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'A powerfully disruptive book for disrupted times ... If you're looking for transformative ideas, this book is for you.' KATE RAWORTH, economist and author of Doughnut EconomicsA Financial Times Book of the Year______________________________________Our planet is in trouble. But how can we reverse the current crisis and create a sustainable future? The answer is: DEGROWTH.Less is More is the wake-up call we need. By shining a light on ecological breakdown and the system that's causing it, Hickel shows how we can bring our economy back into balance with the living world and build a thriving society for all. This is our chance to change course, but we must act now.______________________________________'A masterpiece... Less is More covers centuries and continents, spans academic disciplines, and connects contemporary and ancient events in a way which cannot be put down until it's finished.' DANNY DORLING, Professor of Geography, University of Oxford'Jason is able to personalise the global and swarm the mind in the way that insects used to in abundance but soon shan't unless we are able to heed his beautifully rendered warning.' RUSSELL BRAND'Jason Hickel shows that recovering the commons and decolonizing nature, cultures, and humanity are necessary conditions for hope of a common future in our common home.' VANDANA SHIVA, author of Making Peace With the Earth'This is a book we have all been waiting for. Jason Hickel dispels ecomodernist fantasies of "green growth". Only degrowth can avoid climate breakdown. The facts are indisputable and they are in this book.' GIORGIS KALLIS, author of Degrowth'Capitalism has robbed us of our ability to even imagine something different; Less is More gives us the ability to not only dream of another world, but also the tools by which we can make that vision real.' ASAD REHMAN, director of War on Want'One of the most important books I have read ... does something extremely rare: it outlines a clear path to a sustainable future for all.' RAOUL MARTINEZ, author of Creating Freedom'Jason Hickel takes us on a profound journey through the last 500 years of capitalism and into the current crisis of ecological collapse. Less is More is required reading for anyone interested in what it means to live in the Anthropocene, and what we can do about it.' ALNOOR LADHA, co-founder of The Rules'Excellent analysis...This book explores not only the systemic flaws but the deeply cultural beliefs that need to be uprooted and replaced.' ADELE WALTON

Review

Jason Hickel's Less Is More is not a book about climate policy. It is a book about why climate policy has failed for five decades, and it locates that failure not in insufficient ambition or political will but in the structural logic of capitalism itself. The book's single, insistent argument — made across economic history, ecological science, decolonial politics, and a concluding turn toward ontology — is that the growth imperative encoded in the M–C–M′ formula of capital accumulation makes genuine ecological stabilisation impossible within a capitalist framework. Hickel is an economic anthropologist by training and a synthesiser by temperament, and the book reads as a gathering of evidence from disciplines his opponents would prefer to keep separate: the history of enclosure, the mathematics of decoupling, the epidemiology of life expectancy, the phenomenology of embodiment. What holds the whole thing together is a conviction that the problem is not merely technical but conceptual — that "GDP growth is, ultimately, an indicator of the welfare of capitalism," and that the ideological work of the last century has been to make us mistake that indicator for human flourishing.

The book's architecture is polemical. A preface by Extinction Rebellion co-founders Kofi Mawuli Klu and Rupert Read frames Less Is More as an "emergency brake," and the COVID-19 lockdown during which Hickel finished writing — his partner Guddi, an NHS doctor, leaving each morning for what he calls "what amounted to a warzone" — provides both the emotional ground and a kind of empirical proof of concept: governments can halt the economy when they decide to. The intellectual origin story, recounted in the acknowledgments, is a 2012 walk home from a Paul Krugman lecture at the LSE during the Great Recession, when Guddi asked whether the United States really needs more GDP when so many nations do better on the indicators that matter with far less. Hickel writes that he "was just repeating things that had been told to me, without actually thinking for myself." The eight-year research programme that followed — including his own peer-reviewed papers with Giorgos Kallis in New Political Economy and a 2020 Lancet Planetary Health attribution study — is the evidentiary backbone of what reads, in its final form, as a systematic rebuttal to the Krugman position.

