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The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions
For decades we have been told a story about the divide between rich countries and poor countries.
We have been told that development is working: that the global South is catching up to the North, that poverty has been cut in half over the past thirty years, and will be eradicated by 2030. It’s a comforting tale, and one that is endorsed by the world’s most powerful governments and corporations. But is it true?
Since 1960, the income gap between the North and South has roughly tripled in size. Today 4.3 billion people, 60 per cent of the world's population, live on less than $5 per day. Some 1 billion live on less than $1 a day. The richest eight people now control the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world combined.
What is causing this growing divide? We are told that poverty is a natural phenomenon that can be fixed with aid. But in reality it is a political problem: poverty doesn’t just exist, it has been created.
Poor countries are poor because they are integrated into the global economic system on unequal terms. Aid only works to hide the deep patterns of wealth extraction that cause poverty and inequality in the first place: rigged trade deals, tax evasion, land grabs and the costs associated with climate change. The Divide tracks the evolution of this system, from the expeditions of Christopher Columbus in the 1490s to the international debt regime, which has allowed a handful of rich countries to effectively control economic policies in the rest of the world.
Because poverty is a political problem, it requires political solutions. The Divide offers a range of revelatory answers, but also explains that something much more radical is needed – a revolution in our way of thinking. Drawing on pioneering research, detailed analysis and years of first-hand experience, The Divide is a provocative, urgent and ultimately uplifting account of how the world works, and how it can change.
We have been told that development is working: that the global South is catching up to the North, that poverty has been cut in half over the past thirty years, and will be eradicated by 2030. It’s a comforting tale, and one that is endorsed by the world’s most powerful governments and corporations. But is it true?
Since 1960, the income gap between the North and South has roughly tripled in size. Today 4.3 billion people, 60 per cent of the world's population, live on less than $5 per day. Some 1 billion live on less than $1 a day. The richest eight people now control the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world combined.
What is causing this growing divide? We are told that poverty is a natural phenomenon that can be fixed with aid. But in reality it is a political problem: poverty doesn’t just exist, it has been created.
Poor countries are poor because they are integrated into the global economic system on unequal terms. Aid only works to hide the deep patterns of wealth extraction that cause poverty and inequality in the first place: rigged trade deals, tax evasion, land grabs and the costs associated with climate change. The Divide tracks the evolution of this system, from the expeditions of Christopher Columbus in the 1490s to the international debt regime, which has allowed a handful of rich countries to effectively control economic policies in the rest of the world.
Because poverty is a political problem, it requires political solutions. The Divide offers a range of revelatory answers, but also explains that something much more radical is needed – a revolution in our way of thinking. Drawing on pioneering research, detailed analysis and years of first-hand experience, The Divide is a provocative, urgent and ultimately uplifting account of how the world works, and how it can change.
368 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2017
About the author
Jason Hickel
9 books556 followersDr. Jason Hickel is an economic anthropologist, author, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics, and Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. He serves on the Statistical Advisory Panel for the UN Human Development Report 2020, the advisory board of the Green New Deal for Europe, and on the Harvard-Lancet Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice.
Jason's research focuses on global inequality, political economy, post-development, and ecological economics, which are the subjects of his two most recent books: The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions (Penguin, 2017), and Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (Penguin, 2020).
Jason's ethnographic work focuses on migrant labour and politics in South Africa, which is the subject of his first book, Democracy as Death: The Moral Order of Anti-Liberal Politics in South Africa (University of California Press, 2015). He is co-editor of two additional ethnographic volumes: Ekhaya: The Politics of Home in KwaZulu-Natal (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2014) and Hierarchy and Value: Comparative Perspectives on Moral Order (Berghahn, 2018).
In addition to his academic work, Jason writes regularly for The Guardian and Foreign Policy, and contributes to a number of other online outlets including Al Jazeera, Fast Company, Prospect, Jacobin, Le Monde Diplomatique, New Internationalist, Red Pepper, Truthout, and Monthly Review. His media appearances include Viewsnight, the Financial Times, the BBC World Service, Sky News All Out Politics, BBC Business Matters, Thinking Allowed, Renegade TV, NPR, Doha Debates, TRT World, the LA Times, Citations Needed, and Russell Brand's podcast Under the Skin.
Jason has received a number of teaching awards, including the ASA/HEA National Award for Excellence in Teaching Anthropology. His research has been funded by Fulbright-Hays, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, and the Leverhulme Trust.
He is originally from Swaziland.
https://www.jasonhickel.org/about
Jason's research focuses on global inequality, political economy, post-development, and ecological economics, which are the subjects of his two most recent books: The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions (Penguin, 2017), and Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (Penguin, 2020).
Jason's ethnographic work focuses on migrant labour and politics in South Africa, which is the subject of his first book, Democracy as Death: The Moral Order of Anti-Liberal Politics in South Africa (University of California Press, 2015). He is co-editor of two additional ethnographic volumes: Ekhaya: The Politics of Home in KwaZulu-Natal (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2014) and Hierarchy and Value: Comparative Perspectives on Moral Order (Berghahn, 2018).
In addition to his academic work, Jason writes regularly for The Guardian and Foreign Policy, and contributes to a number of other online outlets including Al Jazeera, Fast Company, Prospect, Jacobin, Le Monde Diplomatique, New Internationalist, Red Pepper, Truthout, and Monthly Review. His media appearances include Viewsnight, the Financial Times, the BBC World Service, Sky News All Out Politics, BBC Business Matters, Thinking Allowed, Renegade TV, NPR, Doha Debates, TRT World, the LA Times, Citations Needed, and Russell Brand's podcast Under the Skin.
Jason has received a number of teaching awards, including the ASA/HEA National Award for Excellence in Teaching Anthropology. His research has been funded by Fulbright-Hays, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, and the Leverhulme Trust.
He is originally from Swaziland.
https://www.jasonhickel.org/about
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May 15, 2024
Finally, a comprehensive intro to global inequality!
Preamble:
--It’s a relief to finally retire Chang’s Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism as my go-to recommendation introducing global inequality. That book is an infuriating mix of the brilliant (free trade = “kicking away the ladder”) and the banal (post-WWII Bretton Woods era US empire = “enlightened hegemony”). We can do better for an intro, leaving that book as an excellent supplementary book to unpack and test yourself with.
--I would like to have one single book to toss in Steven Pinker’s smug, liberal face (“liberal” = cosmopolitan capitalism). Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is the Atlas Shrugged for Bill Gates; I was chucking more books at Pinker than he is worth.
...However, for those already conditioned by opposing frameworks (in this case, liberalism/cosmopolitan capitalism), we cannot underestimate how much additional work is required to re-evaluate when foundational concepts have differing definitions/assumptions. Hickel's book is a better intro for those on the fence (default liberals) rather than devoted liberals (see Chomsky's Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies).
...Some editions of Hickel's book (ex. ones with the subtitle Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets) also seem to be missing citations (publisher's fault I assume), so check that your version has citations/endnotes. I also posted feedback to a negative review in comment #18 in the comment section below.
--I delayed reading this book because I wanted to prioritize Global South scholars and I was getting into their intermediate works:
i) Vijay Prashad’s historical The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South.
ii) Economists Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik: the accessible The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry and the grand theory/history Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present.
...Then, I read Hickel's sequel Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World and was blown away by the breadth of Hickel’s accessible synthesis (including the crucial framework of decolonization that synthesizes the exact Global South writers I was exploring!), so I immediately followed up with this.
Highlights:
--Why are some countries so poor? Once you go through the list below, you will realize the best way to obscure the answers is to systematically avoid how we got here (history) and cui bono? (“who benefits?” i.e. power relations).
…Mainstream (Neoclassical) Economics is an ideal cover (i.e. convenient, idealized thought-experiments, ex. Rostow’s “Stages of Economic Growth and Development” where development is just technical, not political), as is prejudice.
1) Colonialism:
--From 1500, several European states began massive wealth accumulations from abroad (New World colonialism i.e. Columbus 1492, Cortez 1519) and at home (Enclosures 1500-1800). The colonial loot in gold/silver enabled sustained trade with China/India (which were the centers of traded goods), while the colonial raw materials eventually fed domestic industrialization (set up by the Enclosures creating the land + labor markets).
…Note: distribution is important: rising wealth was not redistributed, thus there was actually deteriorating health for the masses due to the Enclosure’s violent dispossession. So, Asia’s life expectancy remained relatively higher into 1800s, when finally after some 350 years of struggle European organized labor won some concessions (esp. public sanitation). See: Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital.
…So, if it was this bad at home despite incoming wealth, imagine the decline in the colonies! Indian/Chinese traded goods were surpassed not by “free market” competition, but by violent conquest. “Unequal treaties” imposed after wars meant no autonomy to protect domestic industries: first deindustrialization, then perpetuated by preventing “infant industry protection”; meanwhile, the industrialized West protects its own industries (US was the most protectionist country from 1860s-1930s)… thus, “kicking away the ladder” popularized in Chang's Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (but now you know to level-up with the Patnaiks!).
…combined with devastated public/communal support set the conditions for famines: Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
--The famous British colonialists Cecil Rhoades sums up the logic:
2) Coups:
--The long struggle for decolonization culminated in the 1950-70s, when the global gap from colonization finally began to narrow. Developmentalism (esp. Latin America)/African Socialism/Arab Nationalism/Non-aligned Movement (NAM)/G77 and perhaps the South’s peak New International Economic Order (NIEO) challenged “kicking away the ladder” with national sovereignty (rebuilding social services and industrialization) and South-South cooperation: The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World.
--Meanwhile, the new post-WWII empire (the US) was trying to establish global hegemony by responding with coups, hiding behind Cold War propaganda (a progression from direct colonialism). The CIA (a.k.a. “Capitalism’s Invisible Army”) got busy:
-accessible intro! Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations
-The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
-Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II
-The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump
3) Debt and SAPs:
--Geopolitically, Western capitalism (i.e. G7) looked to diffuse the South’s challenge (i.e. G77’s NIEO) with the only logical method by rulers: divide-and-rule. Unlike Western leftists (ex. Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism) citing the origins of Neoliberalism on Western stagflation (in particular Western organized labor challenging profits), Prashad (and the Patnaiks) expands the origins to the South’s challenge. Of course, there is also US losing its balance of payments surplus due to war spending (terrorizing Korea and Vietnam), leading to the dismantling of post-WWII Bretton Woods (Hudson's infamous Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance, as well as Varoufakis' The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy).
--The OPEC crisis, originally seen as a moment of South strength, was reversed by the US securing OPEC petrodollar recycling (OPEC can invest their surpluses in US banks). US banks then lent this to South governments (seen as safe, with stagflation at home in the West) who needed credit for industrialization and high oil prices. The Volcker Shock where US spiked interest rates made such debts unpayable (Third World Debt Crisis).
--Instead of defaults to resolve unpayable debts, banks were bailed out (surprise?) and the IMF/World Bank were re-purposed to enforce Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) to in effect re-colonize the debtor states to repay unpayable debts (a progression from coups). In essence, public assets and social spending were retroactively set as collateral for the unpayable loans. Dismantling the state with SAPs makes defaults less optimal, since the state is so dependent it cannot quickly recover (The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South).
...To unpack the morality of debt: Debt: The First 5,000 Years
4) Trade:
--We have seen how unequal trade (“kicking away the ladder”) has been central since colonialism. The 1995 WTO cemented the renewed systematic re-colonization of the South, much of which have through IMF/World Bank SAPs been reduced to exporting cash crops (while the West has heavily-subsidized industrial agriculture!). By controlling world food supply, Michael Hudson calls the World Bank the most evil organization in modern history.
--Intellectual property: patent monopolies (so much for free market) have been extended from 13 years (end of 19th century) to 20 years under WTO’s TRIPS Agreement, and have switched from only patenting the process to patenting the product (thus, preventing innovations in new processes, e.g. more affordable generic drugs). The author gives the murderous consequences this has had to the AIDS epidemic.
--Protests against WTO have been bypassed with bilateral trade agreements: NAFTA, for example, has escalated foreign investor protection, where foreign investors/corporations can sue States in international corporate courts for regulations that threaten anticipated profits (Shadow Courts: The Tribunals that Rule Global Trade). Thus, we have another progression of colonization, where anonymous global investors act as a “virtual Senate”.
--Just as foreign aid inflows is outweighed by outflows from unequal trade/capital flight/debt repayments/repatriations, domestic “corruption” is peanuts compared to the seemingly-benign commercial tax evasion. Hot money (speculation, since regulations like capital controls have been dismantled, so capital is as free as can be in the digital age while labour is trapped by militarized borders) and trade mis-invoicing/transfer mis-pricing (transnational corporations taking advantage of tax havens) are the latest progressions in colonialism.
-Crises in trade and finance: And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future
-The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay
-Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens
5) Environment:
--This is elaborated in the sequel Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (paired it with A People’s Green New Deal), which I read first and was so impressed I immediately picked up this book. Before we leave, we should point out land grabs, which escalated from speculations on food prices creating a bubble (such commodities were seen as more stable when the mortgage crisis was unfolding). Another factor is top-down protection of “environmental services”/carbon trading, and the corporations taking advantage of this.
--In conclusion, the first step towards actual change is accurately diagnosing the problem. The author concludes that the liberal charity paradigm (i.e. aid NGOs) is part of the problem because it hinders this diagnosis by hiding the power structures and actors listed. Once these are exposed, we can also see accompanying struggles that need to be popularized (justice paradigm). I highlight the decolonization framework in reviewing Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World.
Preamble:
--It’s a relief to finally retire Chang’s Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism as my go-to recommendation introducing global inequality. That book is an infuriating mix of the brilliant (free trade = “kicking away the ladder”) and the banal (post-WWII Bretton Woods era US empire = “enlightened hegemony”). We can do better for an intro, leaving that book as an excellent supplementary book to unpack and test yourself with.
--I would like to have one single book to toss in Steven Pinker’s smug, liberal face (“liberal” = cosmopolitan capitalism). Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is the Atlas Shrugged for Bill Gates; I was chucking more books at Pinker than he is worth.
...However, for those already conditioned by opposing frameworks (in this case, liberalism/cosmopolitan capitalism), we cannot underestimate how much additional work is required to re-evaluate when foundational concepts have differing definitions/assumptions. Hickel's book is a better intro for those on the fence (default liberals) rather than devoted liberals (see Chomsky's Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies).
...Some editions of Hickel's book (ex. ones with the subtitle Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets) also seem to be missing citations (publisher's fault I assume), so check that your version has citations/endnotes. I also posted feedback to a negative review in comment #18 in the comment section below.
--I delayed reading this book because I wanted to prioritize Global South scholars and I was getting into their intermediate works:
i) Vijay Prashad’s historical The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South.
ii) Economists Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik: the accessible The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry and the grand theory/history Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present.
...Then, I read Hickel's sequel Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World and was blown away by the breadth of Hickel’s accessible synthesis (including the crucial framework of decolonization that synthesizes the exact Global South writers I was exploring!), so I immediately followed up with this.
Highlights:
--Why are some countries so poor? Once you go through the list below, you will realize the best way to obscure the answers is to systematically avoid how we got here (history) and cui bono? (“who benefits?” i.e. power relations).
…Mainstream (Neoclassical) Economics is an ideal cover (i.e. convenient, idealized thought-experiments, ex. Rostow’s “Stages of Economic Growth and Development” where development is just technical, not political), as is prejudice.
1) Colonialism:
--From 1500, several European states began massive wealth accumulations from abroad (New World colonialism i.e. Columbus 1492, Cortez 1519) and at home (Enclosures 1500-1800). The colonial loot in gold/silver enabled sustained trade with China/India (which were the centers of traded goods), while the colonial raw materials eventually fed domestic industrialization (set up by the Enclosures creating the land + labor markets).
…Note: distribution is important: rising wealth was not redistributed, thus there was actually deteriorating health for the masses due to the Enclosure’s violent dispossession. So, Asia’s life expectancy remained relatively higher into 1800s, when finally after some 350 years of struggle European organized labor won some concessions (esp. public sanitation). See: Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital.
…So, if it was this bad at home despite incoming wealth, imagine the decline in the colonies! Indian/Chinese traded goods were surpassed not by “free market” competition, but by violent conquest. “Unequal treaties” imposed after wars meant no autonomy to protect domestic industries: first deindustrialization, then perpetuated by preventing “infant industry protection”; meanwhile, the industrialized West protects its own industries (US was the most protectionist country from 1860s-1930s)… thus, “kicking away the ladder” popularized in Chang's Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (but now you know to level-up with the Patnaiks!).
…combined with devastated public/communal support set the conditions for famines: Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
--The famous British colonialists Cecil Rhoades sums up the logic:
I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for ‘bread! bread!’ and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism … My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines.
