Degrowth is more than just consuming less

by Chris McElroy

May 23, 2025

Credit: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-pile-of-pumpkins-and-gourds-sitting-on-top-of-a-pile-of-D3Q75te9CFg

Our economy currently relies on exploitation and unequal exchange between countries. Degrowth provides an alternative vision of an economy focused on prosperity and well-being for all. Degrowth researchers argue that scarcity is manufactured through ever-increasing consumption by the rich, and advocate instead for frugal abundance: providing a good life for everyone without relying on the exploitation of others or destruction of the environment.

Is a good life for all achievable?

This raises the question — is it possible to provide a good life for all within sustainable rates of labor, energy, emissions and material use? These questions are the focus of my recent research, which was just published in Global Environmental Change (here's a link to the full article). I collaborated with Dan O’Neill to measure the labor and resource use requirements of two low-consumption scenarios. We use the consumption footprint and population of the UK to do our analysis, but we report all of our results per person so they can be compared with other countries’ footprints.

Our two scenarios

The first low-consumption scenario is the decent living scenario, which is based on the decent living standards put forward by Narasimha Rao and Jihoon Min as a set of universal conditions for human wellbeing. The standards are quite minimal, and our scenario reflects that: each household lives in a small apartment, with basic groceries, clothes, and appliances. There are no beds, furniture, eating utensils, alcohol, computers, or other leisure goods. At a community level, there is no funding for high schools or universities, public safety, government legislation, or maintenance of built capital. Healthcare spending is reduced by over 80% from the UK baseline.

The second low-consumption scenario, which we call the good life scenario, is based on the minimum income standards developed by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. These standards are based on decades of work with UK residents to determine minimum sets of goods that allow for a socially acceptable life in the UK. This scenario is more comprehensive than the decent living scenario; households have access to larger apartments, beds and other furniture, moderate alcohol consumption, and laptops. There is additional funding for education, healthcare, government, and the maintenance of built capital.

The results of the two scenarios are quite different. The decent living scenario requires a mere 18 hours of work per week for each worker, and requires far less than the global average for energy (-38%), emissions (-41%), and material use (-52%). The good life scenario, on the other hand, would require 46 hours of work per week, and increases to our already unsustainable levels of energy use (+28%), emissions (+10%), and material use (+15%). Both scenarios represent significant decreases in requirements from the UK’s baseline consumption, which requires workers to work 65 hours per week to provide.

The labor and resource use requirements of different consumption scenarios. The charts show the labor per worker per week (left figure) and emissions per person per year (right figure) for the two low-consumption scenarios that were the focus of our study: the decent living scenario and the good life scenario. The UK baseline and global average are also shown for comparison. Note that all scenarios assume people work 80% of their working age years (15–64), and following UK law, the scenarios also include 5.6 weeks of holiday per year.

How to provide a good life for all

These findings confirm some of the basic tenets of degrowth. First, the UK’s baseline consumption is clearly made possible by unequal exchange. Working age people in the UK do on average less than 20 hours of work per week, and maintain their material standard of living by importing, according to our analysis, 54% of the labor embodied in the products and services they use. The per-capita statistics we use in our results make this issue tangible — a 65 hour work-week is not part of the good life. Consumption-based approaches in general help reveal the exploitation and destruction otherwise hidden away in other countries. These results make it clear that seemingly “developed” economies do not present a viable path to social or environmental justice; they rely on foreign labor, energy, and materials to provide a high quality of life domestically.

Second, our results make it clear that one’s definition of the good life matters considerably. The two scenarios, constructed by researchers studying countries in the global South and global North respectively, carry vastly diverging requirements for provisioning. The good life scenario for example requires almost double the labor of the decent living scenario. Research currently suggests that many people have found happiness and satisfaction with material standards far lower than the good life scenario used in this research. Further research might help point the way towards a good life that is both comprehensive and sustainable.

Finally, we find very clearly that lowering consumption is not enough on its own. Both scenarios model reductions in consumption without changes to production processes. And both scenarios fail to provide a good life for all within socio-ecological limits; the decent living scenario lacks basic community functions, and the good life scenario requires increases to global labor, energy, emissions, and material use. Sustainably providing a good life for all requires directing the economy towards efficiently and equitably providing well-being, while imposing strict limits on working hours and resource use to avoid the increases in production that have historically accompanied efficiency gains. This would yield a very different economy than the one we have today, but one that might provide a happier life for all.

You can read the full article in Global Environmental Change:

View full article

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Chris grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, and studied engineering at Harvey Mudd College. After graduating, they tried out lots of different work: solar manufacturing engineering, a one-person kickstarter, and serving with AmeriCorps VISTA to help provide employment training. Eventually, Chris discovered ecological economics, and finally had a name for the thing they’d wanted to work on their entire life. They threw themselves into it, visiting Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, doing graduate work at the University of Leeds, and now studying at the University of Vermont.

For their dissertation at Leeds, Chris studied the labor required to provide well-being for all. Chris is particularly interested in the social, political, and economic change necessary for a long-term sustainable world, including the systemic drivers of growth and global inequality, the human requirements for well-being, and macroeconomic theory. In their free time, Chris loves to code, climb, play ping pong, spend time with friends, and listen to music.