, Hickel offers principles rather than tactics.
And if you’re not ready to question whether infinite growth on a finite planet is even possible, this book will likely make you uncomfortable.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
Title: Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
Author: Jason Hickel
Publisher: William Heinemann (Penguin Random House)
Publication Date: 2020
Pages: ~320
About the Author: Jason Hickel is an economic anthropologist, Fulbright Scholar, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Originally from Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), he spent years working with migrant workers in South Africa, writing about exploitation in the wake of apartheid.
He’s a Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, a Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics’ International Inequalities Institute, and Chair Professor of Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo.
He serves on the Climate and Macroeconomics Roundtable of the US National Academy of Sciences, the Statistical Advisory Panel for the UN Human Development Report, and the Harvard-Lancet Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice.
His previous book, The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions, established him as a leading voice on global inequality. Less Is More was listed by the Financial Times and New Scientist as a book of the year.
The Book’s Central Argument: Capitalism’s relentless demand for perpetual growth is driving ecological collapse, and the only way out is “degrowth”: a planned reduction of excess energy and resource use in high-income countries, combined with fairer distribution, shorter working hours, and investment in public goods.
Hickel argues that we can’t solve the climate crisis by making growth “green” because growth itself is the problem. More importantly, he demonstrates that high-income countries don’t actually need growth to improve human welfare, they’ve already surpassed the point where more GDP translates into better lives.
2. Background
The timing of Less Is More (2020) was uncanny. The book arrived as the world was grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic, a crisis that, as the preface by Extinction Rebellion’s Kofi Klu and Rupert Read notes, showed us what governments can do when they’re determined enough. Suddenly, things that had been called “impossible” for years, citizens’ income, debt cancellation, wealth taxes, became reality.
But the deeper context is this: despite decades of climate conferences, from the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to the 2015 Paris Agreement, global CO2 emissions have continued to rise.
The book opens with a devastating observation: scientists have known about anthropogenic climate change since the mid-1970s, and yet there has been no progress in arresting ecological breakdown.
Hickel’s answer to this paradox is that we’ve been looking at the wrong problem. It’s not just fossil fuels, not just technology, not just individual behaviour. It’s the economic system itself, capitalism’s structural need for endless expansion.
3. Less Is More Summary
Part One: More Is Less , How We Got Here
The Creation Story of Capitalism
Hickel begins by demolishing the comfortable origin story we’re all taught in school. Capitalism didn’t emerge naturally from feudalism through some inevitable “transition.” The actual history is much darker and more revealing.
In the early 1300s, commoners across Europe began rebelling against feudalism. After the Black Death (1347) wiped out a third of Europe’s population, labour became scarce and peasants gained bargaining power.
They demanded lower rents, higher wages, and control over land. By 1350-1500, historians describe this as “the golden age of the European proletariat”, wages doubled or tripled, working hours shortened, and women’s wages shot up. Europe’s soils recovered, forests regrew. It was, Hickel writes, a genuine revolutionary moment.
But Europe’s elites weren’t pleased. They considered the high wages “scandalous”. Over the next three centuries, they launched a brutal counter-revolution. The enclosure movement fenced off collectively managed commons, pastures, forests, rivers, for elite use. Villages were razed, crops ripped up, millions removed from the land. In England alone, 7 million acres were enclosed between 1760 and 1870.
This wasn’t about “improvement”, it was about creating scarcity. As Hickel quotes the Reverend Joseph Townsend in 1786: “It is only hunger which can spur and goad them on to labour”. The point was to destroy subsistence economies so people had no choice but to sell their labour for wages. As one Scottish merchant put it: “Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society”.
The Great Separation
But enclosure wasn’t enough. Capitalism also required a new way of seeing the world. For most of human history, people operated with what anthropologists call animist ontologies, seeing no fundamental divide between humans and the rest of the living world. The Achuar people of the Amazon, for example, regard plants and animals as “persons” (aents) with souls similar to humans. They hunt and fish, but in the spirit of reciprocity, not extraction.
