Accelerationist possibilities in an ecosocialist degrowth scenario
I want to make a brief intervention here to highlight an aspect of degrowth climate mitigation strategy that has so far been inadequately developed. It is widely…
Author: Jason Hickel
How popular are post-growth and post-capitalist ideas? Some recent data
Here is a list of studies, surveys and polling results that shed some light on popular perceptions of post-growth and post-capitalist ideas. I will seek to update…
The fallacies of GDP reductionism: A response to Warlenius
Rikard Warlenius has written an article on what he calls “the limits to degrowth”. In it, he states that because degrowth researchers argue the climate crisis cannot…
Universal public services: the power of decommodifying survival
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. Capitalism…
National responsibility for ecological breakdown
Abstract. High-income countries are responsible for up to 93% of global excess material use over the period 1970-2017. Specific results depend on the methods used, ranging from…
On the mortality crises in India under British rule: A response to Tirthankar Roy
In a recent article published in World Development, we drew on newly available data to calculate that India suffered 50-165 million excess deaths during the mortality crisis…
Extreme poverty isn’t natural, it’s created
Over the past few years, this graph has become a sensation. Developed by Our World In Data and promoted widely by Bill Gates and Steven Pinker, the…
The limits of the UN’s Planetary pressure-adjusted HDI
In 2020, the UNDP published a new metric that for the first time seeks officially to adjust the Human Development Index (HDI) for ecological pressure, accounting for…
Is the world poor, or unjust?
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…
A response to Pollin and Chomsky: We need a Green New Deal without growth
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…
Degrowth: A response to Branko Milanovic
In late 2017, Branko Milanovic wrote a blog post titled “The illusion of degrowth in a poor and unequal world.” He penned it, he says, following a…
On resource use and the “Environmental Kuznets Curve”
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 –…
Degrowth and MMT: A thought experiment
Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is getting a lot of attention these days, thanks in large part to the excellent work of Stephanie Kelton and Nathan Tankus, two…
Apartheid in the global governance system
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…
A response to Noah Smith about global poverty
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. …
Inequality metrics and the question of power
How should we measure inequality? There are two metrics that economists use: relative and absolute. In the past I have argued that the relative metric – which…
How not to measure inequality
There are two primary methods for measuring inequality – relative and absolute. In the discipline of economics, the former has become dominant by far. It is embodied…
At this rate, it will take 200 years to end global poverty
During the debate about global poverty that erupted earlier this year, one fact kept getting repeated: maybe poor people’s incomes haven’t increased enough to lift them out…
Global inequality: Do we really live in a one-hump world?
There is a powerful infographic that has been circulating on social media for a couple of years now. It illustrates a dramatic transformation from a “two hump…
How bad is global inequality, really?
Most everyone who’s interested in global inequality has come across the famous elephant graph, originally developed by Branko Milanovic and Christoph Lakner using World Bank data. The…
A response to that Vox article about the global poverty debate
Last week Vox published an article on the global poverty debate. The piece – by journalist Dylan Matthews – raises a few issues that I think are…
A response to Max Roser: how not to measure global poverty
Max Roser and Joe Hasell have written a post defending the methodology behind their long-term poverty graph. It is not addressed to me, but it was written…
A letter to Steven Pinker (and Bill Gates, for that matter) about global poverty
Dear Steven, I’m writing to respond to a letter you posted regarding claims I made in the Guardian about the global poverty narrative. I’m addressing you directly…
The scandal of British aid
*This is the text of a speech delivered at the Cambridge Union in defense of the proposition: This house believes that British aid is not working. Ladies…