Jason Hickel

London School of Economics and Political Science | LSE · International Inequalites Institute

Researchers have argued that wealthy nations rely on a large net appropriation of labour and resources from the rest of the world through unequal exchange in international trade and global commodity chains. Here we assess this empirically by measuring flows of embodied labour in the world economy from 1995–2021, accounting for skill levels, sectors...

IPCC reports, to date, have not featured ambitious mitigation scenarios with degrowth in high-income regions. Here, using MESSAGEix-Australia, we create 51 emissions scenarios for Australia with near-term GDP growth going from +3%/year to rapid reductions (−5%/year) to explore how a traditional integrated assessment model (IAM) represents degrowth...

Background: Scientists have raised concerns about whether high-income countries, with their high per-capita CO2 emissions, can decarbonise fast enough to meet their obligations under the Paris Agreement if they continue to pursue aggregate economic growth. Over the past decade, some countries have reduced their CO2 emissions while increasing their...

Humanity in this moment faces two major crises: one ecological, growing more acute with every planetary boundary passed; the other social, leading to deprivation and despair across the globe. An effective ecosocialist approach to these crises, Jason Hickel writes, must aim to resolve both in a single stroke.

The popular narrative that capitalism has led to a general improvement in human well-being over the last two hundred years is, historical data show, not supported by evidence. Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan enumerate the empirical and methodological problems on which this narrative is built and explore the potential benchmarks for truly understand...

Research on carbon inequalities shows that some countries are overshooting their fair share of the remaining carbon budget and hold disproportionate responsibility for climate breakdown. Scholars argue that overshooting countries owe compensation or reparations to undershooting countries for atmospheric appropriation and climate-related damages. He...

This article examines two major policy frameworks for achieving sustainable development: the market‐based ‘Green Economy’ approach (exemplified by South Korea), and the redistributive ‘Living Well’ approach (exemplified by Bolivia). We compare the two paradigms in qualitative terms using document analysis, and we assess quantitatively how they have...

Climate change has a broad range of health impacts and tackling climate change could be the greatest opportunity for improving global health this century. Yet conversations on climate change and health are often incomplete, giving little attention to structural discrimination and the need for racial justice. Racism kills, and climate change kills....

This paper assesses claims that, prior to the 19th century, around 90% of the human population lived in extreme poverty (defined as the inability to access essential goods), and that global human welfare only began to improve with the rise of capitalism. These claims rely on national accounts and PPP exchange rates that do not adequately capture ch...

Science and technology flourished in India before the Islamic and Christian invasions, as noted by 11th-century scholar Said al-Andalusi, who identified India as one of the foremost advanced civilizations of his time. During the British Brutal Colonizer (BBC) rule, 165 million excess deaths occurred in India between 1880 and 1920 alone—a number gr...

Wealthy countries can create prosperity while using less materials and energy if they abandon economic growth as an objective. Wealthy countries can create prosperity while using less materials and energy if they abandon economic growth as an objective.

The challenge of climate mitigation is made more difficult by high rates of energy use in wealthy countries, mostly in the Global North, which far exceed what is required to meet human needs. In contrast, more than 3 billion people in poorer countries live in energy poverty. A just transition requires energy convergence-reducing energy use in wealt...

Degrowth can aid climate mitigation in the food system by integrating reduced animal protein demand, emissions pricing and wealth redistribution into a global food systems transformation.

Background Human impacts on earth-system processes are overshooting several planetary boundaries, driving a crisis of ecological breakdown. This crisis is being caused in large part by global resource extraction, which has increased dramatically over the past half century. We propose a novel method for quantifying national responsibility for ecolog...

Unequal exchange theory posits that economic growth in the “advanced economies” of the global North relies on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through price differentials in international trade. Past attempts to estimate the scale and value of this drain have faced a number of conceptual and empiric...

Previous research has shown that no country currently meets the basic needs of its residents at a level of resource use that could be sustainably extended to all people globally. Using the doughnut-shaped ‘safe and just space’ framework, we analyse the historical dynamics of 11 social indicators and 6 biophysical indicators across more than 140 cou...