2) Coups:
--The long struggle for decolonization culminated in the 1950-70s, when the global gap from colonization finally began to narrow. Developmentalism (esp. Latin America)/African Socialism/Arab Nationalism/Non-aligned Movement (NAM)/G77 and perhaps the South’s peak New International Economic Order (NIEO) challenged “kicking away the ladder” with national sovereignty (rebuilding social services and industrialization) and South-South cooperation: The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World.
--Meanwhile, the new post-WWII empire (the US) was trying to establish global hegemony by responding with coups, hiding behind Cold War propaganda (a progression from direct colonialism). The CIA (a.k.a. “Capitalism’s Invisible Army”) got busy:
-accessible intro! Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations
-The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
-Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II
-The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump
3) Debt and SAPs:
--Geopolitically, Western capitalism (i.e. G7) looked to diffuse the South’s challenge (i.e. G77’s NIEO) with the only logical method by rulers: divide-and-rule. Unlike Western leftists (ex. Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism) citing the origins of Neoliberalism on Western stagflation (in particular Western organized labor challenging profits), Prashad (and the Patnaiks) expands the origins to the South’s challenge. Of course, there is also US losing its balance of payments surplus due to war spending (terrorizing Korea and Vietnam), leading to the dismantling of post-WWII Bretton Woods (Hudson's infamous Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance, as well as Varoufakis' The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy).
--The OPEC crisis, originally seen as a moment of South strength, was reversed by the US securing OPEC petrodollar recycling (OPEC can invest their surpluses in US banks). US banks then lent this to South governments (seen as safe, with stagflation at home in the West) who needed credit for industrialization and high oil prices. The Volcker Shock where US spiked interest rates made such debts unpayable (Third World Debt Crisis).
--Instead of defaults to resolve unpayable debts, banks were bailed out (surprise?) and the IMF/World Bank were re-purposed to enforce Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) to in effect re-colonize the debtor states to repay unpayable debts (a progression from coups). In essence, public assets and social spending were retroactively set as collateral for the unpayable loans. Dismantling the state with SAPs makes defaults less optimal, since the state is so dependent it cannot quickly recover (The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South).
...To unpack the morality of debt: Debt: The First 5,000 Years
4) Trade:
--We have seen how unequal trade (“kicking away the ladder”) has been central since colonialism. The 1995 WTO cemented the renewed systematic re-colonization of the South, much of which have through IMF/World Bank SAPs been reduced to exporting cash crops (while the West has heavily-subsidized industrial agriculture!). By controlling world food supply, Michael Hudson calls the World Bank the most evil organization in modern history.
--Intellectual property: patent monopolies (so much for free market) have been extended from 13 years (end of 19th century) to 20 years under WTO’s TRIPS Agreement, and have switched from only patenting the process to patenting the product (thus, preventing innovations in new processes, e.g. more affordable generic drugs). The author gives the murderous consequences this has had to the AIDS epidemic.
--Protests against WTO have been bypassed with bilateral trade agreements: NAFTA, for example, has escalated foreign investor protection, where foreign investors/corporations can sue States in international corporate courts for regulations that threaten anticipated profits (Shadow Courts: The Tribunals that Rule Global Trade). Thus, we have another progression of colonization, where anonymous global investors act as a “virtual Senate”.
--Just as foreign aid inflows is outweighed by outflows from unequal trade/capital flight/debt repayments/repatriations, domestic “corruption” is peanuts compared to the seemingly-benign commercial tax evasion. Hot money (speculation, since regulations like capital controls have been dismantled, so capital is as free as can be in the digital age while labour is trapped by militarized borders) and trade mis-invoicing/transfer mis-pricing (transnational corporations taking advantage of tax havens) are the latest progressions in colonialism.
-Crises in trade and finance: And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future
-The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay
-Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens
5) Environment:
--This is elaborated in the sequel Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (paired it with A People’s Green New Deal), which I read first and was so impressed I immediately picked up this book. Before we leave, we should point out land grabs, which escalated from speculations on food prices creating a bubble (such commodities were seen as more stable when the mortgage crisis was unfolding). Another factor is top-down protection of “environmental services”/carbon trading, and the corporations taking advantage of this.
--In conclusion, the first step towards actual change is accurately diagnosing the problem. The author concludes that the liberal charity paradigm (i.e. aid NGOs) is part of the problem because it hinders this diagnosis by hiding the power structures and actors listed. Once these are exposed, we can also see accompanying struggles that need to be popularized (justice paradigm). I highlight the decolonization framework in reviewing Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World.
September 27, 2021
Maybe five years ago – I couldn’t tell you to be honest – people started sending me links to a Ted Talk by Hans Rosling. In it he said two things that those on the extreme centre find completely irresistible. The first is that despite the fact that everyone knows that the world is becoming worse, a sober analysis of the data proves that simply isn’t the case. In fact, poverty has never decreased at a faster rate at any other time in human history. This is due to the wonders of our economic system of free markets and rampant economic inequality – who’d have thought that would prove such a great boon?
The second is that the reason why we think the opposite is happening is ‘the bloody media cycle’, where bad news always trumps good news – and so we get shown images of children starving somewhere in the Horn of Africa, rather than of people across the rest of Africa going about their rather boring little lives becoming increasingly prosperous.
At the time this story felt decidedly wrong to me – so, I Googled to see what criticism there was of Rosling and his Gapminder website. Now look, I could, but won’t, talk to you about the problems of log scales and how they make it look like the rich aren’t getting any richer at all, while the poor are accelerating towards catching them in prosperity – but you probably hated mathematics at school and have no idea what a logarithm is anyway, and could care less, and so the fact he made his graphs using in them seems neither here nor there to you...
At around the same time, I became aware of Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature, and then there was Bill Gates running around praising radical free market economics as the cure not only of poverty but of all other evils too.
This book shows that virtually all of this is not only nonsense, but is about as close to the very opposite of what is actually happening as it is possible to get. In the main, these ‘good news’ stories are an artifact of very creative accountancy – true enough, not always, but in the main. Mostly, this accountancy involves lowering the poverty rate to levels so low that those living at or near this rate literally have to remain sedentary because they are not receiving enough calories to allow them to move. It involves shifting targets from absolute numbers of people in poverty to proportions of people in poverty. It involves shifting the dates you measure from so that you ignore the massive increase in wellbeing that occurred in the 1960s and 70s when the developing world could still direct some of it wealth to social development before structural adjustments imposed on them made that impossible. It further ignores the reversal in the 1980s and then conveniently includes the 1990s when China lifted virtually its whole population out of poverty – something that could then be claimed as proof of progress.
I like to think of China as the Schrödinger nation. Anything good that happens there is because it is capitalist, anything bad because it is communist. But two things are certain – virtually everyone on the planet who has been lifted out of poverty since the 1980s has been Chinese, and China achieved this because it ignored the kinds of advice given to the rest of the developing world by the IMF and World Bank. As this book makes clear, if you take China out of the picture, poverty has increased across the world, and not just in absolute terms, but also in proportionate terms as well.
But this book isn’t just a way of explaining why a Polly-Anna Swedish statistician got things so terribly wrong. In fact, Rosling barely rates a mention. Rather, this book provides a history of neo-colonialism and the bleeding white of the developing world by the world’s richest nations. Rivers of gold flow out of the developing world and into the centres of first-world capital and in there place is left rivers of blood. The gold removed ensures the extremes of human misery in the developing countries – and this is justified on the basis of our twisted notions of ‘debt’. This book provides a thumbnail history of this obscenity, this inversion of reality.
It also is an explanation of the various myths of economics – always presented as positive truths – such as comparative advantage. These myths that somehow always seem to work in the interests of the rich and powerful, and decidedly against the interests of the poor. Economics is an odd field of study – so much of it is pure ideology, but its proponents would fight you to the death for saying so. Rather, they provide endless justifications for why the current state of the world is both the natural and best of all possible worlds. This book is particularly useful in providing the history and politics that are so often left out of the story spun by the Dr Panglosses of the economics profession.
I don’t know how to get you to read this book, but you really should. It is short, clearly written, and it tells a story that demands to be understood. Not just because it might encourage us all to do something to address a criminal wrong that continues to be committed against the vast majority of humanity – as if WE have ever lifted a finger for that – but because the rapaciousness that is destroying the lives of the very poorest on the planet are also destroying the very basis for all human existence on this planet – you know, not just the poor, but all of us. We literally cannot afford the rich anymore – just as we can no longer afford their apologists. Reading this book should put fire in your belly, and dear god, the time is ripe for that.
The second is that the reason why we think the opposite is happening is ‘the bloody media cycle’, where bad news always trumps good news – and so we get shown images of children starving somewhere in the Horn of Africa, rather than of people across the rest of Africa going about their rather boring little lives becoming increasingly prosperous.
At the time this story felt decidedly wrong to me – so, I Googled to see what criticism there was of Rosling and his Gapminder website. Now look, I could, but won’t, talk to you about the problems of log scales and how they make it look like the rich aren’t getting any richer at all, while the poor are accelerating towards catching them in prosperity – but you probably hated mathematics at school and have no idea what a logarithm is anyway, and could care less, and so the fact he made his graphs using in them seems neither here nor there to you...
At around the same time, I became aware of Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature, and then there was Bill Gates running around praising radical free market economics as the cure not only of poverty but of all other evils too.
This book shows that virtually all of this is not only nonsense, but is about as close to the very opposite of what is actually happening as it is possible to get. In the main, these ‘good news’ stories are an artifact of very creative accountancy – true enough, not always, but in the main. Mostly, this accountancy involves lowering the poverty rate to levels so low that those living at or near this rate literally have to remain sedentary because they are not receiving enough calories to allow them to move. It involves shifting targets from absolute numbers of people in poverty to proportions of people in poverty. It involves shifting the dates you measure from so that you ignore the massive increase in wellbeing that occurred in the 1960s and 70s when the developing world could still direct some of it wealth to social development before structural adjustments imposed on them made that impossible. It further ignores the reversal in the 1980s and then conveniently includes the 1990s when China lifted virtually its whole population out of poverty – something that could then be claimed as proof of progress.
I like to think of China as the Schrödinger nation. Anything good that happens there is because it is capitalist, anything bad because it is communist. But two things are certain – virtually everyone on the planet who has been lifted out of poverty since the 1980s has been Chinese, and China achieved this because it ignored the kinds of advice given to the rest of the developing world by the IMF and World Bank. As this book makes clear, if you take China out of the picture, poverty has increased across the world, and not just in absolute terms, but also in proportionate terms as well.
But this book isn’t just a way of explaining why a Polly-Anna Swedish statistician got things so terribly wrong. In fact, Rosling barely rates a mention. Rather, this book provides a history of neo-colonialism and the bleeding white of the developing world by the world’s richest nations. Rivers of gold flow out of the developing world and into the centres of first-world capital and in there place is left rivers of blood. The gold removed ensures the extremes of human misery in the developing countries – and this is justified on the basis of our twisted notions of ‘debt’. This book provides a thumbnail history of this obscenity, this inversion of reality.
It also is an explanation of the various myths of economics – always presented as positive truths – such as comparative advantage. These myths that somehow always seem to work in the interests of the rich and powerful, and decidedly against the interests of the poor. Economics is an odd field of study – so much of it is pure ideology, but its proponents would fight you to the death for saying so. Rather, they provide endless justifications for why the current state of the world is both the natural and best of all possible worlds. This book is particularly useful in providing the history and politics that are so often left out of the story spun by the Dr Panglosses of the economics profession.
I don’t know how to get you to read this book, but you really should. It is short, clearly written, and it tells a story that demands to be understood. Not just because it might encourage us all to do something to address a criminal wrong that continues to be committed against the vast majority of humanity – as if WE have ever lifted a finger for that – but because the rapaciousness that is destroying the lives of the very poorest on the planet are also destroying the very basis for all human existence on this planet – you know, not just the poor, but all of us. We literally cannot afford the rich anymore – just as we can no longer afford their apologists. Reading this book should put fire in your belly, and dear god, the time is ripe for that.
December 14, 2018
If you’ve read Hans rosling or Pinker or Gates or listened to ted talks by them (I’m including you Obama), you have to read this book. You have to.
Poverty is CREATED!
Poverty is CREATED!
May 17, 2020
Since my teenage years, I was a strong believer in laissez-faire economics. I thought that all that the world needs to be fair economically is to just have equality of opportunity. And what is better than neoliberalism to provide that, right?
This book (along with "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" and "Guns, Germs, and Steel") has finally changed my stubborn mind.
I still believe that capitalism is the best economic system humans have invented so far but I stopped believing that the free market economy without any kind of third-party regulations (e.g. governments) is or can be fair in our imperfect world.
And the most shocking realization after reading this book (shocking because living in a Western world bubble it is easy to not think about it at all) is that the Western world didn't get rich just by using capitalism and being smart. Other parts of the World have paid and continue to pay for a big chunk of that spectacular growth.
The developed world actually has a lot of incentives to not allow the emerging world to join the party of the rich nations. We count on cheap resources and labor from poor parts of the world.
And because every nation now is in a very different position, the assumption that we just need a level playing field and every "smart" nation will then grow out of being poor is just naive.
For example, we have a fossil fuels quota that we want every nation to obey. But to be fair, we need to count not only present usage of fossil fuels but take into consideration historic usage as well. Rich countries have used fossil fuels for decades and a lot of their economic growth comes from it. Sure, we need to decrease the amount we use as the whole world, but using the same rule for developed and emerging countries make the latter heavily handicapped.
Even though I don't agree with the author on everything, this book is one of those very few that have strongly influenced how I think about the world and because of it, 5 stars are the least I can give.
This book (along with "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" and "Guns, Germs, and Steel") has finally changed my stubborn mind.
I still believe that capitalism is the best economic system humans have invented so far but I stopped believing that the free market economy without any kind of third-party regulations (e.g. governments) is or can be fair in our imperfect world.
And the most shocking realization after reading this book (shocking because living in a Western world bubble it is easy to not think about it at all) is that the Western world didn't get rich just by using capitalism and being smart. Other parts of the World have paid and continue to pay for a big chunk of that spectacular growth.
The developed world actually has a lot of incentives to not allow the emerging world to join the party of the rich nations. We count on cheap resources and labor from poor parts of the world.
And because every nation now is in a very different position, the assumption that we just need a level playing field and every "smart" nation will then grow out of being poor is just naive.
For example, we have a fossil fuels quota that we want every nation to obey. But to be fair, we need to count not only present usage of fossil fuels but take into consideration historic usage as well. Rich countries have used fossil fuels for decades and a lot of their economic growth comes from it. Sure, we need to decrease the amount we use as the whole world, but using the same rule for developed and emerging countries make the latter heavily handicapped.
Even though I don't agree with the author on everything, this book is one of those very few that have strongly influenced how I think about the world and because of it, 5 stars are the least I can give.
July 18, 2017
We are all concerned about the Global Poor; we all want to help. Many NGOs have been helping the hungry and homeless in poor countries.
Hickel however explained that it is the rich world that first created the Third World. Europeans subjugated and killed almost all the native Americans, and take African slaves to work in the American plantations. The British ruled India and destroyed its then vibrant textile business and forced Indians to buy British textiles; defeated China and forced it to buy Indian opium for its tea and porcelain.
The next phase was United States' intervention in the Americas and the Middle East, supporting regimes that served its interests. Those chosen to lead impoverished the population with corruption.
This phase overlapped with World Bank and IMF which forced loans on poor countries, then asked for money even if the countries cannot replay. Meanwhile the rich countries prevent poor countries from developing their industries by promoting free trade, dumping their better and cheaper goods to the poor countries.
Anyway the rich countries were responsible for most of the global warming because they industrialised before. In their search for economic growth, they are ruining the earth.
The solution, according to Hickel, is for the rich world to forgive all the debt, allow protectionism of the poor countries, pay the poor countries for their past transgressions, and stop chasing growth.
I can understand the arguments and can now understand why every time IMF or G8 or G20 meet, demonstrators are always present.
However, the solutions are probably politically untenable. I think it is likely that should all the solutions be implemented, we will have economic equality, but just like communism everyone would just become poorer. For poverty in the global south has many causes: war, natural disasters, lousy leaders, curse of natural resources, and of course the will of the people. I am afraid Hickel is blaming the rich countries for ALL the woes of the poor countries. If that is the case, Asian countries including China, Japan and the 4 tigers would not have been able to grow.
Nonetheless it is a very good read and I enjoyed his arguments.
Hickel however explained that it is the rich world that first created the Third World. Europeans subjugated and killed almost all the native Americans, and take African slaves to work in the American plantations. The British ruled India and destroyed its then vibrant textile business and forced Indians to buy British textiles; defeated China and forced it to buy Indian opium for its tea and porcelain.