The diagnosis section opens with a rhetorical gambit that is by now familiar in ecological writing but which Hickel executes with genuine force: the catalogue of collapse. Insect biomass down 75% in German nature reserves, 98% in Puerto Rico's El Yunque rainforest. Forty percent of soils seriously degraded. Eighty-five percent of fish stocks depleted. Marine species disappearing at twice the terrestrial rate, oceans absorbing over 90% of excess heat. A sixth mass extinction running a thousand times faster than pre-industrial baselines. The IPBES "biological annihilation" finding. Hickel's childhood memory of insect abundance in Eswatini — windscreens "splattered with moths and grasshoppers" — gives the data a lived texture before the argument sharpens. Drawing on Timothy Morton's work on "hyperobjects," he argues that the endless repetition of terrifying eco-facts functions like a PTSD nightmare, lulling people into fatalism rather than action. Fifty years of knowing the science with no meaningful policy response, he contends, points to a problem deeper than insufficient information: capitalism itself.

Chapter 1's rewriting of capitalism's origin story is the book's most potent historical section and its most direct engagement with the decolonial tradition. Hickel rejects what he calls the "Origin Tale" — the Smithian fable of patient savers and natural market evolution — and instead narrates capitalism as a 500-year sequence of violent enclosures. The English commons (seven million acres fenced between 1760 and 1870), the colonial extraction of the Americas ($165 trillion equivalent in silver), unpaid slave labour ($97 trillion in the US alone), and the British drain of India ($45 trillion between 1765 and 1938) are presented not as regrettable excesses but as the foundational primitive accumulation without which industrial capital could not have formed. The intellectual architecture that licensed this expropriation gets equal attention: Francis Bacon's programme to "torture nature for her secrets," Descartes's dualism that split mind from matter and positioned women, colonised peoples, and non-human animals on the inert side of the split — what Aimé Césaire called "thingification." Hickel reads John Locke's "improvement" doctrine — the claim that enclosing and "improving" land redeems the theft — as "the alibi for appropriation" that still operates under the modern label of "development." The chapter draws heavily on Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch, Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation, and Jason W. Moore's concept of the "Capitalocene," and it is here that the book's Marxism is most explicit and least compromised.

The structural diagnosis continues in Chapter 2, which takes Murray Bookchin's epigraph — "Capitalism can no more be 'persuaded' to limit growth than a human being can be 'persuaded' to stop breathing" — as its premise. Hickel lays out the compounding mechanisms: the M–C–M′ cycle that must expand or collapse, compound interest demanding approximately 3% growth, the "iron law" that requires corporations to grow or die, the 1930s invention of GDP (which Simon Kuznets himself warned against using as a welfare measure), the 1960s OECD enshrinement of "highest sustainable growth" as a policy goal, and the neoliberal turn that dismantled unions, privatised public goods, and imposed structural adjustment on the global South. The chapter's sharpest empirical claim is what Hickel calls "Colonialism 2.0": high-income nations, representing 19% of the global population, are responsible for 92% of excess emissions against a 350 ppm fair-share boundary, while the global South bears 98% of climate-related deaths. The data comes from Hickel's own Lancet Planetary Health paper, and the concept is given moral force by the Sudanese G77 negotiator Lumumba Di-Aping, who called the Copenhagen 2°C target a "suicide pact" and observed that "after 500 years-plus of interaction with the West we are still considered 'disposables.'" The phrase "atmospheric colonisation" is Hickel's coinage, and it lands.