Established climate mitigation scenarios assume continued economic growth in all countries, and reconcile this with the Paris targets by betting on speculative technological change. Post-growth approaches may make it easier to achieve rapid mitigation while improving social outcomes, and should be explored by climate modellers.

This paper quantifies drain from the global South through unequal exchange since 1960. According to our primary method, which relies on exchange-rate differentials, we find that in the most recent year of data the global North (‘advanced economies’) appropriated from the South commodities worth $2.2 trillion in Northern prices — enough to end extre...

During the transition to democracy in the 1990s, the departing apartheid regime granted political power to the black majority but kept the main levers of economic policy insulated from the revolution. Control over the South African Reserve Bank (SARB; hereafter also Reserve Bank) was central to this strategy. The SARB was made private and independe...

The IPCC warns that in order to keep global warming under 1.5°, global emissions must be cut to zero by 2050. Policymakers and scholars debate how best to decarbonise the energy system, and what socio-economic changes might be necessary. Here we review the strengths, weaknesses, and synergies of two prominent climate change mitigation narratives: t...

Degrowth is a planned reduction of energy and resource use designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being. Over the past few years, the idea has attracted significant attention among academics and social movements, but for people new to the idea it raises a number...

Background: This analysis proposes a novel method for quantifying national responsibility for damages related to climate change by looking at national contributions to cumulative CO2 emissions in excess of the planetary boundary of 350 ppm atmospheric CO2 concentration. This approach is rooted in the principle of equal per capita access to atmosph...

Real-World Economics Review

When the Human Development Index (HDI) was introduced in the 1990s, it was an important step toward a more sensible measure of progress, one defined less by GDP growth and more by social goals. But the limitations of HDI have become clear in the 21 st century, given a growing crisis of climate change and ecological breakdown. HDI pays no attention...

The notion of green growth has emerged as a dominant policy response to climate change and ecological breakdown. Green growth theory asserts that continued economic expansion is compatible with our planet’s ecology, as technological change and substitution will allow us to absolutely decouple GDP growth from resource use and carbon emissions. This...

There are two sides to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which appear at risk of contradiction. One calls for humanity to achieve “harmony with nature” and to protect the planet from degradation, with specific targets laid out in Goals 6, 12, 13, 14, and 15. The other calls for continued global economic growth equivalent to 3% per year, as...

The safe and just space framework devised by Raworth calls for the world’s nations to achieve key minimum thresholds in social welfare while remaining within planetary boundaries. Using data on social and biophysical indicators provided by O’Neill et al., this paper argues that it is theoretically possible to achieve a good life for all within plan...

The dominant narrative of global income inequality is one of convergence. Recent high-profile publications by Branko Milanovic and the World Bank claim that the global Gini coefficient has declined since 1988, and that inter-country inequality has declined since 1960. But the convergence narrative relies on a misleading presentation of the data. It...

Is human suffering increasing or decreasing, in aggregate? One way to answer this question is to look at trends in global poverty and hunger. The World Bank and the United Nations tell us that poverty and hunger have been decreasing over the past few decades. But this narrative relies on misleading statistics. In reality, the problem is much greate...

Many of the communities in which anthropologists work are hierarchically organized, and the people who live in them often describe this arrangement in positive terms. Nevertheless, anthropologists rarely paint hierarchy in a favorable light. This special issue aims to question this tendency with ethnographic insights into social contexts where hier...

The final report on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) concludes that the project has been ‘the most successful anti-poverty movement in history’. Two key claims underpin this narrative: that global poverty has been cut in half, and global hunger nearly in half, since 1990. This good-news narrative has been touted by the United Nations and has...

The revolution that brought the African National Congress (ANC) to power in South Africa was fractured by internal conflict. Migrant workers from rural Zululand rejected many of the egalitarian values and policies fundamental to the ANC’s liberal democratic platform and organized themselves in an attempt to sabotage the movement. This anti-democrac...

The ‘girl effect’ – the idea that investment in the skills and labour of young women is the key to stimulating economic growth and reducing poverty in the global South – has recently become a key development strategy of the World Bank, the imf, usaid and dfid, in partnership with corporations such as Nike and Goldman Sachs. This paper examines the...