The next phase was United States' intervention in the Americas and the Middle East, supporting regimes that served its interests. Those chosen to lead impoverished the population with corruption.
This phase overlapped with World Bank and IMF which forced loans on poor countries, then asked for money even if the countries cannot replay. Meanwhile the rich countries prevent poor countries from developing their industries by promoting free trade, dumping their better and cheaper goods to the poor countries.
Anyway the rich countries were responsible for most of the global warming because they industrialised before. In their search for economic growth, they are ruining the earth.
The solution, according to Hickel, is for the rich world to forgive all the debt, allow protectionism of the poor countries, pay the poor countries for their past transgressions, and stop chasing growth.
I can understand the arguments and can now understand why every time IMF or G8 or G20 meet, demonstrators are always present.
However, the solutions are probably politically untenable. I think it is likely that should all the solutions be implemented, we will have economic equality, but just like communism everyone would just become poorer. For poverty in the global south has many causes: war, natural disasters, lousy leaders, curse of natural resources, and of course the will of the people. I am afraid Hickel is blaming the rich countries for ALL the woes of the poor countries. If that is the case, Asian countries including China, Japan and the 4 tigers would not have been able to grow.
Nonetheless it is a very good read and I enjoyed his arguments.
March 13, 2018
Points:
1. Lowering poverty by increasing GDP growth is a joke, played on poor people by world leaders, because increasing income to $5/day for poorest population purely from GDP will damage climate irreparably with much worse subsequent consequences.
2. Global bank's PPP revisions are discriminatory and doesn't reflect reality. World leaders would with such revisions would reach their "goals" by doing exactly nothing.
3. Several hundred years ago so called "third world" lived better and healthier than Europeans. Everything changed with industrial revolution and colonization.
4. "Free trade" is a farce. New TTIP, TPP agreements by the "most transparent administration ever" (B.Obama's) are secret to the public, but available for 605 corporations.
5. Moving to "green energy" wouldn't solve emissions problems created by need of exponential GDP growth.
6. Planet's problems can be solved by decreasing consumption, mainly in the West. For example, life expectancy in U.S. equals to Costa Rica's, but with excess of 5x higher GDP (and over-consumption). Europeans' life expectancy is higher than U.S. with 40% less GDP.
7. Crucial first step is to ditch measurement of quality in GDP. Probably "Better life index", "Genuine progress indicator", etc. can be used to reflect truer reality.
8. One of the reasons economy should grow is the debt. Debt piles up and finally causes financial crises.
This book is like shorter, less scientific, more popular version of Capital in the Twenty-First Century
1. Lowering poverty by increasing GDP growth is a joke, played on poor people by world leaders, because increasing income to $5/day for poorest population purely from GDP will damage climate irreparably with much worse subsequent consequences.
2. Global bank's PPP revisions are discriminatory and doesn't reflect reality. World leaders would with such revisions would reach their "goals" by doing exactly nothing.
3. Several hundred years ago so called "third world" lived better and healthier than Europeans. Everything changed with industrial revolution and colonization.
4. "Free trade" is a farce. New TTIP, TPP agreements by the "most transparent administration ever" (B.Obama's) are secret to the public, but available for 605 corporations.
5. Moving to "green energy" wouldn't solve emissions problems created by need of exponential GDP growth.
6. Planet's problems can be solved by decreasing consumption, mainly in the West. For example, life expectancy in U.S. equals to Costa Rica's, but with excess of 5x higher GDP (and over-consumption). Europeans' life expectancy is higher than U.S. with 40% less GDP.
7. Crucial first step is to ditch measurement of quality in GDP. Probably "Better life index", "Genuine progress indicator", etc. can be used to reflect truer reality.
8. One of the reasons economy should grow is the debt. Debt piles up and finally causes financial crises.
This book is like shorter, less scientific, more popular version of Capital in the Twenty-First Century
November 20, 2018
It took me MONTHS to read this book because it made me so angry I'd read a little bit an then have to put it down.
If you think "Africa/Latin America/poor countries in general just can't get their shit together" read this and learn why. It's eye-opening and infuriating.
Luckily his solutions at the end - while difficult - are feasible and encouraging. We CAN have an equitable world and slow some of this climate destruction and poverty, we just have to start giving a shit.
If you think "Africa/Latin America/poor countries in general just can't get their shit together" read this and learn why. It's eye-opening and infuriating.
Luckily his solutions at the end - while difficult - are feasible and encouraging. We CAN have an equitable world and slow some of this climate destruction and poverty, we just have to start giving a shit.
October 9, 2021
Poverty is manufactured.
TL;DR: read this book immediately.
There is a grand narrative in the western world that we have achieved development and that we wait on the sidelines, cheering on developing countries as they sputter and stall trying to become like us grown up countries. We try to help with grand acts of charity or developmental outreaches as these countries make their adorable attempts to lift themselves from poverty enough to even feed their populace. We like to believe that wealth and poverty are natural states and that world wealth exists in a state of equilibrium. We publish feel-good stories about how free trade and capitalism has actually lifted an enormous part of the global population out of poverty and hunger. We cling to this story because it’s the only way we can ignore the cognitive dissonance of the reality: the western world was actually developed by impoverishing poor countries.
Hickel completely tears down the narrative with more data, critical thinking and brilliance than I believe I’ve ever read. He brings everything together in this book to describe why the world is the way it is with such stunning clarity that no one can deny his conclusions. First off, poverty is not a natural state—it’s man made and it is by design. Rich countries aren’t developing poor countries; it’s poor countries that are developing rich countries. The good news narrative that free trade benefits everyone is developed from statistical theater, bending and moving goal posts that don’t account for depreciation of purchasing power and defining the poverty line at living on only $1.25 a day. This definition also assumes that a person only requires calories to be sedentary. If a poor person suddenly gets up and burns calories, suddenly no one is lifted out of poverty by these ridiculous definitions. China actually accounts for the majority of improvement in poverty reduction, a country that doesn’t participate in the “free trade” that people claim reduces poverty. The good news narrative is a complete falsehood and at its best is propaganda for western countries to continue their vast global exploitation.
Hickel takes us on a tour that starts at the age of colonialism and imperialism. This is when western countries stole the start up capital and slave labor that created the great divide we see today. Precious minerals were stolen from South America and Africa. The West then created products to sell back to these countries while slapping these same countries with tariffs where they could never have a profitable trade balance. The original privatization of peasant land is what started wage labor and capitalism. When you can longer provide food for yourself because land has been taken from you, your only option is to rent your labor and enter the exploits of capitalism.
If we flash forward to the 1950 and 1960s, we see vast and deliberate destabilization of poor countries with any attempt to nationalize their own sovereign goods that are currently in the hands of American corporations. In the name of free trade, the US destroyed democratically elected leaders and replaced them with croney dictators who will do the bidding of the corporate plutocracy. From the Banana Wars of the Caribbean, and Latin America to Indonesia, Iran, Ghana, the Congo, Brazil and the utter destruction of Chile’s economy (thanks Chicago Boys), America has destroyed nation after nation to protect corporate interests and maintain global dominance. The wealth of the west has been subsidized by these countries.
The New Deal proved that if you invest in the public, people can mobilize out of poverty and jumpstart the economy. The legacy of the American middle class hinges on the success of white aparthied socialism. Yet when countless impoverished countries try to do the exact same thing, the US fear mongers with communist panic and destroys these governments because they try to take resources out of the hands of US corporations. This is the playbook and it has happened over and over again since WWII.
Here is who rules the world: multinational companies, the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. The IMF and World Bank were formed under the guise of providing funds to poor nations in order to lift them from poverty. The reality is they basically provided subprime loans with interest rates so outrageous that they could never be paid. The kicker to this is that as a stipulation of taking loans, poorer nations can’t nationalize or subsidize their resources as this was seen as an unfair advantage when it is the EXACT same thing that the US does to its own agriculture, constantly undercutting their traded products on the global market. So the IMF and World Bank basically drown poor countries in debt that they can never repay and take away revenue that could otherwise be invested in their own public good. The IMF is a global debt enforcer. One may ask: why do poor countries decide to take these loans? Well, it’s because they face the very real threat of a covert or military coup of their leadership if they do not. NAFTA and the planned Trans Pacific Partnership (TTP) were engineered to exploit labor in the US and Mexico. NAFTA was a tool of multinationals to strip workers of their wages, their rights and leave dispossession in their wake. Tax havens abound forming a loop of wealth exploitation and hoarding all while continuing the cycle of poverty and hunger in developing countries.
We need to look at systems and not symptoms. There are reasons countries are poor. It’s not just corruption of their leadership or lack of free markets and entrepreneurship. It’s because the West stole resources from the very beginning creating the foundation of an inequitable system that they now control and operate with impunity. The double standards are unjust. The climate fallout disproportionately affects the victims. We need to stop focusing on the poison of maximizing GDP and understand that we cannot chase an exponential wave of consumption and growth.
This book has everything you need to know about how the world operates. I highly, highly recommend.
Other very relevant books:
The Jakarta Method https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
How to Hide and Empire
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
The Triumph of Injustice
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
TL;DR: read this book immediately.
There is a grand narrative in the western world that we have achieved development and that we wait on the sidelines, cheering on developing countries as they sputter and stall trying to become like us grown up countries. We try to help with grand acts of charity or developmental outreaches as these countries make their adorable attempts to lift themselves from poverty enough to even feed their populace. We like to believe that wealth and poverty are natural states and that world wealth exists in a state of equilibrium. We publish feel-good stories about how free trade and capitalism has actually lifted an enormous part of the global population out of poverty and hunger. We cling to this story because it’s the only way we can ignore the cognitive dissonance of the reality: the western world was actually developed by impoverishing poor countries.
Hickel completely tears down the narrative with more data, critical thinking and brilliance than I believe I’ve ever read. He brings everything together in this book to describe why the world is the way it is with such stunning clarity that no one can deny his conclusions. First off, poverty is not a natural state—it’s man made and it is by design. Rich countries aren’t developing poor countries; it’s poor countries that are developing rich countries. The good news narrative that free trade benefits everyone is developed from statistical theater, bending and moving goal posts that don’t account for depreciation of purchasing power and defining the poverty line at living on only $1.25 a day. This definition also assumes that a person only requires calories to be sedentary. If a poor person suddenly gets up and burns calories, suddenly no one is lifted out of poverty by these ridiculous definitions. China actually accounts for the majority of improvement in poverty reduction, a country that doesn’t participate in the “free trade” that people claim reduces poverty. The good news narrative is a complete falsehood and at its best is propaganda for western countries to continue their vast global exploitation.
Hickel takes us on a tour that starts at the age of colonialism and imperialism. This is when western countries stole the start up capital and slave labor that created the great divide we see today. Precious minerals were stolen from South America and Africa. The West then created products to sell back to these countries while slapping these same countries with tariffs where they could never have a profitable trade balance. The original privatization of peasant land is what started wage labor and capitalism. When you can longer provide food for yourself because land has been taken from you, your only option is to rent your labor and enter the exploits of capitalism.
If we flash forward to the 1950 and 1960s, we see vast and deliberate destabilization of poor countries with any attempt to nationalize their own sovereign goods that are currently in the hands of American corporations. In the name of free trade, the US destroyed democratically elected leaders and replaced them with croney dictators who will do the bidding of the corporate plutocracy. From the Banana Wars of the Caribbean, and Latin America to Indonesia, Iran, Ghana, the Congo, Brazil and the utter destruction of Chile’s economy (thanks Chicago Boys), America has destroyed nation after nation to protect corporate interests and maintain global dominance. The wealth of the west has been subsidized by these countries.
The New Deal proved that if you invest in the public, people can mobilize out of poverty and jumpstart the economy. The legacy of the American middle class hinges on the success of white aparthied socialism. Yet when countless impoverished countries try to do the exact same thing, the US fear mongers with communist panic and destroys these governments because they try to take resources out of the hands of US corporations. This is the playbook and it has happened over and over again since WWII.
Here is who rules the world: multinational companies, the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. The IMF and World Bank were formed under the guise of providing funds to poor nations in order to lift them from poverty. The reality is they basically provided subprime loans with interest rates so outrageous that they could never be paid. The kicker to this is that as a stipulation of taking loans, poorer nations can’t nationalize or subsidize their resources as this was seen as an unfair advantage when it is the EXACT same thing that the US does to its own agriculture, constantly undercutting their traded products on the global market. So the IMF and World Bank basically drown poor countries in debt that they can never repay and take away revenue that could otherwise be invested in their own public good. The IMF is a global debt enforcer. One may ask: why do poor countries decide to take these loans? Well, it’s because they face the very real threat of a covert or military coup of their leadership if they do not. NAFTA and the planned Trans Pacific Partnership (TTP) were engineered to exploit labor in the US and Mexico. NAFTA was a tool of multinationals to strip workers of their wages, their rights and leave dispossession in their wake. Tax havens abound forming a loop of wealth exploitation and hoarding all while continuing the cycle of poverty and hunger in developing countries.
We need to look at systems and not symptoms. There are reasons countries are poor. It’s not just corruption of their leadership or lack of free markets and entrepreneurship. It’s because the West stole resources from the very beginning creating the foundation of an inequitable system that they now control and operate with impunity. The double standards are unjust. The climate fallout disproportionately affects the victims. We need to stop focusing on the poison of maximizing GDP and understand that we cannot chase an exponential wave of consumption and growth.
This book has everything you need to know about how the world operates. I highly, highly recommend.
Other very relevant books:
The Jakarta Method https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
How to Hide and Empire
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
The Triumph of Injustice
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
June 5, 2019
This is, hands down, one of THE most outstanding books I have read this year. I found this book un-put-down-able.
Who should read this book?
You should read this book if:
A. You are interested in equality and fairness, you want the world to be a better place, you think about climate change and want to know some of the unknown problems caused by it (and additionally, want to do something about it), you want poorer countries to develop.
and/or
B. If you have read Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (which I have) or The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (which I have not), if you like data or you value the opinions of popular scientists. I feel that books like “Factfulness” are “feel good” books (and there is nothing wrong with them being so) for people who are tired of seeing current the state of the world and want to see some good, real, data. However, these two books only show you one aspect of the story: the good one. They do not give any information about the bad parts of the story.
--
Heads up, majority of book is *very* depressing. At least I found it to be so. It talks about why poor countries are poor in spite of all the “efforts” that are currently being taken. I found the book to be depressing because the way currently the world is, it feels that nothing will change it. If you donate or volunteer in underdeveloped or developing countries, you need to understand that your efforts will NOT help these countries develop. And no, it is not the question about the amount of efforts that get put in to this. The problem is: the system is rigged.
To explain how and why the system is rigged, the author delves into history and economics of poverty. He takes us on an interesting adventure: from history of colonialism to “developed” world, from efforts to “eradicate” poverty and world hunger to the IMF and the World Bank, from “free trade” and debt creation to corporations practicing tax evasions, from assassination of a political leader to millions of people getting unemployed because of a single policy change, from global warming to sustainable farming.
Reading this book made me realize that colonialism has not ended. It has just changed its form to neocolonialism or rather known as “neoliberalism”. And now, because of climate change, it is taking a new form: Carbon Colonialism. Poverty is an economic problem of course, but reading this book made me feel that racism too, is not just a social problem, it is an economic one. It made me feel that the world in its current state will never change without massive, massive efforts on our part. I’m surprised by the fact that this is not a popular book. Hickel talks the sad reality that no one wants to hear about. He critiques a lot of corporates. I’d say this book is one of the hidden gems I have found. If have read “Factfulness”, if you want to know how poverty is “created” and what can you do about it, I’d recommend you to read this book.
Who should read this book?
You should read this book if:
A. You are interested in equality and fairness, you want the world to be a better place, you think about climate change and want to know some of the unknown problems caused by it (and additionally, want to do something about it), you want poorer countries to develop.
and/or
B. If you have read Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (which I have) or The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (which I have not), if you like data or you value the opinions of popular scientists. I feel that books like “Factfulness” are “feel good” books (and there is nothing wrong with them being so) for people who are tired of seeing current the state of the world and want to see some good, real, data. However, these two books only show you one aspect of the story: the good one. They do not give any information about the bad parts of the story.
--
Heads up, majority of book is *very* depressing. At least I found it to be so. It talks about why poor countries are poor in spite of all the “efforts” that are currently being taken. I found the book to be depressing because the way currently the world is, it feels that nothing will change it. If you donate or volunteer in underdeveloped or developing countries, you need to understand that your efforts will NOT help these countries develop. And no, it is not the question about the amount of efforts that get put in to this. The problem is: the system is rigged.
