In Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, Jason Hickel challenges the popularized equivalence between economic growth and human progress, arguing that the GDP metric is a flawed indicator of well-being. He critiques capitalism’s pursuit of infinite growth, which is not aimed at meeting human needs or serving social purposes, but at the relentless accumulation of profit by the elite. This drive for growth is inherently incompatible with the planet’s finite resources and ecological boundaries. Hickel traces the roots of the ecological crisis to the history of capitalism, from feudalism and the enclosure of the commons to colonialism, demonstrating how these processes exploited both nature and labor, allowing the elite to amass wealth through violence, dispossession, and mass impoverishment. At the same time, early capitalists severed humanity’s 300,000 year intimate relationship with nature, changing people’s beliefs about the natural world and turning it into a mere stock of commodities to exploit. Hickel emphasizes that technological innovation cannot solve the ecological crisis – only degrowth can. Given that significant sectors of the economy are wasteful and serve no human purpose (luxury industries, military spending, planned obsolescence), he calls for reducing extraction, production, and consumerism, and reorganizing the economy around the equitable distribution of resources and the flourishing of both humans and the environment.