“Happy Degrowth”

The French scholar Serge Latouche is one of the most important leaders of the movement called “Degrowth” which should be carried out giving people a sense of happiness and fulfilment. This political, economic and social movement bases its ideas on ecological economics, anti-consumerism and anti-capitalism. Its main aim is to reduce consumption without decreasing human well-being. In order to get that, all the humankind on the Planet Earth should start thinking and behaving differently. That was also the utopic desire of Thomas More in the 16^th century when he wrote his famous work “Utopia”. He thought that if all able-bodied people worked six hours a day, we could produce all the essential goods for everyone, thus leaving many hours for free time activities. However leisure time should be devoted to improve your education level or to give cultural and artistic contributions to your community; nonetheless people who cannot do it, could spend more time on their working activity.

The utopic aspect of these ideas is the difficulty of convincing rich people – landowners in the past and capitalists nowadays – to give up all their non-essential material goods.

In the past few decades some countries tried to realized a government ruled this kind of ideas but unfortunately they failed, even because they often turned into dictatorships.

These days a happy Degrowth would be desirable because what we actually produce and consume exceed the Earth’s ability to regenerate its resources. Moreover acting this way people would be less stressed and more careful about conserving and protecting the environment against excessive exploitation.