Tag Archives: jason hickel

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Jason Hickel Features Again On Citations Needed

The latest episode of the podcast Citations Needed features Jason Hickel again who together with the hosts Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson explain how the mainstream narrative hides the correct story about success and failure of nations by spreading the wrong idea that corruption is the main factor.

Jason Hickel: So, of course I teach on global economics and, and one of the questions I like to ask my students at the beginning of term is something along the lines of, okay, so we have this massive inequality between global north and global south, rich countries and poor countries, why do you think poor countries are so poor? And I would say, you know, 80 and 90 percent of the students will put their hands up and say they believe it’s because of corruption, you know, because the global south has corrupts leaders. But the problem with that story is it erases, you know, the history of colonization, the history of structural adjustments, the history of unfair trade arrangements. And so it’s a very de-politicized way of thinking about the drivers of impoverishment because the focus is solely on the nation states as opposed to the relationships between nation states and geopolitical regions of the world. And that’s really what I want to draw attention to.

💯 🎯

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Jason Hickel — The Divide

Jason Hickel is a great economist and today I was looking up his 2018 book The Divide.

I found a nice passage:

The stated goal of the World Trade Organization is to create a ‘level playing field’ among trading partners. Each member has to play by the same rules — the same low tariffs and the same ban on subsidies. But in reality the idea of a level playing field is something of an illusion. when rich countries step onto the playing field they do so with industries that are immensely powerful and competitive — precisely because they spent their formative years of development under heavy protection. Poor countries, for their part, step onto the playing field with industries that have never had the benefit of protection and therefore have no hope of competing with their counterparts in rich countries. It may be a level playing field, but what good is a level playing field in a match between schoolchildren and a Premier League team? The rules are the same for both sides, but that doesn’t mean the game is equitable …

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Even if we assume that the game is in fact equitable, if we look more closely it becomes clear that the ‘level playing field’ is actually not very level at all: the rules are unfair even by the WTO’s own standards. Theoretically, the WTO requires every country to reduce their tariffs and subsidies to the same level, but in reality these cuts are applied selectively in favour of rich countries.

In the book Hickel attempts to prove among many things that:

Poor countries are poor because they are integrated into the global economic system on unequal terms.

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Jason Hickel — Global Inequality: Do We Really Live In A One-Hump World?

The elephant chart is a propaganda chart, misleading you into believing that there’s some convergence of fortunes of people across the planet. As if it’s not enough, there’s a new infographic: transformation from a two-hump world to a one-hump world.

Jason Hickel does an alternative analysis, and finds that the “income gap between the average person in the North and the average person in the South has nearly quadrupled in size, going from $9,000 in 1960 to $35,000 today.”

Hickel says:

… there has been no “catch up”, no “convergence”. On the contrary, what’s happening is divergence, big time.

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Why is this happening? … the global economy has been designed to facilitate the North’s access to cheap labour, raw materials, and captive markets in the South – today just as during the colonial period. Sure, some important things have obviously changed. But the countries of the North still control a vastly disproportionate share of voting power in the World Bank and the IMF, the institutions that control the rules of the global economy. They control a disproportionate share of bargaining power in the World Trade Organization. They wield leverage over the economic policy of poorer countries through debt. They control the majority of the world’s secrecy jurisdictions, which enable multinational companies to extract untaxed profits out of the South. They retain the ability to topple foreign governments whose economic policies they don’t like, and occupy countries they consider to be strategic in terms of resources and geography.

These geopolitical power imbalances sustain and reproduce a global class divide that has worsened since the end of colonialism. And yet this injustice is conveniently erased by the one-hump graph, which offers a misleadingly rosy narrative about what has happened over the past half century.

Check his excellent infographic. 📉

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Jason Hickel — A Letter To Steven Pinker (And Bill Gates For That Matter) About Global Poverty

Jason Hickel writes:

Dear Steven,

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Your argument is that neoliberal capitalism is responsible for driving the most substantial gains against poverty.  This claim is intellectually dishonest, and unsupported by facts.  Here’s why:

The vast majority of gains against poverty have happened in one region: East Asia.  As it happens, the economic success of China and the East Asian tigers – as scholars like Ha-Joon Chang and Robert Wade have long pointed out – is due not to the neoliberal markets that you espouse but rather state-led industrial policy, protectionism and regulation (the same measures that Western nations used to such great effect during their own period of industrial consolidation).  They liberalized, to be sure – but they did so gradually and on their own terms.

Not so for the rest of the global South.  Indeed, these policy options were systematically denied to them, and destroyed where they already existed.  From 1980 to 2000, the IMF and World Bank imposed brutal structural adjustment programs that did exactly the opposite: slashing tariffs, subsidies, social spending and capital controls while reversing land reforms and privatizing public assets – all in the face of massive public resistance.  During this period, the number of people in poverty outside China increased by 1.3 billion.  In fact, even the proportion of people living in poverty (to use your preferred method) increased, from 62% to 68%.  (For detailed economic data and references to the relevant literature, see Chapter 5 of The Divide).

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In other words, the imposition of neoliberal capitalism from 1980 to 2000 made the poverty rate worse, not better.

Since 2000, the most impressive gains against poverty (outside of East Asia) have come from Latin America, according to the World Bank, coinciding with a series of left-wing or social democratic governments that came to power across the continent.  Whatever one might say about these governments (I have my own critiques), this doesn’t sit very well with your neoliberal narrative.

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Jason Hickel Features On Citations Needed

The latest episode Neoliberal Optimism Industry of the podcast Citations Needed features Jason Hickel, who has done a lot of work to bust the narrative of the World Bank on poverty.

Excerpt:

Jason Hickel: So Gates is sort of the forefront of this aid narrative and the way that I see this as problematic is because it effectively ends up obscuring the real causes of the problems that are at stake. Right? So we’re all concerned about global poverty and human suffering, etcetera. But what’s really causing these problems? So the aid discourse makes it seem as though what’s needed is like little technocratic fixes here and there, some more malaria bed nets here and there, but it distracts our attention away from the fundamental structure of the international economy and you know, the rules that govern international trade and that’s really what needs to be addressed because effectively if you look into the way that that system operates, it’s effectively designed in such a way that facilitates the siphoning of wealth and cheap labor and resources from the South to the North.

I am not a fan of degrowth in the episode but the podcast is for an hour and worth your time. The title is the link to the audio and transcript. You can alternatively find the episode on iTunes.