Jason Hickel is Professor of Political Science & Public Law at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. His 2020 book, Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, provides a succinct history of capitalism, an account of its impacts on the Earth, and a vision for replacing capitalism with an economic model committed to less production, pollution, and waste, but more care, community, and human flourishing.

The child of two doctors, Jason Hickel was born and raised in Eswatini, a tiny nation nestled on the border between South Africa and Mozambique. He refers to this background periodically in his work, using it to illustrate environmental or economic changes in southern Africa over the course of his life.

At one point, late in his 2017 book, The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets, Hickel relays a public health parable to explain the importance of preventative care in medicine and other fields. “Imagine you are standing by a river with steep banks and bends that froth with dangerous rapids,” he writes. “Amid the noise of rushing water you hear a faint voice crying out for help, and notice a figure struggling against the waves.” A compassionate being and a capable swimmer, you dive in and pull this unfortunate soul to safety, only to notice another person caught in the current, then another, and another. Realizing the scale of the problem, you rush off to recruit some friends to help in the effort, until they, too, are overwhelmed by the volume of drowning people. Eventually, wet and exhausted, you travel upstream along the shore, hoping to determine why, exactly, all of these people are falling into the river in the first place.

Having come of age around a medical clinic in a Global South nation—and at the height of an HIV/AIDS crisis, no less—Hickel was in daily contact with suffering people, and made sensitive both to their afflictions and the causes. He recalls an anecdote that his father would often tell, about a comment made to him by a “wise elder” one day when a long line of sick people stood waiting outside of his clinic. “Doctor,” the man said, “I can see you are working hard to help these patients. But perhaps you are working at the wrong end of the line?”

As Hickel tells it, his work—and indeed, that of the degrowth community more broadly—is committed to striking problems at the root, to working at the right end of the line.

In his 2020 follow-up, Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, Hickel maintains both his concern about global inequality and his critique of capitalism, but merges both within a much stronger emphasis on climate change and related crises. If the previous book was concerned primarily with economics and ethics, in other words, this book centers the relationship of both to ecology. And if degrowth appears as somewhat of an afterthought in The Divide, it is the very keystone of Less is More.

Again Hickel recounts five hundred years of history, and again he situates capitalism as heir to colonialism, but this time the argument is much more squarely focused on the capitalist metabolism and its environmental impacts. The perpetual extraction, manufacture, marketing, shipping, and disposal of commodities, pushed relentlessly by an imperative for ever greater growth and enabled by exploitative trade agreements and labor practices, necessarily carves deep wounds into the physical environment, spoiling the biosphere even as it harms a wide range of peoples in a variety of disturbing ways. On a finite planet, this frenetic push for infinite growth is a self-destroying enterprise. Thus Hickel confronts and recasts the popular capitalist narrative, demonstrating how a story commonly associated with profit and prosperity is more accurately aligned with destructive costs, both incurred and deferred.

There are two main sections in Less is More, correspondent to two main ideas that I explore in my larger project. The first features Hickel’s revision of the capitalist narrative along lines sketched by Jason Moore. When assessing historical trends, it matters tremendously where the start- and end-points are placed–which stretch of time you have chosen to consider and what the data within that stretch of time indicates. Moore’s key point about capitalism is that you can’t understand it properly if you frame it out as a 200-year phenomenon or, worse, if you trace the trends back only to the end of World War II.

Instead, Hickel agrees, we need to think about capitalism in all its fullness, dating it back to around 1500 or so, and following its rise through and after the height of colonialism. From this vantage, we can see a big picture that casts the material benefits of 20th century consumer capitalism against several centuries of atrocity, destruction, and waste. This is not to claim that capitalism has no benefits, of course, especially for the small proportion of the global population that has enjoyed them most. But it is to insist that those benefits have been claimed at enormous cost, and that a much larger proportion of the planet has had to pay.

The second half of the book looks to the future, sketching out the degrowth policy array and imagining how it might alleviate or heal the manifold harms of capitalist accumulation. The central idea is that, instead of pursuing endless growth forever–which is impossible and destructive–the world’s leaders should collaborate on a new economic model designed to draw down economic activity in collaborative and democratic fashion in order to preserve a livable planet. Along the way, we should reorient ourselves away from material consumption and back toward the fundamental human activities that have always brought meaning, purpose, and satisfaction to human life–quality time with family and friends, leisure activities and hobbies, healthy living, education, and care. Rather than working long hours at unfulfilling jobs to pay down large debts incurred to buy status symbols and junk, we should get back to basics and recall the fundamentals of our species.

The proposals include Green New Deals that develop large public works projects to address socioeconomic and ecological problems at one stroke, Universal Basics programs that provide services (UBS) or income (UBI) to ensure a baseline quality of life for all citizens, commoning activities like reclaiming public lands or developing customer-owned utilities, reducing production and expanding leisure time via a four-day workweek, and public financing from green projects, like the implementation of a carbon fee and dividend that charges polluters for each ton of carbon they emit, and then redistributes the funds to all citizens by direct deposit each month. Others include prohibiting planned obsolescence, placing severe restrictions on advertising, creating public institutions based on shared usership rather than private ownership, dramatically reducing food waste, and scaling down ecologically destructive industries, like fossil fuels, automotive, and factory farming, to name a few.

Though not the first to write at length about degrowth ideas, which have been in circulation at least since the 1970s, Hickel’s book is a masterclass in their presentation. It should be the second book that degrowth-curious readers consider, right after Giorgos Kallis et al’s introductory Case for Degrowth. Paired with some of Hickel’s other work–including his prior books, academic articles, columns, and Substack–it expresses the basic humanity informing degrowth thought, and lays a groundwork for its defense against the critics.