To explain how and why the system is rigged, the author delves into history and economics of poverty. He takes us on an interesting adventure: from history of colonialism to “developed” world, from efforts to “eradicate” poverty and world hunger to the IMF and the World Bank, from “free trade” and debt creation to corporations practicing tax evasions, from assassination of a political leader to millions of people getting unemployed because of a single policy change, from global warming to sustainable farming.
Reading this book made me realize that colonialism has not ended. It has just changed its form to neocolonialism or rather known as “neoliberalism”. And now, because of climate change, it is taking a new form: Carbon Colonialism. Poverty is an economic problem of course, but reading this book made me feel that racism too, is not just a social problem, it is an economic one. It made me feel that the world in its current state will never change without massive, massive efforts on our part. I’m surprised by the fact that this is not a popular book. Hickel talks the sad reality that no one wants to hear about. He critiques a lot of corporates. I’d say this book is one of the hidden gems I have found. If have read “Factfulness”, if you want to know how poverty is “created” and what can you do about it, I’d recommend you to read this book.
November 3, 2017
Basically a red pill for global inequality. Read this to understand why the North-South divide persists in spite of all the generous "aid" being thrown at the problem.
March 3, 2021
I have a very mixed opinion about this book. On the one hand, I sympathise with the view that everyone in the world should have an opportunity to be happy, healthy and wealthy, regardless of any accident of where they happen to be born. On the other hand, Hickel’s treatment of data and facts in this book is extremely poor, showing errors in reasoning, omission, distortion and outright mistakes or fabrications. As a work of scholarship, it’s best to check on all of the data-based claims he makes. I’ll give you a few examples below, but first some fair points that Hickel made:
Europe gained economically from colonialism, conquest and slavery. Western backed coups of certain South American countries happened, and they have a very murky and disturbing history. Data from the GFI shows capital flows can disadvantage developing countries: https://gfintegrity.org/press-release... The obvious question is: how is the development going? (i.e. is there industrialistaion, creation of the information economy, the rise of science and technology to boost educational and health outcomes). It’s difficult to have a consistent and widely applicable metric for poverty or hunger across all countries. The West has been morally contemptable in its participation/backing of military takeovers and installation of dictatorial leaders in other countries. The way the Western media portrays communist bloc countries is too biased/unanalytical. SAPs have some negative consequences and should be reviewed (if they haven’t been already). Big Pharma has a profit incentive to market their products, and to keep people sick (I’m going beyond what Hickel says here but I feel it’s a more impactful point). Illicit transfers and tax havens are a serious problem which disadvantages all countries, particularly developing countries. The West has been the greatest contributor to climate change, and the global south will experience the worst effects from it. Hickel is right about the extent of fossil fuel subsidies and I would support removing them to give renewables a bigger share of the market. Hickel is on the right track with his analysis of the benefits of a UBI vs microfinance, but likely overstates the results and relies too heavily of cash transfers as being representative of a true UBI (it remains to be seen what widespread adoption of a UBI would bring). There are many severe impacts which humans are having on the environment such as loss of species habitats, fisheries, and topsoils. We are using more resources on a per capita basis and this needs to reverse if we are to live sustainably on the planet. Regenerative farming seems like a great idea – I am all for modernising the way we farm to get the best outcomes for humanity and the environment.
So that’s just a snapshot on what I believe Hickel got right. Again, I sympathise with his views. But given my interest in data analytics, I just cant look past the problems. I wont even come close to listing out all of the examples I found (I went down the rabbit hole on this book and ended up writing out over 50 pages of notes about errors), but here are a few:
P15 – 460 million hungry people in 1974 to 800 million in 2017 – an increase of 340 million but as a proportion of population a decrease of 11.5 percent to 10.6 percent. I’m going with 800 million as an estimate based on https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and... but it really depends on how you define “hungry”. Global headcount of those in poverty hasn’t changed since 1981 – staying around 1 billion. Over this time the global population has risen by 3 billion people, making the proportion of those in poverty drop from 22 percent to 13 percent. “If we look at absolute numbers – the original metric by which the world’s governments agreed to measure progress…” Scientists use proportions, not absolute numbers. The reason is to control for population increases. I can’t think of any serious analyst that would use absolute numbers when trying to understand trends to do with humans, or an analyst that would look at a mistake someone else makes (the world’s governments in this case) and copy it.
P40 – again more faulty reasoning focusing on absolute numbers rather than proportions (Hickel does this a lot). Looking at the proportion of people under the dollar-a-day rubric, about 24 percent of people were in absolute poverty in 1987 and it was the same – roughly 24 percent – in 2000. Getting worse? No. Staying the same.
In my opinion some of the more moralistic points Hickel makes are all too often followed by proposed solutions that aren’t critically analysed enough and seem too unrealistic. At the very least they would require a great deal of control. The fundamental political distinction which isn’t openly discussed (in a cost/benefit, pro/con kind of way) is the trade off between freedom and egalitarianism. The most powerful argument which I feel justifies edging back to the egalitarian side are the negative externalities of climate change of which the West is the main culprit.
P60-61- Time for more analysis (see below). Hickel is wrong. The reduction in poverty for people in sub-Saharan Africa is projected to be down from a proportion of 56.4 percent of people in 1990 to 27.2 percent in 2030. Cool!
Number of people in poverty 1990 through to 2030 estimate:
1990: 287 million in poverty (out of pop 509 million) = 56.4 percent
2030: 335 million in poverty (out of pop 1.23 billion) = 27.2 percent (not zero, but a reduction of just over half)
Population measures of sub-Saharan Africa to establish a trend in population growth:
1990: 509 million out of 5.33 billion (9.55 percent of global pop)
2019: 1.107 billion out of 7.71 billion (14.4 percent of global pop)
Assuming the proportion of global population in sub-Saharan Africa remains at 14.4 percent (it is actually likely to grow over the next few decades by most estimates) then the population of sub-Saharan Africa by 2030 will be 1.23 billion people.
P92 – Hickel makes a bunch of claims that imply Britain ruined India and China, and they sounds pretty wild. A little digging shows they are wildly exaggerated. My point in the following is not to show a one-sided account in favour of the British, rather to show ways in which Hickel is wrong, or how his analysis seems very surface level and, if we’re being real, biased. I only tackled some of the claims that had easily accessible data that wasn't in books or behind a pay wall.
• As late as 1800, per capita income in China was ahead of Western Europe. As late as 1800, per capita income for Asia as a whole was better than Europe as a whole
o Daily wages In key European cities have been above or on par with Beijing since 1738: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/f...
o GDP for China is actually lower than Western European nations such as the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and the Netherlands from 1600 right to the present day: https://ourworldindata.org/economic-g...
o This is still a very surface level look at these stats, and there are some drawbacks to per capita GDP as a proxy for per capita income or average wages, but given Hickel’s treatment of stats thus far in the book, I am extremely skeptical that he has represented what he cited with any degree of accuracy (or maybe what he cited is not as accurate as what I have? Not sure)
• In the south of India (and other regions), workers had higher incomes than the British in the 18th Century (around 1750?).
o False. Or at least no where near that simple. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science...
o https://www.sciencedirect.com/science...
• Indian unemployment was lower at this time (around 1750?) too.
• From 1800 to 1850, Indian incomes declined by over 50 percent.
o And when the British Raj came into effect incomes did not decline - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British...
• From 1872 to 1921, Indian life expectancy dropped by 20 percent.
o Another estimate suggests a drop of 2 percent from 1881 to 1921 (start of the data set is 1881): https://ourworldindata.org/life-expec... - notice also in this data the dramatic increase in life expectancy from 1800 to 1950 to 2015. Also note that while still under British rule, life expectancy increased from 1911 to 1941 by about 41 percent (my point here isn’t to cherry pick the data – its to show that if you can do it [poorly] to make Britain look bad, you can do the same to make them look good. All of this is surface level analysis, really).
P133 – On the topic of the economic history of Chile, I want to show you some examples of how not to present data:
o 1982 - hyperinflation struck again (what percentage?), unemployment 35% (compared to?) It was actually a touch under 25% https://si2.bcentral.cl/public/pdf/re...
o 1988 - poverty rate 41% (compared to?), average wages 14% lower (than what?), min wage 42% lower (than what?). Food intake of poorest 40% decreased from 2000 calories per day to 1600 (when was it 2000 calories per day?)
o 1993 – GDP per capita 12% below pre-coup level (assuming this is early 1973 or 1972?)
Some tables or graphs would have helped to present a clearer picture with this data. You often find this kind of reporting when someone is trying to frame the problem in a certain way to make you think in a certain way – context is everything.
Again, Hickel has distorted the facts drastically. The inflation rate at any point from 1980 to 1985 did not breach 40%, while it was over 150% by the end of 1972 and approx. 300% by the time the coup occurred. Stats from https://tradingeconomics.com/chile/in....
This is in contrast, but broadly congruent with, the inflation statistics from other sources - 260.5 in 1972, 605.1 in 1973 (which I would suggest was just after the coup). https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/68995...
As for GDP per capita, lets be generous and say pre-coup levels were the highest during Allende’s government (1971) at 4901.2 USD (2019 dollars). It reached a low point of 3856 USD (2019 dollars) in 1975. It had surpassed this level by 1980 (5172), with a fall again due to the banking crash to hit a low of 4465.6 in 1983 (much higher than the low of 1975) and it would again breach 1971 levels by 1987. In 1993, GDP per capita (again 2019 USD to keep the comparison constant) was 7214.7 – quite high and by this time it had been over 1971 levels for six years. Data from https://tradingeconomics.com/chile/gd.... The World Bank’s data shows the same story (check it for yourself): https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/...
As for the decline in calories per person under Pinochet, data suggests that it started under Allende and that it is likely to have been higher under Pinochet. see: https://www.jstor.org/stable/45132091...
https://ourworldindata.org/food-supply (particularly the chart on calories per person, filter for Chile).
The other obvious point to make here is that if Chile were to have continued to print money, inflation would have increased, and – combined with declining domestic food production, increasing food imports, and subsequent rising deficit – the shocks to consumer prices would have likely kept the market for food unstable and increased the incidence of hunger. It’s a tough sell for most people, but if your country is experiencing hyperinflation and you cant afford to pay for it (by printing money) because it will exacerbate the problem, then its probably time to cut back spending, privatise to a degree, and try and let the market correct itself (though this will increase unemployment if you cant afford to boost wage growth).
So there you have it – again this is a small sample of what I looked at. There is an incredible amount that is wrong with how Hickel presents and misuses data in this book. The argument I want to make here is that if you make data errors of these various types, you don’t actually learn anything. There’s a real possibility that all you’re doing is wasting your time. On a positive note, in researching what Hickel claimed at every step of the way, I did learn a lot.
Europe gained economically from colonialism, conquest and slavery. Western backed coups of certain South American countries happened, and they have a very murky and disturbing history. Data from the GFI shows capital flows can disadvantage developing countries: https://gfintegrity.org/press-release... The obvious question is: how is the development going? (i.e. is there industrialistaion, creation of the information economy, the rise of science and technology to boost educational and health outcomes). It’s difficult to have a consistent and widely applicable metric for poverty or hunger across all countries. The West has been morally contemptable in its participation/backing of military takeovers and installation of dictatorial leaders in other countries. The way the Western media portrays communist bloc countries is too biased/unanalytical. SAPs have some negative consequences and should be reviewed (if they haven’t been already). Big Pharma has a profit incentive to market their products, and to keep people sick (I’m going beyond what Hickel says here but I feel it’s a more impactful point). Illicit transfers and tax havens are a serious problem which disadvantages all countries, particularly developing countries. The West has been the greatest contributor to climate change, and the global south will experience the worst effects from it. Hickel is right about the extent of fossil fuel subsidies and I would support removing them to give renewables a bigger share of the market. Hickel is on the right track with his analysis of the benefits of a UBI vs microfinance, but likely overstates the results and relies too heavily of cash transfers as being representative of a true UBI (it remains to be seen what widespread adoption of a UBI would bring). There are many severe impacts which humans are having on the environment such as loss of species habitats, fisheries, and topsoils. We are using more resources on a per capita basis and this needs to reverse if we are to live sustainably on the planet. Regenerative farming seems like a great idea – I am all for modernising the way we farm to get the best outcomes for humanity and the environment.
So that’s just a snapshot on what I believe Hickel got right. Again, I sympathise with his views. But given my interest in data analytics, I just cant look past the problems. I wont even come close to listing out all of the examples I found (I went down the rabbit hole on this book and ended up writing out over 50 pages of notes about errors), but here are a few:
P15 – 460 million hungry people in 1974 to 800 million in 2017 – an increase of 340 million but as a proportion of population a decrease of 11.5 percent to 10.6 percent. I’m going with 800 million as an estimate based on https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and... but it really depends on how you define “hungry”. Global headcount of those in poverty hasn’t changed since 1981 – staying around 1 billion. Over this time the global population has risen by 3 billion people, making the proportion of those in poverty drop from 22 percent to 13 percent. “If we look at absolute numbers – the original metric by which the world’s governments agreed to measure progress…” Scientists use proportions, not absolute numbers. The reason is to control for population increases. I can’t think of any serious analyst that would use absolute numbers when trying to understand trends to do with humans, or an analyst that would look at a mistake someone else makes (the world’s governments in this case) and copy it.
P40 – again more faulty reasoning focusing on absolute numbers rather than proportions (Hickel does this a lot). Looking at the proportion of people under the dollar-a-day rubric, about 24 percent of people were in absolute poverty in 1987 and it was the same – roughly 24 percent – in 2000. Getting worse? No. Staying the same.
In my opinion some of the more moralistic points Hickel makes are all too often followed by proposed solutions that aren’t critically analysed enough and seem too unrealistic. At the very least they would require a great deal of control. The fundamental political distinction which isn’t openly discussed (in a cost/benefit, pro/con kind of way) is the trade off between freedom and egalitarianism. The most powerful argument which I feel justifies edging back to the egalitarian side are the negative externalities of climate change of which the West is the main culprit.
P60-61- Time for more analysis (see below). Hickel is wrong. The reduction in poverty for people in sub-Saharan Africa is projected to be down from a proportion of 56.4 percent of people in 1990 to 27.2 percent in 2030. Cool!
Number of people in poverty 1990 through to 2030 estimate:
1990: 287 million in poverty (out of pop 509 million) = 56.4 percent
2030: 335 million in poverty (out of pop 1.23 billion) = 27.2 percent (not zero, but a reduction of just over half)
Population measures of sub-Saharan Africa to establish a trend in population growth:
1990: 509 million out of 5.33 billion (9.55 percent of global pop)
2019: 1.107 billion out of 7.71 billion (14.4 percent of global pop)
Assuming the proportion of global population in sub-Saharan Africa remains at 14.4 percent (it is actually likely to grow over the next few decades by most estimates) then the population of sub-Saharan Africa by 2030 will be 1.23 billion people.
P92 – Hickel makes a bunch of claims that imply Britain ruined India and China, and they sounds pretty wild. A little digging shows they are wildly exaggerated. My point in the following is not to show a one-sided account in favour of the British, rather to show ways in which Hickel is wrong, or how his analysis seems very surface level and, if we’re being real, biased. I only tackled some of the claims that had easily accessible data that wasn't in books or behind a pay wall.
• As late as 1800, per capita income in China was ahead of Western Europe. As late as 1800, per capita income for Asia as a whole was better than Europe as a whole
o Daily wages In key European cities have been above or on par with Beijing since 1738: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/f...
o GDP for China is actually lower than Western European nations such as the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and the Netherlands from 1600 right to the present day: https://ourworldindata.org/economic-g...
o This is still a very surface level look at these stats, and there are some drawbacks to per capita GDP as a proxy for per capita income or average wages, but given Hickel’s treatment of stats thus far in the book, I am extremely skeptical that he has represented what he cited with any degree of accuracy (or maybe what he cited is not as accurate as what I have? Not sure)
• In the south of India (and other regions), workers had higher incomes than the British in the 18th Century (around 1750?).
o False. Or at least no where near that simple. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science...
o https://www.sciencedirect.com/science...
• Indian unemployment was lower at this time (around 1750?) too.
• From 1800 to 1850, Indian incomes declined by over 50 percent.
o And when the British Raj came into effect incomes did not decline - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British...
• From 1872 to 1921, Indian life expectancy dropped by 20 percent.
o Another estimate suggests a drop of 2 percent from 1881 to 1921 (start of the data set is 1881): https://ourworldindata.org/life-expec... - notice also in this data the dramatic increase in life expectancy from 1800 to 1950 to 2015. Also note that while still under British rule, life expectancy increased from 1911 to 1941 by about 41 percent (my point here isn’t to cherry pick the data – its to show that if you can do it [poorly] to make Britain look bad, you can do the same to make them look good. All of this is surface level analysis, really).