Chapter 3 is the book's analytic centre of gravity and its most technically demanding section: a systematic dismantling of "green growth" and techno-optimism. Hickel and Kallis's 2019 New Political Economy paper showed that at projected 2.6% global growth, holding warming to 1.5°C with 66% probability requires approximately 14% per-year decarbonisation — roughly nine times the business-as-usual rate and three times the 4% maximum assumed in the most optimistic IPCC models. The Paris Agreement's 1.5°C target, he shows, is structurally dependent on BECCS (bio-energy with carbon capture and storage), which underpins 101 of 116 IPCC AR5 scenarios but would require two to three times the land area of India in monoculture plantations, slash global forest cover by 10%, and is dismissed as "an unjust and high-stakes gamble" by Kevin Anderson, Glen Peters, and 55 other leading scientists in a 2016 Science paper. Hickel walks through the empirical decoupling literature — UNEP's own 2017 study that reversed the agency's prior green-growth position, the Dittrich and Ward studies showing no absolute decoupling of GDP from material use at the global scale — and then deploys the Jevons Paradox as the theoretical block: under capitalism, efficiency gains are reinvested in expansion, not conservation. "We tend to think of capitalism as a system that incentivises innovation," he writes. "And it does. But, paradoxically, the potential ecological benefits of innovation are constrained by the logic of capital itself." The chapter's argument that renewable build-out is being outpaced by energy demand growth is the kind of claim that should force a reckoning; that it hasn't — that the policy world continues to bet on decoupling curves that no data support — is, for Hickel, evidence of ideology at work.

Chapter 4 reorganises the welfare question around distribution rather than aggregate output. Drawing on Szreter's revision of the McKeown thesis, the Easterlin Paradox, and UN comparative data, Hickel argues that beyond a saturation point well below rich-country GDP — Costa Rica, Portugal, Sri Lanka, Kerala, Cuba, and the Nicoya Peninsula all achieve "very high" life expectancy at a fraction of US income — human welfare is driven by sanitation, public health, education (especially women's), and the generosity of the welfare state, not by further growth. The US could theoretically shed 65% of its GDP without touching welfare outcomes. Shifting $10 trillion annually from the richest 1% to the global poor could end poverty and equalise life expectancy while leaving the 1% with average household incomes above $250,000. The argument inverts Henry Wallich's dictum that "growth is a substitute for equality": Hickel proposes that equality can be a substitute for growth. "Justice," he writes, "is the antidote to the growth imperative — and key to solving the climate crisis." It is a genuinely elegant reframing, and it does much of the work of making degrowth politically legible, even if the political conditions for such redistribution go largely untheorised.

The prescription section, gathered under "Pathways to a Post-Capitalist World," is concrete, sequenced, and in places startlingly detailed. Hickel proposes a hard cap on material and energy use, ratcheted down annually, with revenues rebated equally through a cap-fee-dividend mechanism designed to be "Yellow Vests-proof." He calls for ending planned obsolescence through mandatory warranties and right-to-repair legislation; cutting advertising through quotas and São Paulo-style outdoor bans; shifting from ownership to usership in housing, transport, and durable goods; ending food waste (up to 50% of production); downscaling beef, plastics, SUVs, private jets, and commercial aviation; and shortening the working week to 20–30 hours with a job guarantee, retraining, and wages pegged to the week rather than the hour — drawing on Juliet Schor's research showing that US adoption of European working hours would cut energy consumption by 20%. A 10:1 maximum-wage cap (via Sam Pizzigati), a wealth tax on fortunes above $1 billion (via Saez and Zucman), and the decommodification of housing, healthcare, education, transport, internet, energy, and water through Universal Basic Services constitute what Hickel calls a "theory of radical abundance." The argument inverts the Lauderdale Paradox: "If scarcity is created for the sake of growth, then by reversing artificial scarcities we can render growth unnecessary." Private riches (exchange-value) convert to public wealth (use-value), and use-value rises even as GDP falls. The monetary-reform section — calling for cancellation of odious student, mortgage, and Global South debts, drawing on the Hebrew Jubilee and David Graeber's Debt, and for democratising money creation — is the most heterodox element of the programme and the one most likely to be dismissed by orthodox economists, but Hickel's logic is consistent: if ~90% of money is created as interest-bearing bank loans, then the monetary system itself generates a structural compulsion to grow throughput, and no ecological stabilisation is possible without monetary reform.

