Jason Hickel
Jason Edward Hickel is a Swazi economic anthropologist, academic and democratic eco-socialist. He is a professor at the Institute of Environmental Science & Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a visiting senior fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics, and was the Chair of Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo. He serves on the Climate and Macroeconomics Roundtable of the US National Academy of Sciences.
His research focuses on political economy, inequality, and ecological economics. He is a prominent proponent of the degrowth movement and a critic of capitalism, neocolonialism and the use of GDP growth as a measure of progress.
Background
Hickel was born and raised in Swaziland where his parents were doctors. He holds a bachelor's degree in anthropology from Wheaton College, USA. He received his PhD in anthropology from the University of Virginia in August 2011. His doctoral thesis was entitled Democracy and Sabotage: Moral Order and Political Conflict in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He taught at the London School of Economics from 2011 to 2017, where he held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, and at Goldsmiths, University of London, from 2017 to 2021.He served on the U.K. Labour Party task force on international development in 2017–2019. As of 2020 he serves on the Harvard-Lancet Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice, on the Statistical Advisory Panel for the UN Human Development Report, and on the advisory board for the Green New Deal for Europe.
Scholarship
Poverty and development
Hickel, along with co-author Dylan Sullivan, dispute in the journal World Development the view held by most economic historians, that prior to the 19th century, the vast majority of humanity lived in extreme poverty which was eventually ameliorated by industrialization. Hickel argues in The Divide that pre-colonial societies were not poor. He argues that precolonial agricultural societies in Africa and India were "quite content" with a "subsistence lifestyle" and that it was colonialism that made them worse off.. He argues that the dominant narrative of "progress" in international development is overstated, and that poverty remains a widespread and persistent feature of the global economy, reproduced by power imbalances between the Global North and Global South. Hickel argues that the International poverty line used to underwrite the progress narrative,, has no empirical grounding in actual human needs, and is inadequate to achieve basic nutrition and health. Hickel argues that US$7.40 per day is required for nutrition and health. Many other economists agree with Hickel that it would be more useful to use a higher daily income to define the poverty threshold, with some recommending $15 per day. As a consequence of population growth, the absolute number of people living under this threshold has increased from 3.2 billion in 1981 to 4.2 billion in 2015, according to World Bank data. Hickel states that the vast majority of gains against poverty have been achieved by China and East Asian countries that were not subjected to structural adjustment schemes. Elsewhere, increases in income among the poor have been very small, and mostly inadequate to lift people out of his definition of poverty. However, all scholars and intellectuals, including Hickel, agree that the incomes of the poorest people in the world have increased since 1981. Nevertheless, Sullivan and Hickel argue that poverty persists under contemporary global capitalism because masses of working people are cut off from common land and resources, have no ownership or control over the means of production, and have their labor power "appropriated by a ruling class or an external imperial power," thereby maintaining extreme inequality.In a follow up piece published in Monthly Review, Sullivan and Hickel further argue that this inequality is necessary for capitalism to function as a global system, and as such this explains why it has failed to eliminate extreme poverty outright even though the global economy easily produces enough to do so. Capital accumulation, they posit, requires access to cheap labor, and lots of it, as without it the system would be brought to its knees. They contrast this with the existing communist states, primarily in the 20th century, which "achieved better social outcomes than their capitalist counterparts at any given level of national production, including higher life expectancy, better education attainment, and lower child mortality." In this they quote the economist Amartya Sen who commented on health and literacy achievements around the world that "one thought that is bound to occur is that communism is good for poverty removal."
Noah Smith has criticized Hickel for using a single threshold of poverty and ignoring increases in incomes below that threshold. Smith states that an increase in income from $1.90 per day to $7.39 per day would be life-changing, but would not count as poverty alleviation for Hickel. Smith accuses Hickel that he has continued to treat poverty reduction entirely as a matter of crossing a single finish line. And he continues to set that line high enough to allow him to claim that poverty hasn't fallen. According to Smith it is important to look at distributions, not one threshold. Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion's research shows that no matter where the poverty threshold is defined, the percentage of the world's residents who live below it declined from 1981 to 2008.