P133 – On the topic of the economic history of Chile, I want to show you some examples of how not to present data:
o 1982 - hyperinflation struck again (what percentage?), unemployment 35% (compared to?) It was actually a touch under 25% https://si2.bcentral.cl/public/pdf/re...
o 1988 - poverty rate 41% (compared to?), average wages 14% lower (than what?), min wage 42% lower (than what?). Food intake of poorest 40% decreased from 2000 calories per day to 1600 (when was it 2000 calories per day?)
o 1993 – GDP per capita 12% below pre-coup level (assuming this is early 1973 or 1972?)
Some tables or graphs would have helped to present a clearer picture with this data. You often find this kind of reporting when someone is trying to frame the problem in a certain way to make you think in a certain way – context is everything.
Again, Hickel has distorted the facts drastically. The inflation rate at any point from 1980 to 1985 did not breach 40%, while it was over 150% by the end of 1972 and approx. 300% by the time the coup occurred. Stats from https://tradingeconomics.com/chile/in....
This is in contrast, but broadly congruent with, the inflation statistics from other sources - 260.5 in 1972, 605.1 in 1973 (which I would suggest was just after the coup). https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/68995...
As for GDP per capita, lets be generous and say pre-coup levels were the highest during Allende’s government (1971) at 4901.2 USD (2019 dollars). It reached a low point of 3856 USD (2019 dollars) in 1975. It had surpassed this level by 1980 (5172), with a fall again due to the banking crash to hit a low of 4465.6 in 1983 (much higher than the low of 1975) and it would again breach 1971 levels by 1987. In 1993, GDP per capita (again 2019 USD to keep the comparison constant) was 7214.7 – quite high and by this time it had been over 1971 levels for six years. Data from https://tradingeconomics.com/chile/gd.... The World Bank’s data shows the same story (check it for yourself): https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/...
As for the decline in calories per person under Pinochet, data suggests that it started under Allende and that it is likely to have been higher under Pinochet. see: https://www.jstor.org/stable/45132091...
https://ourworldindata.org/food-supply (particularly the chart on calories per person, filter for Chile).
The other obvious point to make here is that if Chile were to have continued to print money, inflation would have increased, and – combined with declining domestic food production, increasing food imports, and subsequent rising deficit – the shocks to consumer prices would have likely kept the market for food unstable and increased the incidence of hunger. It’s a tough sell for most people, but if your country is experiencing hyperinflation and you cant afford to pay for it (by printing money) because it will exacerbate the problem, then its probably time to cut back spending, privatise to a degree, and try and let the market correct itself (though this will increase unemployment if you cant afford to boost wage growth).
So there you have it – again this is a small sample of what I looked at. There is an incredible amount that is wrong with how Hickel presents and misuses data in this book. The argument I want to make here is that if you make data errors of these various types, you don’t actually learn anything. There’s a real possibility that all you’re doing is wasting your time. On a positive note, in researching what Hickel claimed at every step of the way, I did learn a lot.
April 10, 2022
I have spent the last few years deliberately entering conversations on the world economy by talking about the first, second, and third world and being corrected by those quick to point out we now talk about the developed and developing world. It’s a gambit that allows me to suggest why ‘ developed’ and ‘developing’ are terms we shouldn’t embrace. This book beautifully explains why not. It is a must read for anyone out there who still doesn’t understand the extent of global inequality, the reasons for it, and what needs to be done. Of course, it is a depressing read, as knowledge itself rarely leads to real change, but it is an important read.
January 4, 2022
Important argument and analytical narrative; however, as pointed out by another reviewer, the referencing in this book is weak, and I often found no source at all to back up some of the claims made.
I'm still giving it 4 stars since it conveys a critical argument: poverty has historical (colonial) and political-economical roots. The global North seeks to address this via aid and development initiatives but which merely acts as a smokescreen for the much larger unequal exchange driven by multinational corporations and supported by institutional frameworks provided by the World Bank and IMF.
The solutions offered by Hickel is both crucial yet utopian. For example, his proposal for a global Universal Basic Income currently seems so far out of reach that it renders the suggestions unproductive (however, UBI, on a more local level, remains a promising strategy to deal with rising precarity and inequality, see Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen by Standing). A global minimum wage and corporate tax seem more feasible in the near future as the latter has even been proposed by the EU. A debt jubilee we can only hope for, however, the issue has once again surfaced in debates (much due to Graeber's work Debt: The First 5,000 Years).
I'm still giving it 4 stars since it conveys a critical argument: poverty has historical (colonial) and political-economical roots. The global North seeks to address this via aid and development initiatives but which merely acts as a smokescreen for the much larger unequal exchange driven by multinational corporations and supported by institutional frameworks provided by the World Bank and IMF.
The solutions offered by Hickel is both crucial yet utopian. For example, his proposal for a global Universal Basic Income currently seems so far out of reach that it renders the suggestions unproductive (however, UBI, on a more local level, remains a promising strategy to deal with rising precarity and inequality, see Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen by Standing). A global minimum wage and corporate tax seem more feasible in the near future as the latter has even been proposed by the EU. A debt jubilee we can only hope for, however, the issue has once again surfaced in debates (much due to Graeber's work Debt: The First 5,000 Years).
July 20, 2018
Did not finish - I got about halfway before giving up.
While I gave this book a 2, I thought some parts deserved a 3, and many others deserved a 1.
The author has some good information and history about parts of colonialism and conquest that happened for 500 years. There is no disputing the facts of what happened, and he correctly captures much of the negative that happened. With that being said, he draws conclusions that do not seem to be supported by the facts, exaggerates others, and makes jumps in logic well beyond that which I am comfortable with. He is also very selective about what facts he uses, and will ignore some if they do not fit his overall narrative. He is overly critical of capitalism at the same time he is praising feudalism, and this is not a viewpoint I have heard many places before, especially as capitalism is the system that lifted people out of the poverty that had previously existed for about 98% of the global population in the late 18th century (the result of feudalism). In addition, as he suggests that the northern countries (primarily Europe) were only slightly ahead of southern countries (Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia) by the year 1500 is too much of a stretch. While the differences were certainly smaller then than they are today, suggesting they were roughly equal in terms of advancements and standards of living is a stretch.
Perhaps the second half of the book toned down on the bias and presented a more balanced view (not only focusing on the negatives) as he looks at solutions, he had been pretty consistent in his presentation so I won't hold my breathe on it.
While I gave this book a 2, I thought some parts deserved a 3, and many others deserved a 1.
The author has some good information and history about parts of colonialism and conquest that happened for 500 years. There is no disputing the facts of what happened, and he correctly captures much of the negative that happened. With that being said, he draws conclusions that do not seem to be supported by the facts, exaggerates others, and makes jumps in logic well beyond that which I am comfortable with. He is also very selective about what facts he uses, and will ignore some if they do not fit his overall narrative. He is overly critical of capitalism at the same time he is praising feudalism, and this is not a viewpoint I have heard many places before, especially as capitalism is the system that lifted people out of the poverty that had previously existed for about 98% of the global population in the late 18th century (the result of feudalism). In addition, as he suggests that the northern countries (primarily Europe) were only slightly ahead of southern countries (Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia) by the year 1500 is too much of a stretch. While the differences were certainly smaller then than they are today, suggesting they were roughly equal in terms of advancements and standards of living is a stretch.
Perhaps the second half of the book toned down on the bias and presented a more balanced view (not only focusing on the negatives) as he looks at solutions, he had been pretty consistent in his presentation so I won't hold my breathe on it.
June 15, 2017
This book is a powerful intervention. Must-reading for anyone who wants to understand what caused mass poverty and global inequality, and why it persists today. Hickel challenges many of the dominant assumptions out there, and does so in a clear and readable way - his writing is accessible and engaging to a lay audience. This book will challenge you and inform you, and will undoubtedly change the debate about global inequality and its solutions.
February 27, 2019
This book in my opinion serves two purposes: The first being turning major narratives and conventional wisdom on their head, and the second being serving as a straight forward, accessible alternative history of how the global status-quo came to be. Hickel cleverly and effortlessly dissects and refutes the following economic tropes that are commonly heard within Liberal circles. They include but are not limited to:
1- The world is getting better (propagated by the likes of Steven Pinker and Jordan Peterson), thus the current socioeconomic foundation of the world should persist, with minor tweaks to account for the "bad side" of capitalism. [Hickel completely refutes this]
2-Philanthropy works (e.g: Bill Gates and co. spending money to "develop" Africa )
3- Third World Countries (the Global South) are lagging behind because of internal political/social issues, or because of corruption.
4- Millennial Development Goals and other grand development projects care about and actually work on eradicating poverty. [He proves that it's quite the opposite..statistical tools are manipulated to make it as if things are improving, while actually things are getting worse]
5- Free Trade and market liberalization are good for all, since (you know), every region has "comparative advantage" [Hickel destroys these assumptions and argues how these global institutions are tools for neo-colonialism and remote control of the Global South]
The book tackles every single point with excellent refutations and backed up claims. The in-text citation of the book are entirely absent, which makes references checking a little cumbersome because you have to check them at the back of the book. But overall, it's a smooth articulation of a lot of ideas I already had but was never able to combine them in a comprehensive manner.
1- The world is getting better (propagated by the likes of Steven Pinker and Jordan Peterson), thus the current socioeconomic foundation of the world should persist, with minor tweaks to account for the "bad side" of capitalism. [Hickel completely refutes this]
2-Philanthropy works (e.g: Bill Gates and co. spending money to "develop" Africa )
3- Third World Countries (the Global South) are lagging behind because of internal political/social issues, or because of corruption.
4- Millennial Development Goals and other grand development projects care about and actually work on eradicating poverty. [He proves that it's quite the opposite..statistical tools are manipulated to make it as if things are improving, while actually things are getting worse]
5- Free Trade and market liberalization are good for all, since (you know), every region has "comparative advantage" [Hickel destroys these assumptions and argues how these global institutions are tools for neo-colonialism and remote control of the Global South]
The book tackles every single point with excellent refutations and backed up claims. The in-text citation of the book are entirely absent, which makes references checking a little cumbersome because you have to check them at the back of the book. But overall, it's a smooth articulation of a lot of ideas I already had but was never able to combine them in a comprehensive manner.
July 12, 2019
Outstanding and eye-opening. A book everyone on this earth must read; for those in the "developing world" to understand how their kind was repeatedly robbed first through brutal violence then through devious means of unfair trade and manipulation, for those in the "developed world" to see the blood on their hands.
Long ago I discovered the fact that world food production exceeds consumption, yet half the planet lives in hunger and poverty. The poor countries were making the food, yet they were the ones with hungry citizens. It befuddled me and I couldn't decipher much about how this came about.
I kept hearing from Hans Rosling, Bill Gates and the likes about how the world is much better today. It was definitely less physically violent than before; but then I kept hearing of "economic hitmen", George Soros and his currency manipulation, the 2008 crisis and the bailouts of the banks; the truth seemed different. A related theme emerged; one of financial violence. Subtler, unnoticeable and unintelligible to an average person; the rules of the world were either made or twisted to suit the whims of the rich/powerful few.
This book ties all these disparate thoughts about the inequality and unfairness of the world into one grand 500 year long story. 500 years ago the lives of people around the would were more or less similar. Then over half a millenium of unjust acts of colonialism, privatisation of the commons, slavery, unfair trade practices, political manipulation and more; a new global poor were CREATED. Poverty was engineered. This book might make you angry, but you should be.
Long ago I discovered the fact that world food production exceeds consumption, yet half the planet lives in hunger and poverty. The poor countries were making the food, yet they were the ones with hungry citizens. It befuddled me and I couldn't decipher much about how this came about.
I kept hearing from Hans Rosling, Bill Gates and the likes about how the world is much better today. It was definitely less physically violent than before; but then I kept hearing of "economic hitmen", George Soros and his currency manipulation, the 2008 crisis and the bailouts of the banks; the truth seemed different. A related theme emerged; one of financial violence. Subtler, unnoticeable and unintelligible to an average person; the rules of the world were either made or twisted to suit the whims of the rich/powerful few.
This book ties all these disparate thoughts about the inequality and unfairness of the world into one grand 500 year long story. 500 years ago the lives of people around the would were more or less similar. Then over half a millenium of unjust acts of colonialism, privatisation of the commons, slavery, unfair trade practices, political manipulation and more; a new global poor were CREATED. Poverty was engineered. This book might make you angry, but you should be.
September 20, 2019
The Sapiens book for capitalism. The economic history of the last 500 years. Why poor countries are poor and why rich countries are rich. What does the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO do. What's up with all those NGOs in Africa.
These are some of questions this book answers. Other reviews said it feels like taking the red pill and leaving the Matrix; it is exactly that. And the answers will make you outrageous.
Maybe you won't learn anything new; global equality is a major issue and we all know it. But the analysis, the facts, and the details this book presents helped me understand virtually everything about the current global economic system. I now feel much more confident to gauge what any economic policies are about.
Great book.
These are some of questions this book answers. Other reviews said it feels like taking the red pill and leaving the Matrix; it is exactly that. And the answers will make you outrageous.
Maybe you won't learn anything new; global equality is a major issue and we all know it. But the analysis, the facts, and the details this book presents helped me understand virtually everything about the current global economic system. I now feel much more confident to gauge what any economic policies are about.
Great book.
January 31, 2021
An excellent book that deserves to have more people talking about it. If you're curious about the impact of free-market economics on society beyond the usual "liberalization is awesome" narrative, this is a must read.
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"The Divide" is a detailed and data-backed argument for why capitalism doesn't really work for the vast majority of the human race. "GDP growth" and "Free trade" demand ever-increasing resource extraction, labor exploitation and debt fueled consumption, all of which result in gains which are pocketed by a few. The book paints a detailed picture of how we got here, why this is impossible to sustain without ecological collapse, and what can do to create a fairer and more equitable world.
Key highlights include:
1. The message of improvement in living standards under the current economic system is false, or at the very least, exaggerated. The development sector and philanthropy is often intended to be a distraction for deeper structural issues - as long as they remain unsolved, everything else is just a band-aid.
2. Where did "Poverty" come from? Contrary to what many assume, it is not the status quo for many of the world's "developing" nations. It is the result of exploitation, both historical (colonization, political interference in newly established democracies) and present day ("structural adjustment" programs imposed by the IMF and the World Bank in return for loans, unfair trade rules etc.)
3. Global Poverty is a political problem and requires political solutions. These include forgiving the debt of developing nations, strengthening the ability of countries to set appropriate regulations around trade and tariffs, and limiting capital flight via tariff misinvoicing and tax loopholes. Most importantly, it involves imagining and working towards an alternate system, one that is hinged not on limitless growth, but on providing on alternative metrics of societal progress such as happiness or well-being.
My one issue with the book is Jason Hickel's hypocrisy when it comes to talking about data manipulation and exaggeration : he accuses the UN and the World Bank of distorting statistics to suit their narrative of global progress, but I remember at least a couple of instances where he himself indulged in analytical gymnastics to support his viewpoint. Nonetheless, his points are valid for the most part.
-----
"The Divide" is a detailed and data-backed argument for why capitalism doesn't really work for the vast majority of the human race. "GDP growth" and "Free trade" demand ever-increasing resource extraction, labor exploitation and debt fueled consumption, all of which result in gains which are pocketed by a few. The book paints a detailed picture of how we got here, why this is impossible to sustain without ecological collapse, and what can do to create a fairer and more equitable world.
Key highlights include:
1. The message of improvement in living standards under the current economic system is false, or at the very least, exaggerated. The development sector and philanthropy is often intended to be a distraction for deeper structural issues - as long as they remain unsolved, everything else is just a band-aid.
2. Where did "Poverty" come from? Contrary to what many assume, it is not the status quo for many of the world's "developing" nations. It is the result of exploitation, both historical (colonization, political interference in newly established democracies) and present day ("structural adjustment" programs imposed by the IMF and the World Bank in return for loans, unfair trade rules etc.)
3. Global Poverty is a political problem and requires political solutions. These include forgiving the debt of developing nations, strengthening the ability of countries to set appropriate regulations around trade and tariffs, and limiting capital flight via tariff misinvoicing and tax loopholes. Most importantly, it involves imagining and working towards an alternate system, one that is hinged not on limitless growth, but on providing on alternative metrics of societal progress such as happiness or well-being.
My one issue with the book is Jason Hickel's hypocrisy when it comes to talking about data manipulation and exaggeration : he accuses the UN and the World Bank of distorting statistics to suit their narrative of global progress, but I remember at least a couple of instances where he himself indulged in analytical gymnastics to support his viewpoint. Nonetheless, his points are valid for the most part.