Capitalism required destroying this worldview. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) recast nature from a nurturing mother into what he called a “common harlot” that must be “restrained” and “bound into service”. René Descartes argued that animals and plants are mere automatons, operating like clocks, and even the human body was just “brute matter”. This dualism, the idea that humans are separate from and superior to nature, became the philosophical foundation of capitalism.
As Hickel writes: “Once nature was an object, you could do more or less anything you wanted to it”.
The Rise of the Juggernaut
Part One continues with an analysis of how capitalism’s growth imperative actually works. Hickel draws a crucial distinction between use-value (producing things because they’re useful) and exchange-value (producing things to make a profit that must be reinvested to make more profit).
He illustrates this with a simple formula:
M → C → M’
Money becomes commodities becomes more money. And then more money becomes more commodities becomes even more money, an endless, self-reinforcing cycle.
This isn’t just greed. It’s a structural imperative. If a company doesn’t grow, investors pull out and the firm collapses. Governments face the same pressure: if they can’t generate growth, they can’t pay their debts, fund social services, or create jobs. As Hickel puts it: “Growth is a structural imperative, an iron law”.
The results are staggering. Global material extraction has exploded from 7 billion tons per year in 1900 to 92 billion tons in 2017, nearly double the 50 billion tons scientists consider the maximum sustainable threshold. And this isn’t evenly distributed: high-income countries consume an average of 28 tons of material per person per year, while the sustainable level is about 8 tons.
Will Technology Save Us?
Chapter 3 tackles the most common objection to degrowth: the idea that technology will save us. Hickel systematically dismantles this hope.
First, he exposes the dirty secret of the Paris Agreement: the climate models that governments rely on assume the widespread use of “negative emissions technologies” like BECCS (bio-energy with carbon capture and storage).
In the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, 101 out of 116 scenarios for staying under 2°C relied on BECCS. The problem? BECCS has never been proven to work at scale, would require land two to three times the size of India, would devastate biodiversity, and, most critically, would require massive food production to be sacrificed.
Even if we somehow solved the emissions problem, Hickel argues, clean energy doesn’t solve deforestation, overfishing, soil depletion, or mass extinction. And the transition to renewables requires a dramatic increase in mining, 34 million metric tons of copper, 40 million tons of lead, 4.8 billion tons of iron. The lithium boom alone is already an ecological catastrophe.
But the deeper problem is what Hickel calls the Jevons Paradox: efficiency improvements don’t reduce resource use under capitalism, they enable more growth, which wipes out any gains. As he writes: “It’s not our technology that’s the problem. It’s growth”.
Part Two: Less Is More , The Path Forward
Secrets of the Good Life
Part Two opens with a question that cuts to the heart of growthism: does growth actually improve human welfare?
Hickel shows that the historical relationship between GDP and life expectancy is far more complicated than we assume. The dramatic rise in life expectancy in Britain after the 1870s wasn’t driven by economic growth, it was driven by public sanitation, which was only achieved when workers organised and won the right to vote. As one public health researcher notes: “economic growth itself has no direct, necessary positive implications for population health”.
The evidence is overwhelming: after a certain point, more GDP adds little to human flourishing. Costa Rica beats the US on life expectancy despite having 80% less income. Portugal has 65% less income than the US and higher life expectancy. The European Union as a whole has 36% less income than the US and beats it on virtually every welfare indicator.
What explains this? Universal public services. Spain spends $2,300 per person on healthcare and achieves a life expectancy of 83.5 years, five years longer than Americans, who spend $9,500 per person on a private, for-profit system. As Hickel writes: “It’s not income as such that matters. It’s what that income can buy, in terms of access to the things we need to live well”.
Hickel also tackles inequality. The richest 1% capture 28% of all new income from global GDP growth. If we shifted just $10 trillion of excess annual income from the richest 1% to the global poor, we could end poverty in a stroke and boost life expectancy in the global South to 80 years.
Pathways to a Post-Capitalist World
The final chapters offer concrete proposals for what degrowth actually looks like:
- End planned obsolescence. Companies deliberately design products to break down. Lightbulbs that could last 2,500 hours were shortened to 1,000. Smartphones are designed to be unrepairable. With simple legislation, extended warranties, right-to-repair laws, we could make products last two to five times longer.
