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  • Monthly Review Essays

About Jason Hickel

Dr. Jason Hickel is an anthropologist, author, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He has taught at the London School of Economics, the University of Virginia, and Goldsmiths, University of London, where he convenes the MA in Anthropology and Cultural Politics. He serves on the Labour Party task force on international development, works as Policy Director for /The Rules collective, sits on the Executive Board of Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP) and recently joined the International Editorial Advisory Board of Third World Quarterly.
  • 'Public services are a common good,' reads a placard on the March 22 protest in Paris over cuts, labour rights and privatisation. Photo: Twitter/@commeunbruit

    Universal public services: The power of decommodifying survival

    Originally published: Jason Hickel Blog on April 11, 2023 (more by Jason Hickel Blog)

    One of the central insights emerging from research on degrowth and climate mitigation is that universal public services are crucial to a just and effective transition.

  • As Myanmar experiences more extreme weather events, a roadmap that lays the context, analysis, and options on how to tackle climate change is highly essential, 2016

    Existing climate mitigation scenarios perpetuate colonial inequalities

    Originally published: The Lancet on July 20, 2022 by Aljosa Slamersak (more by The Lancet)

    The core countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the rest of Europe (collectively referred to here as the Global North) use on average about 130 gigajoules of energy per capita each year, nearly ten times more than what low-income countries use (13·4 GJ/capita).

  • Protesters carry placards as they demonstrate as part of a global day of action on climate change outside parliament in Cape Town, South Africa, September 25, 2020 [Mike Hutchings/Reuters]

    The Global South has the power to force radical climate action

    Originally published: Al Jazeera on June 29, 2022 (more by Al Jazeera)

    After all, Western economies–and their economic growth–depend utterly on labour and resources from the South.

  • The Age of Imperialism is Not Over—But We Can End It

    The age of imperialism is not over—but we can end it

    Originally published: Current Affairs on December 5, 2021 (more by Current Affairs)  |

    Capitalist accumulation has always depended on cheap labor and resources extracted from the Global South. To end this violence we need a post-capitalist transition—otherwise, as climate breakdown accelerates, the ceaseless search for profit will drive us further into barbarism.

  • - Wikimedia Commons File:Simple surplus value model.svg

    Is the world poor, or unjust?

    Originally published: Jason Hickel Blog on February 21, 2021 (more by Jason Hickel Blog)

    Social media has been ablaze with this question recently. We know we face a crisis of mass poverty: the global economy is organized in such a way that nearly 60% of humanity is left unable to meet basic needs. But the question at stake this time is different.

  • Green New Deal (Photo: Bart Everson)

    A response to Pollin and Chomsky: We need a Green New Deal without growth

    Originally published: Jason Hickel Blog on November 2, 2020 (more by Jason Hickel Blog)

    Robert Pollin and Noam Chomsky have a new book out, Climate Crisis and the Green New Deal. It’s an important contribution to the emerging GND literature, from two thinkers I respect.

  • GDP - raw materials

    A response to McAfee: No, the “Environmental Kuznets Curve” won’t save us

    Originally published: Jason Hickel on October 9, 2020 (more by Jason Hickel)

    A number of people have asked me to respond to a piece that Andrew McAfee wrote for Wired, promoting his book, which claims that rich countries – and specifically the United States – have accomplished the miracle of “green growth” and “dematerialization”, absolutely decoupling GDP from resource use.

  • APARTHEID IN THE GLOBAL GOVERNANCE SYSTEM

    Apartheid in the global governance system

    Originally published: Jason Hickel on October 16, 2019 (more by Jason Hickel)

    In my research I have argued that rising global inequality is driven in large part by power imbalances in the global economy, in that rich countries have disproportionate influence when it comes to setting the rules of international trade and finance.

  • A response to Noah Smith about global poverty

    Originally published: Jason Hickel Blog on June 14, 2019 (more by Jason Hickel Blog)

    During the debate about the global poverty numbers that unfolded earlier this year, the Bloomberg opinion columnist Noah Smith wrote a piece discussing some of my claims. In the months since a number of people have asked me to respond.

  • Economic Growth

    Degrowth: a theory of radical abundance

    Originally published: Real-World Economics Review on March 2019 (Issue no. 87) (more by Real-World Economics Review)

    Degrowth seeks to invert the Lauderdale Paradox. By calling for a fairer distribution of existing resources and the expansion of public goods, degrowth demands not scarcity but ratherabundance (see Sahlins, 1976; Galbraith, 1998; Latouche, 2014; D’Alisa et al., 2014).