February 23, 2022
5 out of 5. After reading the Open Veins of Latin America this was clearly one of the best options I could have made for further inequality socioeconomic reading. Despite the "happy" choice, this book takes one through the darkest and most manipulative happenings of the past 150 years: from aid deceit to suffocating and never-ending debt, Jason Hickel explains why are we still so further apart and why some want to keep that distance. The here and now is pitch-dark and the future not bright at all.
March 6, 2021
Some will probably say that Hickel is one-sided - they’d be right, I guess - and quibble with some of his factual claims. Some will say that the last part of the book - solutions - is unconvincing or at least insufficient. Probably right too (I’m looking forward to reading Hickel’s new book on “degrowth”).
All this notwithstanding I deeply appreciate this anger-inducing tour through all the crimes perpetrated by “the West” since Colombus arrived in 1492; the sheer unfairness of it all. Much, much worse than I suspected. And I thought it was bad.
We’ve got to change this world.
All this notwithstanding I deeply appreciate this anger-inducing tour through all the crimes perpetrated by “the West” since Colombus arrived in 1492; the sheer unfairness of it all. Much, much worse than I suspected. And I thought it was bad.
We’ve got to change this world.
September 19, 2019
Mr. Hickel brings us back to reality in an incrediby concise, factual, entertaining and simple way. Thank you Mr. Hickel.
The definitive smackdown of Steven Pinker's (see The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined and Hans Rosling's (see Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think) ideologies. If you've read this and you still believe Pinker and Rosling well, I get it: Smile or Die (read the book titled this by Barbara Ehrenreich, Smile or Die for another dose of reality).
The only thing that Smile or Diers can say againt this book it might be TOO REAL. And most people are barely holding their shit together, so feel they need candy-coated ecstatic worldviews to be true.
Ok, fair enough, we can stay little narcissitic 10 year olds if we want...but how's that going for us?
3 reasons why the world is not good if we don't change trajectories ASAP:
1. The Climate Crisis is real. 98% of scientists (the 2% left over actually work for the petrol companies, so...1+1=2...) (see This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate or On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal). Throw some sugar or something on it if you don't like your coffee black, whatever, but this shit is still real. Unless you don't believe in science either....Um, no science, no future, kapeesh? We can't go back to hunter-gathering, nope, no. But we can still have fun doing the right thing. That's REAL optimism.
2. Nuclear war breaking out is as close as it has ever been. Trump ain't helping boy and girls, we lost precious time with him. So, he's a better entertainer (in a clownish egotistical, 'if he's that way I must not be so bad' way, I suppose) than some other guys but cripes almighty are so many of us really still children? (Have you seen the Doomsday Clock timeline (https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-cloc...)? it's 2 minutes to midnight guys....)
3. Easy access to false information online is making it even harder to discern reality. So much for internet saving the world. It has been suggested we need the robots to save us, I for one don't want us to need Robot Nannies (Robot Nanny: A human-robot society? Not if, but when.). por favor, please, s'il vous plaie no, non?
Perhaps we can value learning CRITICAL THINKING so we can each understand reality and be able to compare ideas and make rational conclusions instead of jumping on superficial feel-good bandwagons. (See the greatest educator of the twentieth century Paulo Freire for example: Education for Critical Consciousness)
As for positive-motivation junkies, you can still be positive since you need to be realistic to be truly optimistic anyways. A true optimist would face any 'negative situation' and see the obstacle as something amazing and your 'smile' will kick any obstacle's ass. The bigger the obstacle you face and overcome the bigger the optimist. Putting your head in the sand is not optimism, boys and girls. That's the deepest pessimism, or rather cynicism at its worst.
Now, chop-chop, let's move on. We've got to save the world!
It really is Smile (as in Face the Obstacles stoically, see The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph) or Die folks. Because nuclear war would annihilate us, as will global warming if it continues on the current trend. Science is only good if we use our heads to direct it optimally. Or yeah, it can certainly destroy us if we elect clowns, act like clowns, think like clowns and just let our 'superficial, fast thoughts' dominate (see Thinking, Fast and Slow).
Show us how 'positive' you really are. Come on, you can do it.
Pretty please, with sugar on top?
The definitive smackdown of Steven Pinker's (see The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined and Hans Rosling's (see Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think) ideologies. If you've read this and you still believe Pinker and Rosling well, I get it: Smile or Die (read the book titled this by Barbara Ehrenreich, Smile or Die for another dose of reality).
The only thing that Smile or Diers can say againt this book it might be TOO REAL. And most people are barely holding their shit together, so feel they need candy-coated ecstatic worldviews to be true.
Ok, fair enough, we can stay little narcissitic 10 year olds if we want...but how's that going for us?
3 reasons why the world is not good if we don't change trajectories ASAP:
1. The Climate Crisis is real. 98% of scientists (the 2% left over actually work for the petrol companies, so...1+1=2...) (see This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate or On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal). Throw some sugar or something on it if you don't like your coffee black, whatever, but this shit is still real. Unless you don't believe in science either....Um, no science, no future, kapeesh? We can't go back to hunter-gathering, nope, no. But we can still have fun doing the right thing. That's REAL optimism.
2. Nuclear war breaking out is as close as it has ever been. Trump ain't helping boy and girls, we lost precious time with him. So, he's a better entertainer (in a clownish egotistical, 'if he's that way I must not be so bad' way, I suppose) than some other guys but cripes almighty are so many of us really still children? (Have you seen the Doomsday Clock timeline (https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-cloc...)? it's 2 minutes to midnight guys....)
3. Easy access to false information online is making it even harder to discern reality. So much for internet saving the world. It has been suggested we need the robots to save us, I for one don't want us to need Robot Nannies (Robot Nanny: A human-robot society? Not if, but when.). por favor, please, s'il vous plaie no, non?
Perhaps we can value learning CRITICAL THINKING so we can each understand reality and be able to compare ideas and make rational conclusions instead of jumping on superficial feel-good bandwagons. (See the greatest educator of the twentieth century Paulo Freire for example: Education for Critical Consciousness)
As for positive-motivation junkies, you can still be positive since you need to be realistic to be truly optimistic anyways. A true optimist would face any 'negative situation' and see the obstacle as something amazing and your 'smile' will kick any obstacle's ass. The bigger the obstacle you face and overcome the bigger the optimist. Putting your head in the sand is not optimism, boys and girls. That's the deepest pessimism, or rather cynicism at its worst.
Now, chop-chop, let's move on. We've got to save the world!
It really is Smile (as in Face the Obstacles stoically, see The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph) or Die folks. Because nuclear war would annihilate us, as will global warming if it continues on the current trend. Science is only good if we use our heads to direct it optimally. Or yeah, it can certainly destroy us if we elect clowns, act like clowns, think like clowns and just let our 'superficial, fast thoughts' dominate (see Thinking, Fast and Slow).
Show us how 'positive' you really are. Come on, you can do it.
Pretty please, with sugar on top?
August 2, 2023
On top of everything, it's just a fantastic resource. Highly recommend it. Will be returning to it and acquainting myself with the reference list.
April 19, 2022
Very good summary of global inequality (colonialism, Washington consensus, coups) and what appear to me to be pragmatic solutions. I really liked this
November 28, 2021
This is an excellent introductory resource into the causes of the staggering levels of inequality between the Global North and the Global South. The account offers a comprehensive appraisal of the major causes of this Global divide - colonialism, debt-entrapment, neoliberalism in the form of structural adjustment programs, "free" trade, and all the usual ills of globalization. Hickel takes aim at some of the core assumptions held by people all over about the causes of poverty and underdevelopment which conventional wisdom would have us naturalize to the Global South or to the so-called corruption amongst the leaders and dictators of the Global South (the same dictators, incidentally, forced upon those countries through coups and military interventions). Some may for the first time be introduced to the massive levels of land grabs undertaken or the tax evasion done by multinational companies in the form of tax havens and transfer mispricing. The central point of this book is that the "divide between rich countries and poor countries isn’t natural or inevitable. It has been created." The statistics are as bone-chilling as they are astounding.
Since this is intended as an introductory text, the analysis does not dwell a lot on the intricacies, details and nuances; but it does point out whole areas that are worthy of deeper study should the reader choose. The book closes with some of the ways in which we can ameliorate the massive global divide and create a more equitable world in the face of climate catastrophe. The ideas are thought-provoking and worthy of much reflection and deliberation. However, in the end, the questions remain: who undertakes these actions and how are they undertaken? For example, how does mass debt-cancellation for poorer countries (who have already paid many times their principal amounts borrowed) occur in the real world where doing so would bring the full might of the US military? Or even in a world where the national bourgeoise would pummel any attempts for a more equitable redistribution of wealth in the poorer countries? Any proposed solutions that do not take into account such major structural factors so deeply embedded into the order of global capitalism will remain things that sound good on paper.
Since this is intended as an introductory text, the analysis does not dwell a lot on the intricacies, details and nuances; but it does point out whole areas that are worthy of deeper study should the reader choose. The book closes with some of the ways in which we can ameliorate the massive global divide and create a more equitable world in the face of climate catastrophe. The ideas are thought-provoking and worthy of much reflection and deliberation. However, in the end, the questions remain: who undertakes these actions and how are they undertaken? For example, how does mass debt-cancellation for poorer countries (who have already paid many times their principal amounts borrowed) occur in the real world where doing so would bring the full might of the US military? Or even in a world where the national bourgeoise would pummel any attempts for a more equitable redistribution of wealth in the poorer countries? Any proposed solutions that do not take into account such major structural factors so deeply embedded into the order of global capitalism will remain things that sound good on paper.
April 3, 2020
How can I convince everyone I know to read this book? It's clear, convincing and very well-written. Hickel's narration is strikingly similar to that of Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens, and I think anyone with the slightest interest in contemporary society's past, present, and future will thoroughly enjoy it.
It is a history of how the economic interests of the most powerful came to dominate the configuration of human societies, globally. It touches upon an impressive variety of interlinked themes, from the short-term and long-term economic effects of colonisation, economically driven western military interventions in post-independent countries in the global south, the debt crisis, the reconfiguration of our most powerful global financial institutions (the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO) to maintain and fuel the economic dominance of the global North over the global South, to the unequally distributed costs of climate change - and a (probably all too optimistic) outline for how these problems can be fixed.
Being, as we probably are, on our way to go into one of the most challenging economic crises that our globalised world has ever witnessed, now should be a fantastic time to think long and hard about how our future economy can be organised differently.
It is a history of how the economic interests of the most powerful came to dominate the configuration of human societies, globally. It touches upon an impressive variety of interlinked themes, from the short-term and long-term economic effects of colonisation, economically driven western military interventions in post-independent countries in the global south, the debt crisis, the reconfiguration of our most powerful global financial institutions (the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO) to maintain and fuel the economic dominance of the global North over the global South, to the unequally distributed costs of climate change - and a (probably all too optimistic) outline for how these problems can be fixed.
Being, as we probably are, on our way to go into one of the most challenging economic crises that our globalised world has ever witnessed, now should be a fantastic time to think long and hard about how our future economy can be organised differently.
June 20, 2021
This book can be read and judged in two ways. On the theoretical side, it doesn't offer anything new. The Divide's understanding of global inequality is very much rooted in the world-systems theory and the core-periphery model that many scholars (Samir Amin etc.) have been working on. A lot of the perspectives on the damages of colonialism in this book also follow from the work of post-colonial writers. So when it comes to theoretical framing of the issue of global inequality, this book is not unique or original.
On the other hand, The Divide is full of factual evidence. It provides a solid account of the ongoing processes, events, structures, institutions, and relations that underpin the exploitation of the 'developing' world at the hands of the West. This book makes for an excellent reference with countless tables, statistics, figures etc. However, the solutions offered here are arguable.
The writing is incredibly accessible and the book is easy to go through in a couple of sittings. It is worth a read if you want to understand how the West continues to expoit the 'developing' world.
On the other hand, The Divide is full of factual evidence. It provides a solid account of the ongoing processes, events, structures, institutions, and relations that underpin the exploitation of the 'developing' world at the hands of the West. This book makes for an excellent reference with countless tables, statistics, figures etc. However, the solutions offered here are arguable.
The writing is incredibly accessible and the book is easy to go through in a couple of sittings. It is worth a read if you want to understand how the West continues to expoit the 'developing' world.
May 19, 2019
Fantastic book for anyone, and especially those not familiar enough with history of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism/neoliberalism and how we actually came to these vast inequalities in the world and to the brink of destruction of our planet
September 21, 2019
This book argues that the popular narrative that, thanks to the spread of capitalism, the rates of global poverty and hunger in poor countries are going down, is wrong. The reality, according to Hickel, is that poverty and hunger are increasing, as is the divide between rich and poor countries, and that this is due to deep injustice and inequality built into the global economic system. This system is structured to allow rich countries to extract all the value from poor countries, so it's really the rich countries that are the cause off poverty in the poor countries, and no amount of sending aid or growing the GPD of those poor countries will ever make up for it.
Some of the claims in this book are startling and disturbing; some seem questionable or cherry-picked to fit a narrative; the weakest part is that, even if you accept that the book is correct about all the problems with the global economic system, the alternatives the author presents seem laughable and unrealistic. All that said, as I read this book, it made me keenly aware that I do not have a strong enough grasp of history, politics, or economics to properly judge. At least now I have the motivation to go and educate myself to find out more, and for that eye-opening experience alone, this book is worth a read.
Here are some of the claims in the book and some thoughts on them:
1. Hickel says that those popular charts you saw Bill Gates share from the World Economic Forum (https://twitter.com/BillGates/status/...) or in Hans Rosling's TED talk (https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_roslin...) are misleading or gimmicks.
- Hickel says those charts all show poverty decreasing, whereas in reality, the number of poor people in the world is greater now than ever before.
- For example, in absolute numbers, there are more people in poverty today than before. True, but that's because the world population has grown enormously, from ~4 billion people in the 1980's to 7.3 billion people today. The _proportion_ of people in poverty, which is what you see in the charts from Gates and Rosling, have gone down!
- Hickel discounts this because, after all, there are _hundreds of millions_ more people in poverty today than ~30 years ago. I agree that's a tragedy, but the fact that the proportion did decrease means there are also hundreds of millions of people living better lives today, and ignoring that completely seems disingenuous.
- Worse yet, those charts show huge gains in other measures, such as child mortality, literacy, education, and vaccination, all of which are also showing remarkable gains. Hickel briefly acknowledges some of these, but then moves on, as if these accomplishments at such a global scale have no merit.
- In fact, this is a common pattern throughout the book: he ignores just about all the benefits we've seen from capitalism and the global economy—all the advances in health care, lifestyle, technology, etc—and focuses solely on the downsides. There are, of course, many downsides, but EVERY system will have downsides, and many of the alternatives we've seen through history have been even worse.
2. Hickel also claims that the way we measure poverty in those charts is unreasonable.
- Those charts set the poverty line at $1.90 per day, which, depending on what country you're in, doesn't get you out of poverty by a long shot. He argues for using higher poverty lines (in the $7-10 per day range) and shows that for those poverty lines, poverty rates are actually going up.
- On the one hand, less than $2 per day really is an absurd number, and Hickel does show the history of how this poverty line measure has been manipulated over the years to make the numbers look better than they really are.
- On the other hand, $1.90/day is actually the line for "extreme poverty" (not just poverty), and that not only have the rates of extreme poverty gone down, but so have the rates for other poverty lines (e.g., $3.20/day, $5.50/day): https://reason.com/2019/01/31/global-....
- On top of all this, Hickel makes the claim that many of the gains we've seen in poverty (and hunger) rates vanish if you remove China from the equation. That is, China has seen massive gains the last 30 years, but most other poor countries have not. This does paint a more bleak picture of the lack of progress in most of the world, but it also does seem odd to ignore gains for 1.5+ billion people.
3. Hickel then moves on to rates of hunger, which do seem to be on the rise.
- One powerful idea is that hunger is not a problem of lack, but of distribution. Globally, we produce more than enough food to feed every single person, and yet, billions of people around the world go hungry every single day.
- Hickel claims that many poor countries were forced to switch from a happy, peaceful, natural agrarian or hunter gather lifestyle to a the misery of wage labor. To be honest, I don't buy the "happy peaceful native living an easy life of plenty" narrative. There is ample evidence of incredibly short life spans, high child mortality, and massive violence in such societies. Moreover, earlier political and economic systems could be just as brutal, if not more, as anything we have today—e.g., Hickel romanticizes Feudalism in one part of the book, which seems absurd.
4. The book then shifts to the history of the global economy, laying out how the rich countries became rich and the poor countries became poor.
- Hickel goes over colonialism, imperialism, slavery, the role of the British in India and China, the Belgians in Africa, American interference (and coups) in South America, and much more.
- This is one of the more compelling parts of the book, as this is all well known history, and it would be absurd to pretend that it doesn't have a massive impact on how the world is structured today.