The closing chapter, "Everything is Connected," is the book's most ambitious and most speculative move, and it will divide readers sharply. Hickel reframes degrowth as decolonisation — not only of land and economies but of ontology. He draws on animist worldviews from the Achuar of Amazonia, the Chewong of the Malay peninsula, the Bedamuni of New Guinea, and Kanak of New Caledonia — in which plants, animals, rivers, and mountains are recognised as persons — and argues that Western philosophy took a wrong turn with Descartes. Spinoza's monism, phenomenology's insistence on embodied intersubjectivity (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, David Abram), mycorrhizal-network science (Suzanne Simard, Monica Gagliano), and microbiome research all point, he argues, toward a relational ethics of reciprocity that the dualist tradition foreclosed. The legal turn toward rights of nature — the Whanganui River, Mt Taranaki, Te Urewera in New Zealand, the Ganges, the Amazon, Ecuador's 2008 constitution, Bolivia's 2010 Law of the Rights of Mother Earth — is presented as evidence that a different ontology is already taking institutional form. The chapter ends with a 500-year-old chestnut tree outside Hickel's London window, a closing image that risks sentimentality but earns its place through the book's accumulated argument: that the chestnut's persistence is both a reminder of what the growth economy destroys and a promise of what a post-capitalist world might sustain.

A book this ambitious inevitably has structural weaknesses, and Less Is More has several worth naming. The ontological final chapter, for all its intellectual richness, shifts register so abruptly — from policy spreadsheets to Amazonian cosmology — that it can feel like a different book attached to the end of the first one, and the claim that mycorrhizal science "confirms" animist metaphysics elides the epistemological gap between scientific and Indigenous knowledge systems rather than genuinely bridging it. The treatment of gender, while attentive to Federici's argument that primitive accumulation produced the figure of the housewife and to the demographic case for girls' education, does not develop a sustained feminist analysis; Maria Mies is cited but not deeply engaged. The argument about militarism — redirecting $1.8 trillion in annual military spending — is gestured at rather than argued through, which is a missed opportunity given how central the military-industrial complex is to the political economy of the United States. And the political question — how, in polities Hickel himself describes as captured by corporate money, media monopolies, and anti-democratic institutions, a programme this radical could be enacted — is answered largely by the Harvard–Yale intergenerational commons experiment (democratic groups sustain resources at 100% capacity over twelve generations) and the assertion that democracy and capitalism are in tension. True as that may be, the gap between experimental findings and the actually existing political terrain of the US Senate, the City of London, and the World Trade Organization remains wide, and Hickel's confidence that "kicking big money out of politics" is a plausible near-term strategy sometimes reads as wishful. The monetary-reform proposals, meanwhile, are presented as necessary preconditions for a post-growth economy, but the transition mechanics — what happens to existing debt contracts, how credit allocation would function under democratic money creation, what prevents capital flight — are sketched rather than modelled.

These weaknesses are real, but they are weaknesses of scope rather than of rigour. Hickel's source apparatus is formidable: the argument rests on peer-reviewed work in Nature, Science, PNAS, the Lancet, Ecological Economics, and the IPCC and IPBES assessment reports, and the endnotes name every study for every claim. Where the book is strongest — the decoupling critique, the attribution of climate debt, the history of enclosure, the inversion of the Lauderdale Paradox — it is difficult to imagine a coherent empirical rebuttal. The degrowth tradition of Kallis, Latouche, D'Alisa, and Raworth has been building this case for two decades; Hickel has written its most accessible synthesis, one that connects the ecological-economics literature to decolonial politics and popular mobilisation with unusual narrative skill. The book sits at the intersection of the Marxist, anti-imperialist, and ecological traditions mapped in the library's vocabulary, but it also points toward traditions — degrowth, ecological economics, social ecology — that remain unmapped, and its most insistent claim is that these unmapped traditions must become central to any serious engagement with the climate crisis.

