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Degrowth Quotes

Browse 21 quotes about Degrowth.

Degrowth Quotes

“Perhaps the answer is that it is necessary to slow down, finally giving up on economistic fanaticism and collectively rethink the true meaning of the word “wealth.” Wealth does not mean a person who owns a lot, but refers to someone who has enough time to enjoy what nature and human collaboration place within everyone’s reach. If the great majority of people could understand this basic notion, if they could be liberated from the competitive illusion that is impoverishing everyone’s life, the very foundations of capitalism, would start to crumble (p. 169).”

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Author:Franco Bifo Berardi
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“We have a tendency to describe capitalism with familiar, well-worn words like ‘markets’ and ‘trade’. But this isn’t quite accurate. Markets and traders were around for thousands of years before capitalism, and they are innocent enough on their own. What makes capitalism different from most other economic systems in history is that it’s organised around the imperative of constant expansion, or ‘growth’: ever-increasing levels of industrial extraction, production and consumption, which we measure as Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Growth is the prime directive of capital. Not growth for any particular purpose, mind you, but growth for its own sake. And it has a kind of totalitarian logic to it: every industry, every sector, every national economy must grow, all the time, with no identifiable end-point.”

CapitalismEconomicsLogicGreenDefinitionsTotalitarianismMarketsGdpDegrowth
Book:Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
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“When people live in a fair, caring society, where everyone has equal access to social goods, they don’t have to spend their time worrying about how to cover their basic needs day to day – they can enjoy the art of living. And instead of feeling they are in constant competition with their neighbours, they can build bonds of social solidarity.”

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Book:Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
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“We can choose to keep shooting up the curve of exponential growth, bringing us ever closer to irreversible tipping points in ecological collapse, and hope that technology will save us. But if for some reason it doesn’t work, then we’re in trouble. It’s like jumping off a cliff while hoping that someone at the bottom will figure out how to build some kind of device to catch you before you crash into the rocks below, without having any idea as to whether they’ll actually be able to pull it off. It might work … but if not, it’s game over. Once you jump, you can’t change your mind. If we’re going to take this approach, the evidence for it had better be rock solid. We’d better be dead certain it will work.”

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Book:Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
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“When capital has bumped up against limits to profit-growth in the past, it has found fixes in things like colonisation, structural adjustment programmes, wars, restrictive patent laws, nefarious debt instruments, land grabs, privatisation, and enclosing commons like water and seeds. Why would it be any different this time? Indeed, a study by the ecological economist Beth Stratford finds that when capital faces resource constraints, this is exactly what happens: it turns to aggressive rent-seeking behaviour. It seeks to grab existing value wherever it can, with clever mechanisms to suck income and wealth from the public domain into private hands, and from the poor to the rich, exacerbating inequality.”

HistoryCapitalismEconomicsInequalityExploitationRentDegrowth
Book:Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
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“Consider this thought experiment: if Portugal has higher levels of human welfare than the United States with $38,000 less GDP per capita, then we can conclude that $38,000 of America’s per capita income is effectively ‘wasted’. That adds up to $13 trillion per year for the US economy as a whole. That’s $13 trillion worth of extraction and production and consumption each year, and $13 trillion worth of ecological pressure, that adds nothing, in and of itself, to the fundamentals of human welfare. It is damage without gain. This means that the US economy could in theory be scaled down by a staggering 65% from its present size while at the same time improving the lives of ordinary Americans, if income was distributed more fairly and invested in public goods.”

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Book:Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
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“Upper-middle income and high-income nations – countries over the threshold of $10,000 per capita – could in theory deliver flourishing lives for all, achieving real progress in human development, without needing any additional growth in order to do so. We know exactly what works: reduce inequality, invest in universal public goods, and distribute income and opportunity more fairly.”

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Book:Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
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“Growthism is little more than ideology – an ideology that benefits a few at the expense of our collective future. We’re all pushed to step on the accelerator of growth, with deadly consequences for our living planet, all so that a rich elite can get even richer. From the perspective of human life, this is clearly an injustice. And indeed we have been aware of this problem for some time. But from the perspective of ecology, it is even worse – it is a kind of madness.”

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Book:Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
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“Those who insist that aggregate growth is necessary to improve people’s lives force us into a horrible double-bind. We are made to choose between human welfare or ecological stability – an impossible choice that nobody wants to face. But when we understand how inequality works, suddenly the choice becomes much easier: between living in a more equitable society, on the one hand, and risking ecological catastrophe on the other.”

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Book:Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
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“We know exactly what we need to do in order to avert climate breakdown. We need to mobilise a rapid rollout of renewable energy – a global Green New Deal – to cut world emissions in half within a decade and get to zero before 2050. Keep in mind that this is a global average target. High-income nations, given their greater responsibility for historical emissions, need to do it much more quickly, reaching zero by 2030. It is impossible to overstate how dramatic this is; it is the single most challenging task that humanity has ever faced. The good news is that it is absolutely possible to achieve. But there’s a problem: scientists are clear that it cannot be done quickly enough to keep temperatures under 1.5°C, or even 2°C, if we keep growing the economy at the same time. Why? Because more growth means more energy demand, and more energy demand makes it all the more difficult – impossible, in fact – to roll out enough renewables to cover it in the short time we have left.”

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Book:Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
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“Under capital’s growth imperative, there is no horizon – no future point at which economists and politicians say we will have enough money or enough stuff. There is no end, in the double sense of the term: no maturity and no purpose. The unquestioned assumption is that growth can and should carry on for ever, for its own sake. It is astonishing, when you think about it, that the dominant belief in economics holds that no matter how rich a country has become, their GDP should keep rising, year after year, with no identifiable end point.”

PoliticsCapitalismEconomicsGreenGdpTautologyDegrowth
Book:Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
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“The vast majority of major, collaborative infrastructure projects around the world have been guided by government policy and funded by public resources: sanitation systems, road systems, railway networks, public health systems, national power grids, the postal service. These are not the spontaneous outcomes of market forces, much less of abstract growth. Projects like these require public investment. Once we realise this, it becomes clear that we can fund the transition quite easily by directing existing public resources from, say, fossil fuel subsidies (which presently stand at $5.2 trillion, 6.5% of global GDP) and military expenditure ($1.8 trillion) into solar panels, batteries and wind turbines.”

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Book:Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
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“Today, nearly every government in the world, rich and poor alike, is focused single-mindedly on GDP growth. This is no longer a matter of choice. In a globalised world where capital can move freely across borders at the click of a mouse, nations are forced to compete with one another to attract foreign investment. Governments find themselves under pressure to cut workers’ rights, slash environmental protections, open up public land to developers, privatise public services – whatever it takes to please the barons of international capital in what has become a global rush towards self-imposed structural adjustment. All of this is done in the name of growth.”

PoliticsCapitalismEconomicsGlobalizationGdpNeoliberalismDegrowthPrivitization
Book:Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
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