Degrowth
Overthink
Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D.
4.7 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 14 October 2025
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Which industries should cease to exist immediately? And what ‘bullshit jobs’ should they take with them? In episode 143 of Overthink, Ellie and David explore the academic and social movement of ‘Degrowth.’ They discuss the imperial mode of living that has become normalized in the Global North, explain how it relates to the ‘iron law’ of capitalism, and detail how the degrowth movement seeks to build a communist future. In particular, they explore the pillars Kohei Saito’s degrowth communism. Why are degrowth scholars such as Saito so critical of the Green New Deal? Was Karl Marx himself a ‘degrower’? And what exactly does it mean to degrow the economy? In the Substack bonus segment, your hosts continue their discussion of the pillars of degrowth, thinking about the benefits abandoning the current division of labor and shortening work hours.
Works Discussed:
Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen, The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism
John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature
Jason Hickel, Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
Matthew Huber, Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy
Kohei Saito, Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto
Aaron Vansintjan, Andrea Vetter, and Matthias Schmelzer, The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | For nearly five years, Overthink has been an independent podcast without ads. |
| 0:05.1 | Since the beginning, David and I have been doing this work without compensation and on top of our full-time jobs as college professors. |
| 0:11.3 | But as we transition to weekly episodes and grow our team, this model is no longer sustainable. |
| 0:18.2 | So, we have decided to join a podcast network and incorporate ads. |
| 0:22.8 | This will not affect our content, but it will ensure that we can keep doing this work for |
| 0:27.3 | the foreseeable future in a way that's fair to our team and sustainable to us. |
| 0:31.8 | We are, as always, thankful for your support and for helping us make Overthink a reality. |
| 0:56.4 | Hello and welcome to Overthink. |
| 1:00.8 | The podcast where two philosophy professors connect big ideas to everyday life. |
| 1:02.7 | I'm Dr. David Peña-Gusman. |
| 1:04.1 | And I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson. |
| 1:09.3 | As denizens of the Global North, we are used to a lot of nice things. |
| 1:14.9 | We want fast internet. We want potable water. We want the latest advances in science and technology at our fingertips. I thought you're going to say the latest |
| 1:18.8 | iPhone. That is the latest advance in technology and science at our fingertips, literally. |
| 1:25.0 | And I think our society encourages us to think about all these niceties as markers of success, |
| 1:32.3 | not only our success as individuals who can afford these things, but also markers of success |
| 1:39.3 | on a societal level. We live in the kind of society that makes these a reality for its citizens. And, you know, |
| 1:47.0 | in a society, we want to have clean water. We want to have nice roads. We want to have a sustainable |
| 1:52.5 | and impressive electrical grid, so on and so forth. And at the same time, the German sociologists |
| 1:59.5 | Ulrich Brand and Marcus Vissen |
| 2:01.8 | suggests that all of this comes at a high price. |
| 2:06.4 | Our lifestyle is based on the extraction of resources from the global south. |
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