What Less Is More most distinctively does is make the growth question inescapable. It is possible to disagree with Hickel's prescriptions — to argue that democratic politics cannot deliver a 10:1 wage ratio, that monetary reform is a third rail, that the ontological turn is a category error — but the diagnostic chapters make it very difficult to sustain the belief that green growth, as currently conceived, is anything other than a fantasy underwritten by negative-emissions technologies that do not exist at scale and cannot exist without catastrophic ecological costs. The book is for readers who have sensed that something is structurally wrong with the climate discourse — that the science has been clear for fifty years and emissions keep rising, that the Paris Agreement's dependence on BECCS is a transparent evasion, that "sustainable development" has become a contradiction in terms — and who want to understand why. Hickel's answer, developed across 88,000 words of densely sourced argument, is that the "why" is capitalism itself, and that the only adequate response is to build an economy organised around flourishing rather than accumulation. "Degrowth begins as a process of taking less," he writes in the closing paragraph. "But in the end it opens up whole vistas of possibility." Whether those vistas are politically reachable is a question the book raises more powerfully than it answers, but raising it this clearly, and this empirically, is itself a substantial contribution. The chestnut tree outside the window is still there, for now. The book is an argument that it — and everything it represents — does not have to be lost.

Notable Quotes

GDP growth is an index of the welfare of capitalism, not of the welfare of humans.

Preface by XR. Capturing the book's central critique of growthism as ideology. — GDP, growthism, ideology, capitalism

We tend to take capitalism so much for granted that we just assume it has more or less always been around, at least in nascent form. When we think of capitalism we think of things like markets and trade, which seem natural and innocent enough. But this is a false equivalence.

Chapter One. Hickel distinguishes capitalism from markets, arguing capitalism is only about 500 years old. — capitalism, markets, ideology, history

The rebels did not content themselves with demanding some restrictions to feudal rule, nor did they only bargain for better living conditions. Their aim was to put an end to the power of the lords.

Chapter One, quoting historian Silvia Federici on the medieval peasant revolutions that destroyed feudalism. — revolution, feudalism, class struggle, history

Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.

Chapter One, quoting the agriculturalist Arthur Young in 1771 on the necessity of artificial scarcity. — artificial scarcity, poverty, capitalism, labor exploitation

Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilisation. It is the lot of man. It is the source of wealth.

Chapter One, quoting Patrick Colquhoun on poverty as a precondition for capitalist growth. — poverty, artificial scarcity, capitalism, class

The image of the earth as a living organism and nurturing mother had served as a cultural constraint restricting the actions of human beings. One does not readily slay a mother, dig into her entrails for gold or mutilate her body.

Chapter One, quoting historian Carolyn Merchant on how animist ideas limited ecological exploitation before capitalism. — animism, dualism, ecology, nature

Science should as it were torture nature's secrets out of her.

Chapter One. Francis Bacon's vision of science as domination of nature, linking the torture of peasants to the conquest of the living world. — Bacon, dualism, science, domination of nature

Capitalism can no more be 'persuaded' to limit growth than a human being can be 'persuaded' to stop breathing.

Chapter Two epigraph, quoting Murray Bookchin on the structural growth imperative. — growth imperative, capitalism, structural critique

The choice is stark: grow or die. And this expansionary drive puts other companies under pressure, too. Suddenly no one can be satisfied with a steady-state approach; if you don't push to expand, you'll get gobbled up by your competitors. Growth becomes an iron law to which all are captive.

Chapter Two. Hickel's explanation of why growth is a structural imperative, not a matter of individual greed. — growth imperative, competition, structural analysis, capitalism

We conclude that decoupling of GDP growth from resource use, whether relative or absolute, is at best only temporary. Permanent decoupling is impossible for essential, non-substitutable resources because the efficiency gains are ultimately governed by physical limits.

