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Jason Edward Hickel (born 1982) is an economic anthropologist whose research focuses on ecological economics, global inequality,
imperialism Imperialism is the state policy, practice, or advocacy of extending power and dominion, especially by direct territorial acquisition or by gaining political and economic control of other areas, often through employing hard power (economic and ...
and
political economy Political economy is the study of how economic systems (e.g. markets and national economies) and political systems (e.g. law, institutions, government) are linked. Widely studied phenomena within the discipline are systems such as labour m ...
. He is known for his books ''The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions ''(2017) and ''Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World ''(2020). He is a professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, a Visiting Senior Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics, and a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Arts The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), also known as the Royal Society of Arts, is a London-based organisation committed to finding practical solutions to social challenges. The RSA acronym is used m ...
.


Background

Hickel was born and raised in Swaziland (now
Eswatini Eswatini ( ; ss, eSwatini ), officially the Kingdom of Eswatini and formerly named Swaziland ( ; officially renamed in 2018), is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. It is bordered by Mozambique to its northeast and South Africa to its no ...
) where his parents were doctors at the height of the AIDS crisis. He holds a bachelor's degree in anthropology from Wheaton College, USA (2004). He worked in the non-profit sector in Nagaland, India and in Swaziland, and received his PhD in anthropology from the
University of Virginia The University of Virginia (UVA) is a public research university in Charlottesville, Virginia. Founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson, the university is ranked among the top academic institutions in the United States, with highly selective ad ...
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 Goldsmiths, University of London, officially the Goldsmiths' College, is a constituent research university of the University of London in England. It was originally founded in 1891 as The Goldsmiths' Technical and Recreative Institute by the ...
, 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


International development

Writing for a piece published in the journal ''
World Development ''World Development'' is a monthly peer-reviewed academic journal covering development studies. It was established in 1973 and is published by Elsevier. According to the ''Journal Citation Reports'', the journal has a 2020 impact factor The im ...
'' and in an accompanying opinion piece for
Al Jazeera Al Jazeera ( ar, الجزيرة, translit-std=DIN, translit=al-jazīrah, , "The Island") is a state-owned Arabic-language international radio and TV broadcaster of Qatar. It is based in Doha and operated by the media conglomerate Al Jazeera M ...
, Hickel, along with co-author Dylan Sullivan, dispute the notion that, prior to the 19th century, the vast majority of humanity lived in extreme poverty which was eventually ameliorated by the rise of
capitalism Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price system, private pr ...
. On the contrary, they argue that it was the emergence of
colonialism Colonialism is a practice or policy of control by one people or power over other people or areas, often by establishing colonies and generally with the aim of economic dominance. In the process of colonisation, colonisers may impose their relig ...
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. In India, for example, Hickel and Sullivan write that "under the aegis of British capitalism," tens of millions lost their lives, with excess deaths rising to around 100 million for the years 1880 to 1920, which is greater than all the famines that occurred under communist governments combined. 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 Decolonization or decolonisation is the undoing of colonialism, the latter being the process whereby imperial nations establish and dominate foreign territories, often overseas. Some scholars of decolonization focus especially on independence m ...
and socialist political movements." In ''The Divide'', Hickel argued 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 Global means of or referring to a globe and may also refer to: Entertainment * ''Global'' (Paul van Dyk album), 2003 * ''Global'' (Bunji Garlin album), 2007 * ''Global'' (Humanoid album), 1989 * ''Global'' (Todd Rundgren album), 2015 * Bruno ...
and
Global South The concept of Global North and Global South (or North–South divide in a global context) is used to describe a grouping of countries along socio-economic and political characteristics. The Global South is a term often used to identify region ...
. Hickel argues that the
poverty line The poverty threshold, poverty limit, poverty line or breadline is the minimum level of income deemed adequate in a particular country. The poverty line is usually calculated by estimating the total cost of one year's worth of necessities for ...
used to underwrite the progress narrative, US$1.90 per day (2011 PPP), has no empirical grounding in actual human needs, and is inadequate to achieve basic nutrition and health. Hickel draws on empirical studies to show that closer to US$7.40 per day is required for nutrition and health, and that the 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. 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 poverty. In a 2022 article published in '' Global Environmental Change'', Hickel and a team of scholars state that in the globalized
neoliberal Neoliberalism (also neo-liberalism) is a term used to signify the late 20th century political reappearance of 19th-century ideas associated with free-market capitalism after it fell into decline following the Second World War. A prominent fa ...
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 Unequal exchange is used primarily in Marxist economics, but also in ecological economics (more specifically also as ecologically unequal exchange), to denote forms of exploitation hidden in or underwriting trade. Originating, in the wake o ...
is a leading driver of uneven development, increasing global inequality and
environmental degradation Environmental degradation is the deterioration of the environment through depletion of resources such as quality of air, water and soil; the destruction of ecosystems; habitat destruction; the extinction of wildlife; and pollution. It is ...
. On his blog, Hickel has criticised claims by
Hans Rosling Hans Rosling (; 27 July 1948 – 7 February 2017) was a Swedish physician, academic and public speaker. He was a professor of international health at Karolinska Institute and was the co-founder and chairman of the Gapminder Foundation, which de ...
and others that global inequality has been decreasing and the gap between poor countries and rich countries has disappeared. This narrative relies on relative metrics (such as the "elephant graph"), which Hickel says obscure the fact that absolute inequality has worsened considerably over the past decades: the real per capita income gap between the Global North and Global South has quadrupled since 1960, and the incomes of the richest one percent have increased by one hundred times more than the incomes of the poorest 60% of humanity over the period 1980 to 2016. Hickel has argued that absolute metrics are the appropriate measure for assessing inequality trends in the world economy. 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 (such as under structural adjustment programmes, free trade agreements, and the
WTO The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an intergovernmental organization that regulates and facilitates international trade. With effective cooperation in the United Nations System, governments use the organization to establish, revise, and e ...
framework) 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.


