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# Less Is More, Until You Have Nothing
- URL: https://goodoil.news/less-is-more-until-you-have-nothing/
- Published: 2026-09-14T04:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-14T03:59:59.000Z
- Description: ‘Degrowth’ is just communism in a green shirt.
- Author: Lushington Brady
- Tags: Economy, History

The notion of ‘degrowth’ is hardly new, for the misanthropes and armchair socialists. It was **Thomas Malthus** who first howled that ‘we’re all gonna be rooned!’ if we don’t stop having babies and getting enough to eat. He was wrong, of course, and 250 years later **Paul Ehrlich** repeated the same jeremiad. He was wrong, too. Embarrassingly, spectacularly, undeniably wrong.

Yet, he died a hero to the environmental movement that, despite his track record of utter failure, worshipped him as a seer.

Socialists, despite their own track record of utter failure, continue to blatherskite in the same vein. **H G Wells** gave us his own recipe for ‘degrowth’ in *The Shape of Things to Come* (1933). In it, Wells advocated not just abolishing interest on capital, but reversing it. Wells wanted interest rates to be deliberately kept negative so that capital depreciated. The clearly stated goal was to encourage to spend everything and save nothing.

In the 21st century, the unholy marriage of socialism and environmentalism has whelped the rabid pup called the “degrowth movement”. It will surely not surprise you in the least that it’s the favourite child of that class that singularly produces nothing but hot air: ‘intellectuals’.

> [In recent years,](https://humanprogress.org/should-we-accept-degrowth-as-a-serious-academic-concept/?ref=goodoil.news) an intellectual movement known as “degrowth” has grown in popularity through the efforts of a small but growing group of academics and activists. Key texts that champion this ideology \[…\] appear on bestseller lists and in bookstores worldwide.

So did *Fifty Shades of Gray*, *The Da Vinci Code* and *Morning Glory Milking Farm* (I wish I could see your faces when you look that one up!)

These books now weigh down the same bookshop tables that once groaned under the collective bullshit of Ehrlich and **Rachel Carson**. Now, they peddle **Marie Kondo** with a communications degree.

The first howler is the claim that growth must stop because the planet is finite. **Kenneth Boulding**’s old crack – only a madman or an economist believes in infinite growth on a finite planet – is recycled as if it were physics, rather than a fundamental cluelessness about economics. Growth is not ‘more stuff’, it is more value. As resources get dearer, people conserve, recycle and substitute. UK emissions in 2024 were 54 per cent below 1990 levels while the economy grew 84 per cent. France cut emissions by a third over the same span. Degrowthers, as addicted to circular reasoning as only a ‘socialist intellectual’ can be, mutter about offshoring. The trend still points the other way: more parks, more forest and cleaner air in the places that got rich.

The second howler is the fantasy that ‘we’ are currently maximising growth.

> In this way, degrowthers blame all the myriad problems, including (perceived or real) stagnant living standards, inequality, and political polarization, not on a lack of economic growth but on the pursuit of growth.  
>  
> Even commentators and journalists critical of degrowth often buy this premise; they too assume a “they” who chooses policies that maximize growth and wonder whether adding other goals alongside growth might make sense. In truth, however, there is no “we” or “they” in control of the economy.

Blaming every grievance – stagnant wages, polarisation, the weather – on an imaginary growth cult is just the old socialist habit of blaming the market for the failures of politics.

The third is the history. **Jason Hickel**’s *The Divide* insists the Industrial Revolution was not innovation but loot: capitalism created mass poverty. Never mind that the workers in those grim factory towns flocked there *voluntarily* because, as awful as it was, it was way, way, better than the pre-Industrial rural poverty they were fleeing. Just as rural Chinese today flock to the cities, if the CCP grants them the travel permits.

History, as always, is the enemy of leftist theory. So, as they do, the degrowthers simply insist the history is wrong.

> \[Hickle\] asserts that traditional accounts of the Industrial Revolution are false \[…\]  
>  
> That is, of course, a cartoon version of economic history that no specialist in the field takes seriously. \[**Dylan Sullivan**\] and Hickel’s most substantive evidence is simply that **Robert Allen**’s estimates of real wages and welfare ratios show significant declines after 1500, which is when they date the rise of capitalism in Europe. But economic historians have known for decades that living standards fell as populations recovered from the Black Death.

Then comes the part they never put on the cover. **Branko Milanović** notes that even their own sums require some 86 per cent of people in rich countries to accept a lower standard of living. Voluntarily. Democratically.

Yeah, right: we’ve seen this movie before. Anyone who doesn’t ‘voluntarily’ and ‘democratically’ opt to make themselves poorer just gets taken out and shot. The beatings will continue until morale improves.

> The reality, of course, is that degrowth would require a massive increase in governmental organization and intervention in the economy. \[**Timothée Parrique**\] asks: “Should every company make a profit? Should we let the markets decide what we produce?” The implicit answer is “no,” for as Parrique continues: “degrowth is planned – meaning it is democratically discussed with society and organized in advance by public authorities and the economy’s stakeholders according to a plan.”

Just like all those Five Year Plans that worked so well that a hundred million people died.

In practice the radicals retreat from the bailey of actual shrinkage to the motte of UBI, GPI and ‘global redistribution’. Degrowth is less a programme than a slogan designed to move the Overton window leftward while the authors keep their book tours and their tenured posts.

Malthus was wrong. Ehrlich was wrong. Wells’s depreciating capital was a recipe for eating the seed corn. The latest litter of intellectuals have simply given the same death wish a greener coat of paint and a PhD in bullshit.

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