- Cut advertising. Advertising is manipulation on an industrial scale. A survey found 90% of American CEOs believed it would be impossible to sell a new product without advertising; 85% admitted it persuaded people to buy things they didn’t need. Reducing advertising would reduce consumption and improve well-being.
- Shift from ownership to usership. Share cars, tools, and equipment. Public transportation is far more efficient than private cars. Bicycles are even better.
- End food waste. Up to 50% of all food produced is wasted. Ending this could cut global emissions by 13%.
- Scale down destructive industries. Beef uses 60% of global agricultural land but provides only 2% of calories. Scaling it down could liberate 11 million square miles of land, the size of the US, Canada, and China combined.
- Shorten the working week. As we eliminate unnecessary jobs, we can distribute labour more evenly, from 40-50 hours down to 20-30. This has been shown to improve well-being, gender equality, and reduce environmental pressure.
- Reduce inequality. A wealth tax on the super-rich would reduce high-impact luxury consumption and competitive consumption across society.
- Decommodify public goods. Universal healthcare, education, transport, housing, these should be public goods, not profit centres.
The Law of Jubilee
Hickel also tackles the debt system. Debt, with its compound interest, creates artificial scarcity and forces endless growth. He points to the ancient Hebrew Law of Jubilee, which cancelled debts every seventh year. We could do the same today: cancel student debts, mortgage debts created by speculation, and the unjust debts of global South countries.
He also questions the money system itself. Banks create more than 90% of the money in circulation out of thin air when they make loans, and charge interest on money they created for free. This system forces endless competition and growth. Alternatives exist: state-created, debt-free money, distributed partly as a universal basic income.
Everything is Connected
The final chapter is the most philosophically ambitious. Hickel argues that degrowth isn’t just about economics, it’s about changing how we see ourselves in relation to the living world.
He draws on Indigenous philosophies: the Achuar of the Amazon, who see plants and animals as persons; the Chewong of Malaysia, who refer to all beings as “our people”; the Bedamuni of New Guinea, who say “when we see animals, we might think they are just animals, but we know they are really like human beings”.
These aren’t just metaphors. Hickel shows how modern science is catching up. We now know that our bodies contain more bacterial cells than human cells. Trees communicate through underground fungal networks. Plants learn, remember, and solve problems. Spending time around trees improves health, reduces crime, and increases co-operation.
As he writes: “The key principle is reciprocity. You have to start by recognising that you are in a relationship of interdependence”.
4. Less Is More Analysis
What Works:
Hickel’s greatest strength is his ability to synthesise complex material, history, economics, ecology, anthropology, into a coherent and accessible argument. The historical sections are particularly compelling. The story of the peasant revolts and the enclosure movement isn’t just interesting trivia; it fundamentally reframes how we understand capitalism. Once you see that growth was built on violence and dispossession, the idea that it’s “natural” or “inevitable” becomes impossible to sustain.
The statistical arguments are also powerful. The comparison between Costa Rica and the United States is devastating: a country with 80% less income and higher life expectancy proves that high GDP isn’t necessary for human flourishing. The data on material consumption, 92 billion tons extracted annually, double the safe limit, makes the scale of the problem visceral.
Hickel is also refreshingly honest about what degrowth isn’t. It’s not austerity. It’s not going back to the caves. It’s not reducing GDP for its own sake. As he writes: “Degrowth calls for abundance in order to render growth unnecessary”. It’s about producing less of what we don’t need so we can have more of what we actually value: time, community, health, meaning.
What Could Be Stronger:
Some critics have pointed out that Hickel sometimes conflates “growthism” (the ideology) with capitalism (the system). This matters because if the problem is ideology, it can be changed within capitalism, but if it’s the system itself, the solution is more radical. Hickel seems to want it both ways at times.
The book also has relatively little to say about political strategy. How do we actually get from here to there? The preface by Extinction Rebellion acknowledges this gap, XR is “the smoke alarm,” not the all-purpose solution. But for readers looking for a roadmap, the absence of detailed political analysis can feel frustrating.
