Lucía’s Reviews > Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World > Status Update

«A drastic reduction in purchasing power of the richest would therefore in itself have a substantial impact on the reduction of emissions at global level.»
Thomas Piketty

The richest 1% emit thirty times more than the poorest 50% of the human population. Why? It’s not only because they consume more stuff than everybody else, but also because the stuff they consume is more energy-intensive: huge houses, big cars, private jets, frequent flights, long-distance holidays, luxury imports, and so on.

The richest 10% of the world’s population are responsible for almost half the world’s total lifestyle carbon emissions. In other words, the global climate crisis is being driven largely by the global rich. And things become even more lopsided as we climb the income ladder.

We humans are evolved for sharing, co-operation and community. We flourish in contexts that enable us to express these values, and we suffer in contexts that stifle them.

We keep buying more stuff in order to feel better about ourselves, but it never works because the benchmark against which we measure the good life is pushed perpetually out of reach by the rich (and, these days, by social media influencers). We find ourselves spinning in place on an exhausting treadmill of needless over-consumption.

If you get a raise at work it’s bound to boost your happiness. But what happens when you discover that your colleagues got a raise that was twice what you received? Suddenly you’re not happy at all – you’re upset. You feel devalued. Your sense of trust in your boss takes a hit, and your sense of solidarity with your colleagues falls apart.

strangely enough, when we look at measures of overall happiness and well-being, it turns out that even these indicators have a tenuous relationship with GDP. This rather puzzling result is known as the Easterlin Paradox, after the economist who first pointed it out.

As the ecologist Herman Daly has put it, after a certain point growth begins to become ‘uneconomic’: it begins to create more ‘illth’ than wealth: the continued pursuit of growth in high-income nations is exacerbating inequality and political instability, and contributing to problems like stress and depression from overwork and lack of sleep, ill health from pollution, diabetes and obesity, and so on.

Past a certain threshold, more growth actually begins to have a negative impact.

According to data from the UN, it is possible for nations to reach the very highest category on the life expectancy index with as little as $8,000 per capita, and very high levels on the education index with as little as $9,000 per capita.