Less is More

I went into this book with “capitalism is not perfect but it's not that bad compared to communism” mindset. What this book opened my mind to is that this is not a duopoly. Democracy and capitalism do not come hand in hand. And what's at the core of capitalism is continuous growth. Mostly for growths sake. A sort of larpurlartism, if you will. And here is the crux of the situation we find ourselves in these times: growth and ecology simply can not co-exist.

>Whenever there appears to be a conflict between ecology and growth, economists and politicians opt for the latter and try ever more creative ways to get reality to conform to it.

But that doesn't work anymore. We have to ditch GDP as a measure of success and chose ecology/well-being. After a certain point there is no correlation between how good people have it vs how high the GDP is anyway. If anything it's actually reverse: take a look at Portugal and USA for example. We have to pick a metric that adjusts for income inequality as well as the social and environmental costs of economic activity.

>Decoupling of GDP growth from resource use is at best only temporary. Permanent decoupling (absolute or relative) is impossible for essential, non-substitutable resources because the efficiency gains are ultimately governed by physical limits. It is therefore misleading to develop growth-oriented policy around the expectation that decoupling is possible.

>If scarcity is created for the sake of growth, then by reversing artificial scarcities we can render growth unnecessary. By decommodifying public goods, expanding the commons, shortening the working week and reducing inequality, we can enable people to access the goods that they need to live well without requiring additional growth in order to do so. People would be able to work less without any loss to their well-being, thus producing less unnecessary stuff and generating less pressure for unnecessary consumption elsewhere.

TL;DR: We have enough already. We have to find a way to redistribute it so we can all have better and more fulfilling lives. And in the process also save ourselves from growth that's killing us via the actions we make on this planet.