Some of the proposed solutions, ending advertising, for example, would face enormous political opposition from powerful interests. Hickel acknowledges this but doesn’t offer much guidance on how to overcome it.
The Broader Contribution:
Despite these limitations, Less Is More makes an indispensable contribution. It provides the intellectual framework for understanding why mainstream environmentalism has failed. As the Australian Institute of International Affairs review notes, it offers “the most persuasive and comprehensive argument in favour of ‘degrowth’ that I’ve read”.
The book has been described as “a powerfully disruptive book for disrupted times” by Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics. And that’s exactly what it is, not because it offers easy answers, but because it forces us to ask harder questions.
5. Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths:
Intellectual synthesis. Hickel draws on history, economics, ecology, and anthropology to build a comprehensive case.
Empirical grounding. The book is dense with data, material consumption figures, emissions data, life expectancy statistics, income inequality numbers.
Accessible writing. Despite the complexity of the subject, Hickel writes clearly and engagingly.
Hopeful vision. Unlike many books on ecological collapse, Less Is More offers a positive vision of what a post-growth society could look like.
Relevant case studies. The comparisons between the US and Costa Rica, Spain, and other countries make the argument concrete.
Weaknesses:
Limited political strategy. The book is stronger on diagnosis than on tactics for achieving change.
Occasional conflation. Hickel sometimes blurs the line between “growthism” as an ideology and capitalism as a system.
Cherry-picking concerns. Some critics have argued that Hickel selectively cites data that supports his thesis.
Repetition. Some sections feel bloated, with facts repeated across chapters.
Limited discussion of population. Hickel touches on population but doesn’t fully integrate it into his analysis.
6. Comparison with Similar Works
Less Is More sits at the intersection of several important books:
Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics (2017) : Both books argue for moving beyond GDP, but Raworth focuses more on the visual framework of the “doughnut” (social foundation + ecological ceiling) while Hickel provides a deeper historical and political analysis.
Mariana Mazzucato’s The Value of Everything (2018) : Both critique the way capitalism extracts value, but Mazzucato focuses on innovation and public goods while Hickel focuses on ecological limits.
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) : Both draw on Indigenous wisdom to reimagine our relationship with the living world, but Kimmerer’s approach is more poetic and personal while Hickel’s is more political and economic.
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) : Both focus on inequality, but Piketty’s solution is a global wealth tax within capitalism while Hickel argues for moving beyond capitalism itself.
Tim Jackson’s Prosperity Without Growth (2009) : Both argue that growth is incompatible with ecological sustainability, but Jackson’s book is more policy-focused while Hickel’s is more historically and philosophically grounded.
7. Conclusion
Less Is More is essential reading for anyone who’s ever wondered why we keep doing the same things despite mounting evidence that they’re destroying the planet. It’s for people who’ve felt that something is fundamentally wrong with our economic system but couldn’t quite articulate what.
I’d recommend it to:
- Climate activists looking for intellectual ammunition
- Students of economics, politics, or environmental studies
- Anyone working in tech who’s wondered if “optimising for scale” is actually a problem
- Readers who enjoyed Doughnut Economics or The Value of Everything
- People who feel overwhelmed by the climate crisis and need a coherent framework for understanding it
I’d caution against it if:
- You believe markets and technology will solve climate change without structural change
- You’re looking for a detailed political playbook with step-by-step implementation
- You’re not ready to question whether infinite growth on a finite planet is possible
The book has its limitations, it’s stronger on diagnosis than strategy, and some of the solutions would face enormous political opposition. But as the Australian Institute of International Affairs review puts it, “This book provides the most persuasive and comprehensive argument in favour of ‘degrowth’ that I’ve read”.
In the end, Hickel’s message is simple but profound: we don’t need endless growth to live well. We need fair distribution, public goods, and a different way of seeing our relationship with the living world.
As he writes in the final pages: “What we call ‘the economy’ is our material relationship with each other and with the rest of the living world. We must ask ourselves: what do we want that relationship to be like?”
It’s a question worth sitting with.