Chapter Three, quoting James Ward's team in Australia, whose research provides a 'robust rebuttal' to green growth claims. — green growth, decoupling, planetary boundaries, ecological economics

In a system where technological innovation is leveraged to expand extraction and production, it makes little sense to hope that yet more technological innovation will somehow magically do the opposite.

Chapter Three. Hickel on why the Jevons Paradox is not a paradox but a predictable feature of capitalism. — technology, Jevons Paradox, growth, efficiency

The historical record is clear that economic growth itself has no direct, necessary positive implications for population health. The most that can be said is that it creates the longer-term potential for population health improvements.

Chapter Four, quoting historian Simon Szreter, debunking the McKeown thesis that growth automatically drives progress. — growth, health, public goods, distribution

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'.

Chapter Four. Hickel's thought experiment demonstrating that excess GDP adds nothing to fundamentals of human welfare. — GDP, welfare, inequality, public goods

Come, then, comrades, the European game has finally ended; we must find something different. We today can do everything, so long as we do not imitate Europe, so long as we are not obsessed by the desire to catch up with Europe.

Chapter Four, quoting Frantz Fanon on decolonising the imaginary of economic development. — decolonisation, development, Fanon, global South

Growth is a substitute for equality of income.

Chapter Four, quoting Henry Wallich, former member of the US Federal Reserve, which Hickel inverts: equality can be a substitute for growth. — equality, growth, distribution, political economy

Austerity calls for scarcity in order to generate more growth. Degrowth calls for abundance in order to render growth unnecessary.

Chapter Five. Hickel's crucial distinction between degrowth and austerity, inverting the common conflation. — degrowth, austerity, abundance, artificial scarcity

Capitalism transforms even the most spectacular gains in productivity and income not into abundance and human freedom, but into new forms of artificial scarcity. It must, or else it risks shutting down the engine of accumulation itself.

Chapter Five. The core of Hickel's theory of artificial scarcity as the engine of growth. — artificial scarcity, capitalism, growth, abundance

Compound interest is just a fiction, after all. And the nice thing about fictions is that we can change them.

Chapter Five, on debt cancellation, drawing on David Graeber's argument that money is a human arrangement. — debt, money, fiction, political possibility

Under democratic conditions, resources were sustained for future generations, at 100% capacity, indefinitely.

Chapter Five. Hickel describing the Harvard-Yale study showing that democracy produces ecologically sustainable outcomes. — democracy, sustainability, commons, political ecology

Capitalism has a tendency to be anti-democratic, and democracy has a tendency to be anti-capitalist.

Chapter Five. Hickel's summary of the fundamental tension between the growth imperative and democratic governance. — democracy, capitalism, political philosophy, growth

The world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and life is always lived in relationship with others.

Chapter Six, quoting Graham Harvey's definition of animism, which Hickel presents as both ancient wisdom and cutting-edge science. — animism, personhood, ecology, ontology

The greatest peril of life lies in the fact that human food consists entirely of souls.

Chapter Six. An Arctic shaman speaking to anthropologist Knud Rasmussen about the ethics of eating. — animism, reciprocity, ethics, food

Scientists estimate that 80% of the planet's biodiversity is to be found on territories stewarded by Indigenous peoples.

Chapter Six. Evidence that animist relational ontologies produce measurably better ecological outcomes. — Indigenous knowledge, biodiversity, animism, stewardship

What's unethical is to take more than you need, and more than you give back. What's unethical is exploitation, extraction and, perhaps worse still, waste.

Chapter Six. Hickel distilling the ethical core of animist ecology into principles for a post-capitalist economy. — ethics, reciprocity, waste, animism

We don't have a right to ask whether we are going to succeed or not. The only question we have a right to ask is what's the right thing to do? What does this Earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it?

Epigraph, quoting Wendell Berry. Sets the moral framework for the entire book. — ethics, ecology, responsibility, action