GDP measures the transactions within an economy — all the occasions when money changes hands in exchange for goods and services. It’s not wealth, but it’s one of the primary ways we measure wealth. Al jaren worstel ik met wat ik als de grootste paradox van onze tijd beschouw: we moeten als brave burgers zo veel mogelijk consumeren, en dit om ervoor te zorgen dat iedereen aan zijn basisbehoeften kan voldoen. Hoe meer er geconsumeerd wordt - of we het nu nodig hebben of niet - hoe beter, en als we te weinig consumeren, komen grote groepen mensen in de miserie terecht omdat ze de eindjes niet meer aan elkaar kunnen knopen. Waarom? Omdat het de economie is, natuurlijk. Hoezo, dingen hergebruiken en zuinig omspringen met middelen? Dat is slecht voor de economie! One of the most powerful examples in the book shows how even though capitalism is presented to us as the most efficient economic system it is by design inefficient. Under capitalism things are not built to last. The goal is to keep people buying, and to keep people producing waste. This is good for business but terrible for the environment. The way this is achieved is through something called planned obsolescence. This is when products are designed with the express purpose of being obsolete after a certain pre-determined amount of time. Apple are particularly bad for this, making your IPhone run slower after each update, convincing the consumer that they need a new phone every 2-3 years. In the USA, approximately 151 million phones are discarded each year, amounting to 17 tonnes of copper waste. This waste is entirely unnecessary, it is built into the design of the product itself. Through a brisk but vivid history of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, Less Is More sketches the concepts and practices that, over time, equated growth with progress, and thus made it a precondition of public policy on a global scale. A slow but critical turning point arrived in Europe during the early modern period, when the gains of successive peasant rebellions were reversed through the enclosure of the commons under the emergent capitalist theory of “improvement.” This practice justified the dispossession of land if it could be put to more productive use under private ownership, thereby prioritizing exchange-value over use-value and extending the commodification of agriculture, petty manufacture, and human labour throughout society. The embryonic nation-state and capitalist class created artificial scarcity for the now propertyless, wage-dependent masses, while extending the logic of improvement to distant colonies that would supply, often through slavery or other comparably brutal methods, many of the raw materials fuelling industrialization.

But, this uncompromising and urgent approach is wholly warranted giving the scale of the challenge, to counter a narrative that perpetual growth is good. An idea which is so deeply ingrained in society few of us ever question it (even though, as we learn, this idea is based on questionable evidence). Nearly half of the book is spent looking at the origins of capitalism in Western thought, and praising primitive cultures and their animistic, nature-oriented beliefs. He mentions the “dominion” passages in the Old Testament (Genesis 1:26), the Axial Age in which we saw the rise of the dominion ideology (p. 64), Plato (whom he says is dualist, p. 65), and the transition from feudalism to capitalism.Our fears of needing more to achieve a “good life” is contrasted with the actual measures of wellness. Historically, this has not been from working to death/destroying our surroundings but from the creation of new Commons: public sanitation, public healthcare, public education, public housing/land reforms, improved working conditions, socialized safety nets/old age pensions/childcare, etc. ( Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital). …Thus, degrowth is the transformation from artificial scarcity to radical abundance. 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.

Exponential growth is possible only with endless extraction , which involves bringing more and more of the planet and human activities under the economy, and this is causing us to fast approach the point where our planet cannot regulate and regenerate itself successfully. Ecological collapse is coming. And no, this is not just about climate change. Think water, for example - how long are our ground water supplies supposed to last if both industries and population keep rising at their current rate? Marx’s M-C-M’ (Money invested into Commodity production for the goal of more Money) representing capitalist production's logic in contrast to pre-capitalist market exchange C-M-C (Commodity exchanged via Money for another Commodity). Thus, the capitalist logic is fundamentally about growing money. 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).First, in the world today, there’s an extremely strong association between growth and welfare outcomes of every kind. GDP, while imperfect, is a better predictor of a country’s welfare state, outcomes for poor citizens in that country, and well-being measures like leisure time and life expectancy than any other measure. Even poor people have so many needs for goods and services that you can’t possibly put them on a list and say, ‘Now we’re done here,’” Roser told me. “That’s the beauty of money, that you can just go out there and get what you need rather than what some researcher determines are your needs.” Degrowth is unrealistic — and gaining traction And a recent paper in Nature explored how a “degrowth” of 0.5 percent of GDP per year might interact with climate and emissions targets, arguing that while “substantial challenges remain regarding political feasibility,” such approaches should be “thoroughly considered.” The tension at the heart of degrowth: Can we fix global poverty without economic growth? Degrowth articles burst with such examples. GDP, they love to point out, includes the production of things like nerve gas, even though that has no social value. And it doesn’t include storytelling, singing, gardening, and other simple human pleasures.