- However, it's also worth mentioning that Hickel covers a massive amount of global history in a short time span—a bit like "Guns, Germs, and Steel" condensed into a chapter or two—so he tends to gloss over a lot of details.
5. Hickel also discusses more modern economic institutions and practices, almost all of which was new to me.
- Structural adjustment programs (SAPs): loans provided by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) to poor countries that experienced economic crises; to obtain these loans, those countries were required to implement a number of very questionable economic and social policies (e.g., cutting wages, removing public services, privatizing most state-owned enterprises, shifting business primarily to labor and resource extraction, strengthening protection for foreign investors, etc). Ostensibly, these policies were to help stabilize the economies of these countries, but in reality, they often had the opposite effect: the poor countries would end up in massive debt to the rich countries (Hickel describes debt as a a modern form of colonialism) and the policies would require them to open up their markets to rich countries in a way where those rich countries would end up dominating the economy and extracting most of the value from it.
- IMF and World Bank: Apparently, these institutions have legal immunity everywhere, so you can't ever sue them, no matter what they do wrong?
- WTO: Apparently, control of this organization is massively biased towards rich countries. E.g., The US has enough votes to veto any WTO decision.
- NAFTA and other FTAs: These agreements allow foreign corporations to sue local governments (but not vice versa!) in private court, overturning local laws or regulations!
- Tax shelters: An astonishing amount of global trade goes through tax havens, often allowing rich corporations (mainly from rich countries) from paying taxes to poor countries. There is even a thing known as the "City of London" which is a small piece of London that is a separate entity with its own Lord Mayor elected by corporations... primarily to find tax havens. Is this... True?
- Some of this stuff sounded absurd, almost like conspiracy theories, but a quick search suggests this stuff might be true. Where do you go to to learn more about this stuff? Why do I know so little about major organizations like WTO, IMF, World Bank, etc? Am I the only one that's this ignorant of this stuff?
6. Hickel then argues that protectionism is required to bootstrap capitalism.
- Hickel argues that every country that's rich today used protectionism and social programs (e.g., like the New Deal) in its early days, before going out and competing in the global economy. It's a bit like raising a child: you keep the child at home the first 18 years, giving them a chance to grow and mature, before sending them out into the world on their own.
- The IMF and SAPs, in the name of "neo liberalism," ban exactly this type of protectionism and social programs, which Hickel argues makes it impossible for poor countries to ever compete globally, and build stable economies.
- This seems plausible, but I honestly don't know enough about capitalism or history to know if this is accurate. Where do I go to learn more about this?
7. Hickel then moves on GDP, making the claim that the global economy is based on the need for infinite GDP growth, but infinite GDP growth on a planet with finite resources is impossible.
- Due to fractional reserve banking, 90% of the money circulating today is debt, which means it's money created out of thin air when a bank loans money it doesn't actually have. Eventually, all of this debt will have to be paid back—with interest. The need to pay back all this money that didn't exist before means the economy needs to grow, and grow, and grow, forever.
- However, resources on our planet are limited. Moreover, economic production has side effects, such as climate change. In other words, we are at the point where the only way you can grow GDP is at the cost of someone else. That means our economy, based on the current model, must eventually grind to a halt.
- It does seem like growth is an absolute requirement of capitalism, and that you can't keep growing indefinitely. Where do I go to learn more about this?
8. In the final chapter, Hickel presents his solutions.
- He argues that we should forgive some or all of the debt that poor countries have to rich countries; that we should ban fractional reserve lending; that all countries will have to reduce consumption and stop growing their economies; that all advertising should be banned; that the work week should be reduced to 2-3 days per week as a way to reduce unemployment and consumption; and a number of other ideas that, for the most part, sound completely unrealistic.
- This is the book's biggest weakness. After a scathing review of capitalism and the global economy, Hickel doesn't present any particularly compelling alternatives. Yes, some of the more insidious problems (e.g., SAPs, tax havens) can probably be fixed, but that doesn't seem enough to make the type of sweeping changes we need. It reminds me of the Churchill quote: "Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time..."
Some of the claims in this book are startling and disturbing; some seem questionable or cherry-picked to fit a narrative; the weakest part is that, even if you accept that the book is correct about all the problems with the global economic system, the alternatives the author presents seem laughable and unrealistic. All that said, as I read this book, it made me keenly aware that I do not have a strong enough grasp of history, politics, or economics to properly judge. At least now I have the motivation to go and educate myself to find out more, and for that eye-opening experience alone, this book is worth a read.
Here are some of the claims in the book and some thoughts on them:
1. Hickel says that those popular charts you saw Bill Gates share from the World Economic Forum (https://twitter.com/BillGates/status/...) or in Hans Rosling's TED talk (https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_roslin...) are misleading or gimmicks.
- Hickel says those charts all show poverty decreasing, whereas in reality, the number of poor people in the world is greater now than ever before.
- For example, in absolute numbers, there are more people in poverty today than before. True, but that's because the world population has grown enormously, from ~4 billion people in the 1980's to 7.3 billion people today. The _proportion_ of people in poverty, which is what you see in the charts from Gates and Rosling, have gone down!
- Hickel discounts this because, after all, there are _hundreds of millions_ more people in poverty today than ~30 years ago. I agree that's a tragedy, but the fact that the proportion did decrease means there are also hundreds of millions of people living better lives today, and ignoring that completely seems disingenuous.
- Worse yet, those charts show huge gains in other measures, such as child mortality, literacy, education, and vaccination, all of which are also showing remarkable gains. Hickel briefly acknowledges some of these, but then moves on, as if these accomplishments at such a global scale have no merit.
- In fact, this is a common pattern throughout the book: he ignores just about all the benefits we've seen from capitalism and the global economy—all the advances in health care, lifestyle, technology, etc—and focuses solely on the downsides. There are, of course, many downsides, but EVERY system will have downsides, and many of the alternatives we've seen through history have been even worse.
2. Hickel also claims that the way we measure poverty in those charts is unreasonable.
- Those charts set the poverty line at $1.90 per day, which, depending on what country you're in, doesn't get you out of poverty by a long shot. He argues for using higher poverty lines (in the $7-10 per day range) and shows that for those poverty lines, poverty rates are actually going up.
- On the one hand, less than $2 per day really is an absurd number, and Hickel does show the history of how this poverty line measure has been manipulated over the years to make the numbers look better than they really are.
- On the other hand, $1.90/day is actually the line for "extreme poverty" (not just poverty), and that not only have the rates of extreme poverty gone down, but so have the rates for other poverty lines (e.g., $3.20/day, $5.50/day): https://reason.com/2019/01/31/global-....
- On top of all this, Hickel makes the claim that many of the gains we've seen in poverty (and hunger) rates vanish if you remove China from the equation. That is, China has seen massive gains the last 30 years, but most other poor countries have not. This does paint a more bleak picture of the lack of progress in most of the world, but it also does seem odd to ignore gains for 1.5+ billion people.
3. Hickel then moves on to rates of hunger, which do seem to be on the rise.
- One powerful idea is that hunger is not a problem of lack, but of distribution. Globally, we produce more than enough food to feed every single person, and yet, billions of people around the world go hungry every single day.
- Hickel claims that many poor countries were forced to switch from a happy, peaceful, natural agrarian or hunter gather lifestyle to a the misery of wage labor. To be honest, I don't buy the "happy peaceful native living an easy life of plenty" narrative. There is ample evidence of incredibly short life spans, high child mortality, and massive violence in such societies. Moreover, earlier political and economic systems could be just as brutal, if not more, as anything we have today—e.g., Hickel romanticizes Feudalism in one part of the book, which seems absurd.
4. The book then shifts to the history of the global economy, laying out how the rich countries became rich and the poor countries became poor.
- Hickel goes over colonialism, imperialism, slavery, the role of the British in India and China, the Belgians in Africa, American interference (and coups) in South America, and much more.
- This is one of the more compelling parts of the book, as this is all well known history, and it would be absurd to pretend that it doesn't have a massive impact on how the world is structured today.
- However, it's also worth mentioning that Hickel covers a massive amount of global history in a short time span—a bit like "Guns, Germs, and Steel" condensed into a chapter or two—so he tends to gloss over a lot of details.
5. Hickel also discusses more modern economic institutions and practices, almost all of which was new to me.
- Structural adjustment programs (SAPs): loans provided by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) to poor countries that experienced economic crises; to obtain these loans, those countries were required to implement a number of very questionable economic and social policies (e.g., cutting wages, removing public services, privatizing most state-owned enterprises, shifting business primarily to labor and resource extraction, strengthening protection for foreign investors, etc). Ostensibly, these policies were to help stabilize the economies of these countries, but in reality, they often had the opposite effect: the poor countries would end up in massive debt to the rich countries (Hickel describes debt as a a modern form of colonialism) and the policies would require them to open up their markets to rich countries in a way where those rich countries would end up dominating the economy and extracting most of the value from it.
- IMF and World Bank: Apparently, these institutions have legal immunity everywhere, so you can't ever sue them, no matter what they do wrong?
- WTO: Apparently, control of this organization is massively biased towards rich countries. E.g., The US has enough votes to veto any WTO decision.
- NAFTA and other FTAs: These agreements allow foreign corporations to sue local governments (but not vice versa!) in private court, overturning local laws or regulations!
- Tax shelters: An astonishing amount of global trade goes through tax havens, often allowing rich corporations (mainly from rich countries) from paying taxes to poor countries. There is even a thing known as the "City of London" which is a small piece of London that is a separate entity with its own Lord Mayor elected by corporations... primarily to find tax havens. Is this... True?
- Some of this stuff sounded absurd, almost like conspiracy theories, but a quick search suggests this stuff might be true. Where do you go to to learn more about this stuff? Why do I know so little about major organizations like WTO, IMF, World Bank, etc? Am I the only one that's this ignorant of this stuff?
6. Hickel then argues that protectionism is required to bootstrap capitalism.
- Hickel argues that every country that's rich today used protectionism and social programs (e.g., like the New Deal) in its early days, before going out and competing in the global economy. It's a bit like raising a child: you keep the child at home the first 18 years, giving them a chance to grow and mature, before sending them out into the world on their own.
- The IMF and SAPs, in the name of "neo liberalism," ban exactly this type of protectionism and social programs, which Hickel argues makes it impossible for poor countries to ever compete globally, and build stable economies.
- This seems plausible, but I honestly don't know enough about capitalism or history to know if this is accurate. Where do I go to learn more about this?
7. Hickel then moves on GDP, making the claim that the global economy is based on the need for infinite GDP growth, but infinite GDP growth on a planet with finite resources is impossible.
- Due to fractional reserve banking, 90% of the money circulating today is debt, which means it's money created out of thin air when a bank loans money it doesn't actually have. Eventually, all of this debt will have to be paid back—with interest. The need to pay back all this money that didn't exist before means the economy needs to grow, and grow, and grow, forever.
- However, resources on our planet are limited. Moreover, economic production has side effects, such as climate change. In other words, we are at the point where the only way you can grow GDP is at the cost of someone else. That means our economy, based on the current model, must eventually grind to a halt.
- It does seem like growth is an absolute requirement of capitalism, and that you can't keep growing indefinitely. Where do I go to learn more about this?
8. In the final chapter, Hickel presents his solutions.
- He argues that we should forgive some or all of the debt that poor countries have to rich countries; that we should ban fractional reserve lending; that all countries will have to reduce consumption and stop growing their economies; that all advertising should be banned; that the work week should be reduced to 2-3 days per week as a way to reduce unemployment and consumption; and a number of other ideas that, for the most part, sound completely unrealistic.
- This is the book's biggest weakness. After a scathing review of capitalism and the global economy, Hickel doesn't present any particularly compelling alternatives. Yes, some of the more insidious problems (e.g., SAPs, tax havens) can probably be fixed, but that doesn't seem enough to make the type of sweeping changes we need. It reminds me of the Churchill quote: "Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time..."
March 3, 2021
There are a few “technical” issues with this book. Even though 20% of the book consists of endnotes, a source seems to be lacking for nearly every crucial statement (such as when the author claims that much of the gains in poverty reduction are solely based on the “statistical trickery” of intentionally wrong Purchasing Power Parity calculations). Where there are sources, they barely refer to top-notch, peer reviewed journals. Though if we accept the premise of the book - everyone is conspiring to hide the truth, except the author - this might be unavoidable, so let's give him the benefit of the doubt.
The book could also have profited from some more professional editing, as some of the data cited is at least suspect. The author confuses the World Bank with the IBRD (one of its sub-units, with a notably narrower, specific mission), when criticizing and citing its mission statement, or confuses billions for millions when speaking of debt relieve…
Main talking points:
- Global poverty is getting worse. The relevant institutions may be claiming the opposite, but this is just statistical trickery to hide the fact that "the West" is deliberately holding poor countries down, in order to take advantage of them (there are a few metrics in the book that actually contradict the "everything is getting worse"-narrative, but… oh well, I guess?)
The author on why “the West” want to keep poor countries poor:
“(…) the World Bank, for example, which profits from global South debt; the Gates Foundation, which profits from an intellectual-property regime that locks life-saving medicines and essential technologies behind outlandish patent paywalls; and Bono, who profits from the tax haven system that siphons revenues out of global South countries”
- “The West” has only been able to become rich by exploiting "the global South". Europe was poorer than other regions of the world (specifically: China) until roughly 1800, when it managed to make itself much richer, and its colonies much poorer, by extracting resources and by preventing the colonies from taking part in global trade at self-determined conditions. Also, the West only became rich through protectionist measures. (Not too much in terms of explanation on this last latter point though).
The author on why Europe is rich:
"And of course, European powers had been controlling vast regions of the South since as early as 1492. Indeed, Europe’s Industrial Revolution was only possible because of the resources they extracted from their colonies. The gold and silver they siphoned out of the mountains of Latin America not only provided capital for industrial investment; it also allowed them to buy land-intensive goods from the East, which freed them to transfer their own labour power from agriculture to industry. Later, they came to rely on sugar and cotton – produced by enslaved Africans – that was shipped in from their colonies in the New World, grain from colonial India and natural resources from colonial Africa, all of which provided the energy and raw materials they needed to secure their industrial dominance. Europe’s development couldn’t have happened without colonial loot."
- After decolonialization, much of “the global South” embarked on a policy of developmentalism (a policy of protectionism/high tariffs, subsidies, social spending (education, health), redistribution and nationalization). This brought great gains in growth and poverty reduction during the 1960s and 1970s. The rise of the poor countries threatened the interests of “the West”, which therefore initially supported or carried out a multitude of coups in order to stop pro-developmentalism governments. Later, coups were largely replaced by Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), which achieved the same aims with less physical violence. As a result, growth rates fell and poverty increased in "the global South" during the 1980s and 1990s. “The West” was specifically looking to avoid nationalization of property held by investors from their countries, to avoid defaults on debt owned, to allow free trade, ie market access, and to promote privatization, which would provide investment opportunities to Western investors. [Explaining the growth pattern of dozens of countries over multiple decades with a single variable (a pro- or anti-developmentalist government) is not only extremely simplistic, I would actually contest that the growth pattern described here is factually true. In addition, the various coups to topple developmentalist leaders, which the author lists in some detail (probably the strongest part of the book), take place in the 1950s-70s, just when all is allegedly well in “the South”)]
- In the 1970s “The West” was also running up against the natural limits of capitalism, causing a “crises of over-accumulation”, of which there are 3 forms: a) Limits in natural resources / pollution, b) limits to inequality, as the working class would rise up at a certain threshold of inequality and c) market saturation, where everyone already has all the goods they need and consumption declines. “The West” therefore depended on “the global South’s” resources and markets.
The author defining developmentalism:
“(…)using infant industry subsidies to build strong businesses in a protected economy, grooming them to the point where they were capable of competing and succeeding against their Western counterparts. All of these strategies relied on relatively high trade tariffs on foreign goods, restrictions on foreign capital flows and limits on foreign ownership of national assets. Land reform was often a central part of the package. And in many cases, governments sought to nationalise natural resources and key industries in order to ensure that their citizens benefited from them as much as possible.”
The author on the success of developmentalism:
"Across the global South, newly independent countries were ignoring US advice and pursuing their own development agenda, building their economies with protectionist and redistributionist policies – trade tariffs, subsidies and social spending on healthcare and education. And it was working brilliantly. From the 1950s through the 1970s, incomes were growing, poverty rates were falling and the divide between rich and poor countries began to close for the first time in history. And we shouldn’t be surprised; after all, global South countries were using the exact same policies that Western countries had used during their own periods of economic consolidation."
