Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan Over the past two decades, the posture of the United States toward China has evolved from economic cooperation to outright antagonism. US media outlets and politicians have engaged in persistent anti-China rhetoric, while the US government has imposed trade restrictions and sanctions on China and pursued military buildup close to Chinese territory. Washington wants…
Degrowth scholarship calls for reducing less-necessary production in rich countries to enable faster decarbonization and reverse other ecological pressures. But how can this be achieved? What is the mechanism? For many years ecological economists advocated setting “caps” on resource use, declining to levels that are compatible with ecological goals. This is a nice idea in the abstract, but it…
Look around and it is impossible to ignore the fact that our world is torn apart by brutal inequality. Some countries enjoy unimaginable material affluence while others suffer mass deprivation, with billions lacking basic necessities like nutritious food and clean water. The injustice stares every sane observer in the face. But where does it come from? This book shows that global inequality is not…
The Divide was first published in 2017. In the years since, many people have written to me, or approached me during public events, to share the impact it had on them. I am always grateful for this. And yet as a researcher, I look back on the text now and wish that it could include all that I have learned over the past seven years. Knowledge moves quickly, and I want to make it available to…
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 understood that scaling down less-necessary forms of production can contribute substantially to decarbonization, in two direct and obvious ways. First, it directly reduces emissions in addition to what can be achieved through efficiency…
Here is a list of studies, surveys and polling results that shed some light on popular perceptions of post-capitalist ideas. I will seek to update this list periodically. Support for post-capitalism 1. A survey shows that a majority of people around the world (56%) agree with the statement “Capitalism does more harm than good”. In France it is 69%, in India it is 74%. Source: Edelman Trust…
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 relies on maintaining an artificial scarcity of essential goods and services (like housing, healthcare, transport, etc), through processes of enclosure and commodification. We know that enclosure enables monopolists to…
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 countries’ carbon emissions and resource use on a per capita basis. This is an important step forward; I support the effort and I applaud the work of those who are involved. But the new metric, known as the Planetary…
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 be addressed by decoupling alone (which is true), the only conceivable alternative is to drastically reduce GDP (which is false). He also applies GDP reductions to developing countries. These are ill-informed approaches to climate…
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 of 1881-1920 (an average of 1.3 to 4.1 million excess deaths per year over the period, depending on our assumptions about ‘normal’ mortality). Following recent scholarship, we attribute the crisis to British colonial policy,…
Over the past few years, this graph has become something of a sensation. Developed by Our World In Data and promoted widely by Bill Gates and Steven Pinker, the graph gives the impression that virtually all of humanity was in “extreme poverty” as of 1820 (i.e., living on less than $1.90 per day, PPP; less than is required for basic food). OWID has used this figure to claim that extreme poverty was…
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 roughly half of humanity is left unable to meet basic needs. But the question at stake this time is different. A couple of economists on Twitter have claimed that the world average income is $16 per day (PPP). This, they say, is proof that the world…
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. But in recent interviews, when Pollin has been asked about degrowth, he has responded with claims that are factually incorrect and, I think, intentionally misleading. Take for example this recent interview in Vox ,…
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 conversation he had with a proponent of degrowth, which was me. I wrote a response, which I have updated here for clarity, and to account for new data. To recap Milanovic’s argument: he imagines a scenario in which we cap global GDP at present levels.…
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. I had critiqued the book’s central claims here and here , pointing out that the data he relies on…
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 of the movement’s most effective communicators. Over the past few weeks a number of people inspired by their work have asked me whether there is scope for thinking about degrowth from a MMT perspective. My answer: definitely. In fact, the two…
During the debate about global poverty that unfolded earlier this year, the Bloomberg opinion columnist Noah Smith wrote a piece discussing some of my claims . While some of Smith’s points are worth engaging, the piece makes a number of misleading assertions — assertations that illustrate the sort of sleight of hand to which many defenders of the grand poverty-progress narrative have resorted.…
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 is by far the dominant approach, embodied in the standard Gini index , in the famous “ elephant graph ”, and in logarithmic distribution graphs – is problematic in that it is aligned with the interests and perspectives of the rich, and…
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 in the standard Gini index , in the famous “ elephant graph ”, and in logarithmic distribution graphs (follow the links to see my critiques of each of these). According to the relative metric, if the income of the poor increases at a…
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 of actual poverty (grudgingly admitted), but at least they’ve been rising . For those who seek to defend neoliberal globalization, this fact has become a precious touchstone. While it is true that the average incomes of poor…