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is not about reducing GDP. It is about reducing the material and energy consumption throughout the economy to bring it back into balance with the liv… - Jason Hickel
" "is not about reducing GDP. It is about reducing the material and energy consumption throughout the economy to bring it back into balance with the living world, while distributing income and resources more fairly, liberating people from needless work, and investing in the publics goods that people need to thrive. It is the first step toward a more ecological civilisation. Of course, doing this may mean that GDP grows more slowly, or stops growing, or even declines. And if so, that's okay, because GDP isn't what matters. Under normal circumstances, this might cause a recession. But a recession is what happens when a growth-dependent economy stops growing. It's a disaster. Degrowth is completely different. It is about shifting to a different kind of economy altogether – an economy that doesn't need growth in the first place. An economy that's organised around human flourishing and ecological stability, rather than around the constant accumulation of capital.
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About Jason Hickel
(born in 1982) is an eswati anthropologist, author, and professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Hickel's research and writing focuses on economic anthropology and development, and is particularly critical of capitalism, neocolonialism, as well as economic growth as a model of human development.
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Jason Edward Hickel
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Additional quotes by Jason Hickel
Extreme poverty should not exist, period. The fact that up to 17 percent of the world population lives in extreme poverty today (according to Robert Allen’s data on cost-of-basic-needs poverty) should be understood as an indictment of our economic system.8 It is a sign that severe social dislocation remains institutionalized in the capitalist world economy. Yes, the prevalence of extreme poverty is lower today than it was at the height of the colonial period, but this is not sufficient reason for celebration. The colonial high-water mark was an effect of capitalist policy and should never have existed.
Capitalism relies on maintaining an artificial scarcity of essential goods and services (like housing, healthcare, transport, etc), through processes of enclosure and commodification. We know that enclosure enables monopolists to raise prices and maximize their profits (consider the rental market, the US healthcare system, or the British rail system). But it also has another effect. When essential goods are privatized and expensive, people need more income than they would otherwise require to access them. To get it they are compelled to increase their labour in capitalist markets, working to produce new things that may not be needed (with increased energy use, resource use, and ecological pressure) simply to access things that clearly are needed, and which are quite often already there.
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Some people have the tendency to think of neoliberalism as a mistake – an overtly-extreme version of capitalism that we should reject in favor of returning to the somewhat more humane version that prevailed in prior decades. But the shift to neoliberalism was not a mistake; it was driven by the growth imperative. In order to restore the rate of profit and keep capitalism afloat, governments had to shift away from social objectives (use-values) to focus instead on improving the conditions for capital accumulation (exchange value). The interests of capital came to be internalized by the state, to the point where today the distinction between growth and capital accumulation has almost completely collapsed. Now the goal is to tear down barriers to profit – to make humans and nature cheaper – for the sake of growth.
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