The author on SAPS:
“Debtor countries were also forced to orient their economies towards exports, to get more hard currency to repay their loans. This meant abandoning the import-substitution programmes they had used to such good effect during the developmentalist era. In addition, structural adjustment programmes required debtors to keep inflation low – a kind of monetary austerity – because the bankers feared they would use inflation to depreciate the value of their debt.”
[Which is strange, as the author claims this debt was denominated in USD.]
“Many countries ended up spending large proportions of their national budgets on debt service.”
“So SAPs introduced a three-part cocktail: austerity, privatisation and liberalisation. These principles were applied across the board, not just in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and India – the first victims of structural adjustment “
- More recently, Nixon’s USA was operating under loose monetary policy [abandoning the gold standard in 1973] and high government spending in order to bankroll the expensive Vietnam War, weakening the USD. In 1973, following the Yom Kippur war, Saudi-Arabia and other OPEC-members decided to sharply increase the price of oil to punish Israel and its ally, the USA. With oil, a crucial industrial input, becoming scarce, consumer prices in the US increased sharply, reducing consumption, and thus GDP, leading to the phenomenon of stagflation, including double-digit inflation. Meanwhile, the OPEC states were making unexpectedly high profits off their oil. With inflation high in the US and few investment opportunities in the Arab region, $450 billion of petrodollars [not a mainstream viewpoint, I believe, and no sources given] poured into Wall Street in a very short period of time and was used to force USD-denominated debt onto poor countries.
To battle US inflation, the Fed, under Volcker, had increased interest rates from a very low level to 20% by 1980. The “Volcker shock” ended inflation in the US, but tipped poor countries into the “3rd world debt crisis”, as they could not afford repayments at 20% interest rates. Wall Streets lobbyists convince the World Bank / IMF, that Wall Street should not be left to shoulder the losses of their risky investments, thus the institutions step in and the Structural Adjustment Programs are born.
The author on SAPs as a continuation of coups by another means:
“But in the early 1980s that suddenly changed. The United States and Western Europe discovered they could use their power as creditors to dictate economic policy to indebted countries in the South, effectively governing them by remote control, without the need for bloody interventions. Leveraging debt, they imposed ‘structural adjustment programmes’ that reversed all the economic reforms that global South countries had painstakingly enacted. In the process, they went so far as to ban the very policies that they had used for their own development, effectively kicking away the ladder to success.”
- The last third or so of the book concerns itself with solving climate change, and feels relatively unconnected to the poverty topic. Basically the solution here is degrowth. The idea being that “the West” should shrink its economies (and thus pollution) enough so as to limit green house gas emissions to a level where “the global South” could grow GDP (and thus pollution) enough to end poverty, while the “West’s” and “South’s” combined greenhouse gas emissions would still be low enough to avoid catastrophic warming.
The author’s proposed solutions to poverty and climate change:
- More of the voting power in the decision making bodies of the IMF and the World Bank should go to debtor countries. Delegations of poorer countries to the WTO should receive support in order to be able to afford top notch negotiating teams. Ideally, the delegation of each country should be democratically elected [unclear how this would work, once a majority of votes are held by less than stellar democracies.]
- Current debt relief efforts, channeled through HIPCs and MDRI, should be increased roughly sixfold. Especially debt incurred by dictators, which are no longer in power, should be forgiven (though the wording “debt forgiveness” should be avoided). [No mention of how to avoid future over-indebtedness, though, or how to tackle the structural reasons that led to debt pileup]
- Debt-cancellation is meant to give poor countries “the sovereignty to use tariffs, subsidies, capital controls, social spending and other measures.”
- “The global South” should introduce capital controls. Specifically, foreign investors should only be allowed to repatriate profits after receiving case-to-case approval to do so. [uhm…. Oh-oh…]
- Each rich WTO-member should grant tariff-free access to their markets not only to LDCs (which is currently the case), but to each under-developed country [however that may be defined], that is either smaller or poorer than itself.
- Rich countries should stop subsidizing their agricultural sectors.
- Landgrabs (defined as land purchases that entail a transfer of at least 500 acres to be converted from smallholder production, collective use or ecosystem services to commercial activity) should be ended, at least temporarily. [It’s not very clear how less efficient small-holder farming would drive down food prices…]
- Patents are evil and should be waived, especially for medicines, for poor countries [no mention on how this would not be charity, given that charity, according to the author, is also fairly evil.] Patents in general should expire after half the time they currently do, and patenting should be banned in certain areas, such as living beings including seeds and agricultural inputs.
- Tax havens should be closed.
- A global minimum wage should be introduced, which would be implemented by the ILO. [No consideration is given to the fact that not all goods are export goods. A minimum wage would also drive up the price of things such as food or housing, potentially pushing more people into poverty.]
- The power to create money supply should be taken from commercial banks and be limited to national banks (ie, commercial banks should only be allowed to make loans with money from deposits). This is somehow meant to limit the pressure on the private sector to produce growth.
- Working time should be limited to about 20 hours a week globally.
- Advertising for consumer goods should be banned.
Points that are nearly or fully absent from the book:
- Population growth is considered neither in connection with poverty nor in connection with rising greenhouse gas emissions.
- An increasing part of the world’s poor live in failed or fragile states. Yet, against mainstream thinking, the author claims that poor institutions, corruption and lacking capacity have a tiny part (if any) to play as a cause of global poverty. (Although he does advocate forgiving “dictator debt”.)
- The case of China, which is responsible for large parts of global poverty reduction (if we believe official statistics), achieved by a combination of heavy-handed industrial policy, but also by export-led growth and job creation. This development story gets only a tangential mention here and there in the book.
- Other “routes” for poverty-alleviation get no mention at all (eg Vietnam => export-led growth, the Gulf-states or Botswana => extractive industry-led growth).
- The de-materialization of growth. According to the author, the only way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to dramatically lower GDP in rich countries. That an increasing proportion of consumption is in non-material goods/services, with low carbon footprints, is not considered.
(The few) strong points in the book:
- An entire section with factual (mostly historic) information, which is worth re-visiting (or learning about), much of it on which coup took place where under which circumstances.
- Some interesting factoids that might help with the next pub quiz.
Eg: On governing London’s City district:
“Unlike in normal councils, the franchise in the City of London is not restricted to human beings. Businesses registered within the council’s borders are allowed to vote alongside residents. More than 70 per cent of the votes cast during council elections are cast not by humans, but by businesses – mostly corporate banks and financial firms."
The book could also have profited from some more professional editing, as some of the data cited is at least suspect. The author confuses the World Bank with the IBRD (one of its sub-units, with a notably narrower, specific mission), when criticizing and citing its mission statement, or confuses billions for millions when speaking of debt relieve…
Main talking points:
- Global poverty is getting worse. The relevant institutions may be claiming the opposite, but this is just statistical trickery to hide the fact that "the West" is deliberately holding poor countries down, in order to take advantage of them (there are a few metrics in the book that actually contradict the "everything is getting worse"-narrative, but… oh well, I guess?)
The author on why “the West” want to keep poor countries poor:
“(…) the World Bank, for example, which profits from global South debt; the Gates Foundation, which profits from an intellectual-property regime that locks life-saving medicines and essential technologies behind outlandish patent paywalls; and Bono, who profits from the tax haven system that siphons revenues out of global South countries”
- “The West” has only been able to become rich by exploiting "the global South". Europe was poorer than other regions of the world (specifically: China) until roughly 1800, when it managed to make itself much richer, and its colonies much poorer, by extracting resources and by preventing the colonies from taking part in global trade at self-determined conditions. Also, the West only became rich through protectionist measures. (Not too much in terms of explanation on this last latter point though).
The author on why Europe is rich:
"And of course, European powers had been controlling vast regions of the South since as early as 1492. Indeed, Europe’s Industrial Revolution was only possible because of the resources they extracted from their colonies. The gold and silver they siphoned out of the mountains of Latin America not only provided capital for industrial investment; it also allowed them to buy land-intensive goods from the East, which freed them to transfer their own labour power from agriculture to industry. Later, they came to rely on sugar and cotton – produced by enslaved Africans – that was shipped in from their colonies in the New World, grain from colonial India and natural resources from colonial Africa, all of which provided the energy and raw materials they needed to secure their industrial dominance. Europe’s development couldn’t have happened without colonial loot."
- After decolonialization, much of “the global South” embarked on a policy of developmentalism (a policy of protectionism/high tariffs, subsidies, social spending (education, health), redistribution and nationalization). This brought great gains in growth and poverty reduction during the 1960s and 1970s. The rise of the poor countries threatened the interests of “the West”, which therefore initially supported or carried out a multitude of coups in order to stop pro-developmentalism governments. Later, coups were largely replaced by Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), which achieved the same aims with less physical violence. As a result, growth rates fell and poverty increased in "the global South" during the 1980s and 1990s. “The West” was specifically looking to avoid nationalization of property held by investors from their countries, to avoid defaults on debt owned, to allow free trade, ie market access, and to promote privatization, which would provide investment opportunities to Western investors. [Explaining the growth pattern of dozens of countries over multiple decades with a single variable (a pro- or anti-developmentalist government) is not only extremely simplistic, I would actually contest that the growth pattern described here is factually true. In addition, the various coups to topple developmentalist leaders, which the author lists in some detail (probably the strongest part of the book), take place in the 1950s-70s, just when all is allegedly well in “the South”)]
- In the 1970s “The West” was also running up against the natural limits of capitalism, causing a “crises of over-accumulation”, of which there are 3 forms: a) Limits in natural resources / pollution, b) limits to inequality, as the working class would rise up at a certain threshold of inequality and c) market saturation, where everyone already has all the goods they need and consumption declines. “The West” therefore depended on “the global South’s” resources and markets.
The author defining developmentalism:
“(…)using infant industry subsidies to build strong businesses in a protected economy, grooming them to the point where they were capable of competing and succeeding against their Western counterparts. All of these strategies relied on relatively high trade tariffs on foreign goods, restrictions on foreign capital flows and limits on foreign ownership of national assets. Land reform was often a central part of the package. And in many cases, governments sought to nationalise natural resources and key industries in order to ensure that their citizens benefited from them as much as possible.”
The author on the success of developmentalism:
"Across the global South, newly independent countries were ignoring US advice and pursuing their own development agenda, building their economies with protectionist and redistributionist policies – trade tariffs, subsidies and social spending on healthcare and education. And it was working brilliantly. From the 1950s through the 1970s, incomes were growing, poverty rates were falling and the divide between rich and poor countries began to close for the first time in history. And we shouldn’t be surprised; after all, global South countries were using the exact same policies that Western countries had used during their own periods of economic consolidation."
The author on SAPS:
“Debtor countries were also forced to orient their economies towards exports, to get more hard currency to repay their loans. This meant abandoning the import-substitution programmes they had used to such good effect during the developmentalist era. In addition, structural adjustment programmes required debtors to keep inflation low – a kind of monetary austerity – because the bankers feared they would use inflation to depreciate the value of their debt.”
[Which is strange, as the author claims this debt was denominated in USD.]
“Many countries ended up spending large proportions of their national budgets on debt service.”
“So SAPs introduced a three-part cocktail: austerity, privatisation and liberalisation. These principles were applied across the board, not just in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and India – the first victims of structural adjustment “
- More recently, Nixon’s USA was operating under loose monetary policy [abandoning the gold standard in 1973] and high government spending in order to bankroll the expensive Vietnam War, weakening the USD. In 1973, following the Yom Kippur war, Saudi-Arabia and other OPEC-members decided to sharply increase the price of oil to punish Israel and its ally, the USA. With oil, a crucial industrial input, becoming scarce, consumer prices in the US increased sharply, reducing consumption, and thus GDP, leading to the phenomenon of stagflation, including double-digit inflation. Meanwhile, the OPEC states were making unexpectedly high profits off their oil. With inflation high in the US and few investment opportunities in the Arab region, $450 billion of petrodollars [not a mainstream viewpoint, I believe, and no sources given] poured into Wall Street in a very short period of time and was used to force USD-denominated debt onto poor countries.
To battle US inflation, the Fed, under Volcker, had increased interest rates from a very low level to 20% by 1980. The “Volcker shock” ended inflation in the US, but tipped poor countries into the “3rd world debt crisis”, as they could not afford repayments at 20% interest rates. Wall Streets lobbyists convince the World Bank / IMF, that Wall Street should not be left to shoulder the losses of their risky investments, thus the institutions step in and the Structural Adjustment Programs are born.
The author on SAPs as a continuation of coups by another means:
“But in the early 1980s that suddenly changed. The United States and Western Europe discovered they could use their power as creditors to dictate economic policy to indebted countries in the South, effectively governing them by remote control, without the need for bloody interventions. Leveraging debt, they imposed ‘structural adjustment programmes’ that reversed all the economic reforms that global South countries had painstakingly enacted. In the process, they went so far as to ban the very policies that they had used for their own development, effectively kicking away the ladder to success.”
- The last third or so of the book concerns itself with solving climate change, and feels relatively unconnected to the poverty topic. Basically the solution here is degrowth. The idea being that “the West” should shrink its economies (and thus pollution) enough so as to limit green house gas emissions to a level where “the global South” could grow GDP (and thus pollution) enough to end poverty, while the “West’s” and “South’s” combined greenhouse gas emissions would still be low enough to avoid catastrophic warming.
The author’s proposed solutions to poverty and climate change:
- More of the voting power in the decision making bodies of the IMF and the World Bank should go to debtor countries. Delegations of poorer countries to the WTO should receive support in order to be able to afford top notch negotiating teams. Ideally, the delegation of each country should be democratically elected [unclear how this would work, once a majority of votes are held by less than stellar democracies.]
- Current debt relief efforts, channeled through HIPCs and MDRI, should be increased roughly sixfold. Especially debt incurred by dictators, which are no longer in power, should be forgiven (though the wording “debt forgiveness” should be avoided). [No mention of how to avoid future over-indebtedness, though, or how to tackle the structural reasons that led to debt pileup]
- Debt-cancellation is meant to give poor countries “the sovereignty to use tariffs, subsidies, capital controls, social spending and other measures.”
- “The global South” should introduce capital controls. Specifically, foreign investors should only be allowed to repatriate profits after receiving case-to-case approval to do so. [uhm…. Oh-oh…]
- Each rich WTO-member should grant tariff-free access to their markets not only to LDCs (which is currently the case), but to each under-developed country [however that may be defined], that is either smaller or poorer than itself.
- Rich countries should stop subsidizing their agricultural sectors.
- Landgrabs (defined as land purchases that entail a transfer of at least 500 acres to be converted from smallholder production, collective use or ecosystem services to commercial activity) should be ended, at least temporarily. [It’s not very clear how less efficient small-holder farming would drive down food prices…]
- Patents are evil and should be waived, especially for medicines, for poor countries [no mention on how this would not be charity, given that charity, according to the author, is also fairly evil.] Patents in general should expire after half the time they currently do, and patenting should be banned in certain areas, such as living beings including seeds and agricultural inputs.
- Tax havens should be closed.
- A global minimum wage should be introduced, which would be implemented by the ILO. [No consideration is given to the fact that not all goods are export goods. A minimum wage would also drive up the price of things such as food or housing, potentially pushing more people into poverty.]
- The power to create money supply should be taken from commercial banks and be limited to national banks (ie, commercial banks should only be allowed to make loans with money from deposits). This is somehow meant to limit the pressure on the private sector to produce growth.
- Working time should be limited to about 20 hours a week globally.
- Advertising for consumer goods should be banned.
Points that are nearly or fully absent from the book:
- Population growth is considered neither in connection with poverty nor in connection with rising greenhouse gas emissions.
- An increasing part of the world’s poor live in failed or fragile states. Yet, against mainstream thinking, the author claims that poor institutions, corruption and lacking capacity have a tiny part (if any) to play as a cause of global poverty. (Although he does advocate forgiving “dictator debt”.)
- The case of China, which is responsible for large parts of global poverty reduction (if we believe official statistics), achieved by a combination of heavy-handed industrial policy, but also by export-led growth and job creation. This development story gets only a tangential mention here and there in the book.
- Other “routes” for poverty-alleviation get no mention at all (eg Vietnam => export-led growth, the Gulf-states or Botswana => extractive industry-led growth).
- The de-materialization of growth. According to the author, the only way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to dramatically lower GDP in rich countries. That an increasing proportion of consumption is in non-material goods/services, with low carbon footprints, is not considered.
(The few) strong points in the book:
- An entire section with factual (mostly historic) information, which is worth re-visiting (or learning about), much of it on which coup took place where under which circumstances.
- Some interesting factoids that might help with the next pub quiz.
Eg: On governing London’s City district:
“Unlike in normal councils, the franchise in the City of London is not restricted to human beings. Businesses registered within the council’s borders are allowed to vote alongside residents. More than 70 per cent of the votes cast during council elections are cast not by humans, but by businesses – mostly corporate banks and financial firms."
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