Witchcraft has long been a touchy subject in anthropology. While it was quite popular to write about witchcraft during the colonial period, the decades following independence saw this line of inquiry go silent. It became unfashionable to study such ‘traditional’ themes when there were more exciting, more modern issues at hand. Moreover, witchcraft...

This article explores the violent, anti-immigrant riots that swept through informal settlements in South Africa in 2008, during which more than sixty foreigners were killed and more than one hundred thousand displaced. In the first part of the paper, I draw on research conducted in informal settlements around the city of Durban to argue that many p...

The idea of international development aid lies at the heart of a tremendously successful PR campaign. The narrative we have been sold claims that aid has been effective at reducing global poverty. Here I will argue that there are three problems with this narrative. First, poverty is not disappearing, despite what we have been told to believe. Secon...

It is always a bit surprising to hear an economist described as a “rock star” in the media, but Thomas Piketty has been collecting this accolade in spades since the publication of his runaway bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It surely says something interesting about our times that this 700 page tome packed with dense historical dat...

Participation in development projects in the Global South has become one of the most sought-after activities among American and British high school graduates and college students. In the United States this often takes the form of Alternative Spring Break trips, while in Britain students typically pursue development work during their 'gap years'. De...

The article deals with the transformation of the Left critique of neoliberal capitalism from explicit opposition to acceptance of its basic tenets. The author notes that neoliberal ideology has created its own forms of political participation and activism, which permeates across social classes, religious and cultural affiliations and political prej...

Swaziland has the highest HIV prevalence rate in the world, despite the billions of dollars' worth of prevention efforts mobilised to curtail the epidemic. In this article I will argue that Swaziland's HIV prevention campaign fundamentally misperceives the causes of the epidemic by focusing on individual behaviour change to the exclusion of the wid...

The liberation struggle in South Africa that eventually brought the apartheid state to its knees had its roots in the workers' movement that emerged in the early 1970s. Beginning in the 1980s, this movement shifted from a ‘workerist’ orientation around shop floor issues to a ‘popularist’ articulation with the broader liberation struggle – a shift e...

Early colonial administrators relied primarily on indirect rule and “customary law” to govern Africans in segregated reserves by appropriating chiefs and propping up patriarchal power in rural families. But, by the early twentieth century, colonists’ demands for African labour had led to the growth of an urban African population living in “slums” n...

South Sudan will be celebrating the first anniversary of its independence on July 9. But the day's revelry will be marred by the fact that the past year has brought none of the peace and prosperity that people hoped it would.

Occupy succeeded in shedding light on this pattern of elite accumulation, brought it into mainstream consciousness, forced the corporate media to talk about it, and provided space for the elaboration of popular outrage. It aroused tremendous excitement by breaking the taboo on critique induced by the neoliberal mantra that “there is no alternative”...

South Sudan became the world's newest nation on July 9, 2011, to a great deal of fanfare from the international community that had followed its devastating civil war for more than a generation. Some 2.5 million Sudanese were killed during the course of this conflict, a number that demonstrates how desperate Khartoum was to maintain control over the...

South Sudan became the world’s newest nation on July 9, 2011, to a great deal of fanfare from the international community that had followed its devastating civil war for more than a generation. Some 2.5 million Sudanese were killed during the course of this conflict, a number that demonstrates how desperate Khartoum was to maintain control over the...

While Jeffrey Sachs has done well to highlight the roles of colonialism, the Cold War and the ‘ongoing political and economic plunder’ in creating Africa’s poverty, Jason Hickel argues that Sachs’ ‘Big Five’ solutions are rooted in the same system that he seeks to criticise: ‘The problem here is that Sachs calls on us to think within a paradigm of...

To this day there is competition between the sugar unions in Kwazulu-Natal. Jason Hickel traces this rivalry from the early '80s and explains their different traditions and their contributions to unionism in this sector.

Atropine dilates the pupil and paralyzes the ciliary muscle accommodation, blurring vision, and therefore is an effective penalization of the sound eye in the treatment of functional amblyopia of the other eye. The degree of blur induced is a function of the amount of the patient's uncorrected hyperopia and the distance from the eye of the viewed m...