  • democracy chronicles Income Inequality Thomas Nast Style | by democracychronicles

    Inequality metrics and the question of power

    Originally published: Jason Hickel Blog on July 3, 2019 (more by Jason Hickel Blog)

    How should we measure inequality?

  • Income inequality has been growing for decades and Americans are ... LSE Blogs

    How not to measure inequality

    Originally published: Jason Hickel Blog on May 15, 2019 (more by Jason Hickel Blog)

    When we look at inequality from the perspective of the poor – using the theory of increasing egregiousness – it becomes clear that the relative metric is inappropriate as a tool for assessing distribution. Certainly if our objective is to end poverty, this is the conclusion we must draw, as an additional dollar going needlessly to the rich could have been used to reduce poverty, and yet was not.

  • Inequality and the ecological transition

    Originally published: Jason Hickel Blog on January 14, 2019 (more by Jason Hickel Blog)

    Last month Branko Milanovic published a blog post about the Yellow Vest movement against the fuel tax in France. He was worried–like many analysts–that the uprising proves it will be virtually impossible to roll out the policies necessary to reduce carbon emissions. He’s convinced that people simply won’t accept it.

  • NEW HAVEN, CT - OCTOBER 08: Yale Professor William Nordhaus attends a press conference after winning the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences at Yale University on October 8, 2018 in New Haven, Connecticut. Professor Nordhaus' research has been focused on the economics of climate change, economic growth, and natural resources. (Photo by Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images)

    The Nobel Prize for climate catastrophe

    Originally published: Foreign Policy on December 6, 2018 (more by Foreign Policy)  |

    The economist William Nordhaus will receive his profession’s highest honor for research on global warming that’s been hugely influential—and entirely misguided.

  • Prosperity or Plunder? Nigeria Slipping at an Oily Crossroads

    Jason Hickel

    “Disaster” doesn’t begin to describe the troubled oil scene in Nigeria.  Last June, in the immediate wake of the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the New York Times ran an article exposing a crisis in Nigeria that should have been capable of piquing the conscience of even the most hardened oil barons.  It […]

  • Rethinking Jeffrey Sachs and the “Big Five”: New Proposals for the End of Poverty

    Jason Hickel

    Jeffrey Sachs has become something of a force in international development circles over the past decade.  As special advisor to the UN’s Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, former director of the UN’s Millennium Development Project, and a decorated economist at Columbia University, Sachs certainly has much to brag about.  The publication of his runaway bestseller, The […]

  • Africa, Nature, and the March of the Development Technocrats

    Jason Hickel

    “Development,” I’ve discovered, operates as a flagrantly racist discourse in some guises.  Scrambling to explain the reasons for Africa’s perpetual poverty and apparently incurable misery, laypersons in the West point to Africans’ “savagery” and alleged incapacity for civilization.  This is not just a fringe opinion; even among putatively educated individuals such nonsense recurs with disturbing […]

  • From Rights to Commons: Dispatches from South Africa’s Revolution

    Jason Hickel

    “But we can’t eat rights, hawu!”  Those five words of protest from the lips of South Africa’s underclass sting like a slap in the face.  Good liberals will always take offense.  We find ourselves scrambling desperately to battle the mad claim that “things were better under apartheid.”  “But of what worth is a job,” we […]

  • Hollywood Pretends to Learn from Nelson Mandela

    Jason Hickel

    Since its release last December Invictus has caused quite a stir among American movie-goers, garnering relatively high reviews from critics, bagging third place among box-office openers, taking home a series of award nominations, and — perhaps most importantly — winning airtime on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show.  But while director Clint Eastwood’s successes with this […]

Monthly Review Essays

  • Ruy Mauro Marini’s Contribution to the Political Economy of Imperialism
    Torkil Lauesen

    In “The Dialectics of Dependency,” Ruy Mauro Marini developed a theory of dependency and unequal exchange that is still invaluable today.

Lost & Found

  • Militarism and the Coming Wars
    István Mészáros What Did You Learn from Iraq?

    The dangers and immense suffering caused by all attempts at solving deep-seated social problems by militaristic interventions, on any scale, are obvious enough. If, however, we look more closely at the historical trend of militaristic adventures, it becomes frighteningly clear that they show an ever greater intensification and an ever-increasing scale, from local confrontations to […]

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