## Metadata - Author: [[Jason Hickel]] - Full Title: Less Is More - Category: #books ## Highlights - Half of Asia’s population depends on water that flows from Himalayan glaciers – not only for drinking and other household needs but also for agriculture. ([Location 405](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085L9XSM1&location=405)) - Forests literally produce rain. The Amazon, for instance, exhales some 20 billion tons of water vapour into the atmosphere every day, like an enormous river flowing invisibly into the sky. ([Location 437](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085L9XSM1&location=437)) - richest 1% (all of whom are millionaires) capture some $19 trillion in income every year, which represents nearly a quarter of global GDP.47 This is astonishing, when you think about it. It means that a quarter of all the labour we render, all the resources we extract, and all the CO2 we emit is done to make rich people richer. ([Location 635](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085L9XSM1&location=635)) - over the past 40 years, 28% of all new income from global GDP growth has gone to the richest 1% (all of whom are millionaires).45 This is astonishing, when you think about it. It means that nearly a third of all the labour we’ve rendered, all the resources we’ve extracted, and all the CO2 we’ve emitted over the past half-century has been done to make rich people richer. ([Location 695](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085L9XSM1&location=695)) - markets have been around for many thousands of years, in different times and places, capitalism is ([Location 758](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085L9XSM1&location=758)) - Markets have been around for many thousands of years, in different times and places. Capitalism, however, is relatively recent – only about 500 years old.2 What makes capitalism distinctive isn’t that it has markets, but that it is organised around perpetual growth. ([Location 809](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085L9XSM1&location=809)) - The point here is that the rise of capitalism in Europe – and Europe’s Industrial Revolution – did not emerge ex nihilo. It hinged on commodities that were produced by enslaved workers, on lands stolen from colonised peoples, and processed in factories staffed by European peasants who had been forcibly dispossessed by enclosure. We tend to think of these as separate processes, but they were all part of the same project, and ([Location 942](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085L9XSM1&location=942)) - The point here is that the Industrial Revolution – and Europe’s industrial growth – did not emerge ex nihilo. It hinged on commodities that were produced by slaves, on lands stolen from colonised peoples, and processed in factories staffed by European peasants who had been forcibly dispossessed by enclosure. We tend to think of these as separate processes, but they all operated with the same underlying logic. Enclosure was a process of internal colonisation, and colonisation was a process of enclosure. Europe’s peasants were dispossessed from their lands just as Indigenous Americans were (although, notably, the latter were treated much worse, excluded from the realm of rights, and even humanity, altogether). And the slave trade is nothing if not the enclosure and colonisation of bodies – bodies that were appropriated for the sake of surplus accumulation just as land was, and treated as property in the same way. It might be tempting to downplay these moments of violence as mere aberrations in the history of capitalism. But they are not. They are the foundations of it. Growth has always relied on processes of colonisation. ([Location 982](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085L9XSM1&location=982)) - We often think of the Church and science as antagonists, but in fact the architects of the Scientific Revolution were all deeply religious, and shared common cause with the clergy: to strip nature of spirit. ([Location 1176](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085L9XSM1&location=1176)) - Writing in the late 1700s, Immanuel Kant, one of Western philosophy’s most celebrated ethicists, wrote: ‘As far as non-humans are concerned, we have no direct duties. They are there merely as the means to an end. The end is man.’ ([Location 1187](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085L9XSM1&location=1187)) - When the OECD was founded in 1960, the top goal in its charter was (and remains) to ‘promote policies designed to achieve the highest sustainable rate of economic growth’. Suddenly the objective was to pursue not just higher levels of output for some specific purpose, but the highest rate, indefinitely, for its own sake. The British government followed suit, setting a target of 50% growth over the course of a single decade – an extraordinary rate of expansion, and the first time growth for its own sake was enshrined as a national policy objective. ([Location 1486](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085L9XSM1&location=1486)) - Kuznets warned that we should never use GDP as a normal measure of economic progress. He thought we should improve it to account for the social costs of growth. But then the Second World War struck. As the Nazi threat mounted, Kuznets’ concerns about well-being faded into the background. Governments needed to count all economic activities – even negative ones – so they could identify every shred of money and productive capacity available for the war effort. This more aggressive vision of GDP ended up becoming dominant. ([Location 1502](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085L9XSM1&location=1502)) - GDP growth is, ultimately, an indicator of the welfare of capitalism. That we have all come to see it as a proxy for the welfare of humans represents an extraordinary ideological coup. ([Location 1544](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085L9XSM1&location=1544)) - A more holistic way of thinking about growth is to recognise that it is broadly equivalent to the rate at which our economy is metabolising the living world. ([Location 1639](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085L9XSM1&location=1639)) - there is a bitter irony to the fact that we have been persuaded to use the word ‘growth’ to describe what has now become primarily a process of breakdown. ([Location 1644](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085L9XSM1&location=1644)) - What’s happening here should be understood as a process of atmospheric colonisation. ([Location 1741](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085L9XSM1&location=1741)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the richest 1% emit one hundred times more than individuals in the poorest half of the human population.28 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.29 ([Location 2641](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085L9XSM1&location=2641)) - Tags: [[blue]] - And if the rich have more money than they can spend, which is virtually always the case, then they invest their excess in expansionary industries that are quite often ecologically destructive. ([Location 2645](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085L9XSM1&location=2645)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The richest 1% emit thirty times more than the poorest 50% of the human population.23 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.24 ([Location 2649](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085L9XSM1&location=2649)) - Tags: [[blue]] - As one Arctic shaman put it to the anthropologist Knud Rasmussen, ‘The greatest peril of life lies in the fact that human food consists entirely of souls.’ ([Location 3633](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085L9XSM1&location=3633)) - Tags: [[blue]]