Professor of Sociology Tibor Rutar assesses Hickel's work in a 2024 paper in which he examines the link between capitalism and extreme poverty. According to Rutar, "the data clearly shows poverty and even life relatively close to extreme poverty to be an undeniable and not uncommon reality in many pre-capitalist countries". In contrast to Hickel, Rutar argues that the transition to capitalist institutions in countries such as England did not lead to deterioration, but rather to a stabilization or improvement in living standards. Regions that did not undergo capitalist development yet, such as parts of continental Europe, often experienced a decline in real wages and food security.
In a review for Deutschlandfunk Kultur, German economics journalist Ursula Weidenfeld described Hickel’s book The Divide as “radically one-sided,” portraying capitalism as a centuries-long history of exploitation. She wrote that it tells a history of capitalism as a powerful conspiracy theory, centering on Hickel’s depiction of industrialization and globalization as instruments of domination that enabled the rich to subjugate the world. According to Weidenfeld, Hickel “denies reports that global poverty has drastically declined in the past twenty years,” calling such claims “sleight-of-hand tricks by interested parties.” She argued that Hickel ignores the disastrously failed attempt at an alternative economic system — communism — and that only for this reason can he recommend a kind of “feel-good socialism” as a remedy, a utopian vision lacking nothing.
Colonialism
Writing for a piece published in the journal World Development and in an accompanying opinion piece for Al Jazeera, Hickel, along with co-author Dylan Sullivan argue that it was the emergence of colonialism and the shoehorning of regions into the capitalist world system starting in the "long 16th century" that created "periods of severe social and economic dislocation" which resulted in wages crashing to subsistence levels and surging premature mortality. Hickel and Sullivan estimate that British colonial policies in India caused 165 million of excess deaths between 1880 and 1920, which they state is "larger than the combined number of deaths that occurred during all famines in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, North Korea, Pol Pot's Cambodia, and Mengistu's Ethiopia". They conclude that human welfare only really began to increase in the 20th century, and note that this development coincided with "the rise of anti-colonial and socialist political movements."According to sociologist Tibor Rutar, the relationship between capitalism and colonialism is more complex than is often suggested. He argues that many colonial powers in the early modern period were still pre-capitalist. Moreover, he claims that these powers rarely introduced capitalist institutions into their colonies. Only in a few settler colonies, such as the United States and Australia, did a genuine capitalist development take place. According to Rutar, economic profit motives alone are insufficient to classify colonialism as a specifically capitalist practice. Balance of payments analyses also show that colonial plunder generally did not play a necessary or decisive role in Europe's economic growth—except in the case of settler colonies.
Trade and global inequality
In a 2022 article published in Global Environmental Change, Hickel and a team of scholars state that in the globalized neoliberal capitalist economy, the Global North still relies on "imperialist appropriation" of resources and labor from the Global South, which annually amounts to "12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour, worth $10.8 trillion in Northern prices – enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over." From 1990 to 2015, this net appropriation amounted to $242 trillion. Hickel et al. write that this unequal exchange is a leading driver of uneven development, increasing global inequality and environmental degradation.According to Hickel, the focus on aid as a tool for international development depoliticises poverty and misleads people into believing that rich countries are benevolent toward poorer countries. In reality, he says, financial flows from rich countries to poor countries are outstripped by flows that go in the opposite direction, including external debt service, tax evasion by multinational companies, patent licensing fees and other outflows resulting from structural features of neoliberal globalisation. Moreover, Hickel argues that poor countries suffer significant losses due to international trade and finance rules which depress their potential export revenues and prevent them from using protective tariffs, subsidies, and capital controls as tools for national economic development. According to Hickel, global poverty is ultimately an artefact of these structural imbalances. Focusing on aid distracts from the substantive reforms that would be necessary to address these problems.
Journalist Kelsey Piper wrote that Jason Hickel argues most trade between rich and poor countries is extractive rather than mutually beneficial. According to Piper, this view rests on a speculative assumption about how developing countries could grow without trade with rich nations — an assumption that, she noted, is not widely shared by democratically elected leaders in those countries. Piper further argued that the global economy is much more interconnected than Hickel suggests. As an example, she pointed to the COVID-19 pandemic, during which the decline in consumption in wealthy countries led to severe side effects in poorer nations, such as rising hunger and child mortality.