Climate change and ecological economics

In 2020, Hickel published research in ''The Lancet Planetary Health '' asserting that a small number of high-income countries are responsible for the overwhelming majority of historical CO2 emissions in excess of the planetary boundary (350 ppm). His analysis asserts that the US is responsible for 40%, the EU is responsible for 29%, and the Global North as a group is responsible for 92%. He has also argued that high-income nations are disproportionately responsible for other forms of global ecological breakdown, given their high levels of resource use. In a review paper written with the ecological economist Giorgos Kallis, Hickel argues that narratives about "green growth" have little empirical validity. They point to evidence showing that it is not feasible for high-income nations to achieve absolute reductions in resource use, or to reduce emissions to zero fast enough stay within the carbon budget for 2 °C if they continue to pursue GDP growth at historical rates. Hickel and his colleagues argue that high-income nations need to scale down excess energy and resource use (i.e., "
degrowth Degrowth (french: décroissance) is a term used for both a political, economic, and social movement as well as a set of theories that critique the paradigm of economic growth. It can be described as an extensive framework that is based on crit ...
") in order to achieve a rapid transition to
100% renewable energy 100% renewable energy means getting all energy from renewable resources. The endeavor to use 100% renewable energy for electricity, heating, cooling and transport is motivated by climate change, pollution and other environmental issues, ...
and reverse ecological breakdown. He has argued that high-income nations do not need economic growth in order to achieve social goals; they can reduce excess resource and energy use while at the same time improving human well-being, by distributing income more fairly, expanding universal public goods, shortening the working week, and introducing a public
job guarantee A job guarantee is an economic policy proposal that aims to provide a sustainable solution to inflation and unemployment. Its aim is to create full employment and price stability by having the state promise to hire unemployed workers as an emp ...
. In 2020, Hickel proposed a Sustainable Development Index, which adjusts the
Human Development Index The Human Development Index (HDI) is a statistic composite index of life expectancy, education (mean years of schooling completed and expected years of schooling upon entering the education system), and per capita income indicators, w ...
by accounting for nations' ecological impact, in terms of per capita emissions and resource use.


Journalism

Hickel writes on global development and political economy, and has contributed to ''
The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
'', ''
Foreign Policy A state's foreign policy or external policy (as opposed to internal or domestic policy) is its objectives and activities in relation to its interactions with other states, unions, and other political entities, whether bilaterally or through ...
'' and
Al Jazeera Al Jazeera ( ar, الجزيرة, translit-std=DIN, translit=al-jazīrah, , "The Island") is a state-owned Arabic-language international radio and TV broadcaster of Qatar. It is based in Doha and operated by the media conglomerate Al Jazeera M ...
, as well as ''
Jacobin , logo = JacobinVignette03.jpg , logo_size = 180px , logo_caption = Seal of the Jacobin Club (1792–1794) , motto = "Live free or die"(french: Vivre libre ou mourir) , successor = P ...
'' and other media outlets.


Awards

* Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth (ASA) Annual Award for Teaching and Lecturing in Anthropology, 2013.


Books

* * ** (2018). ''The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets''. WWNorton. * * * *


References


Further reading

* * *Hickel, Jason (March 2019) �
Degrowth: a theory of radical abundance
��, Real-World Economics Review, issue no. 87, 19, pp. 54–68. *


External links

*
Jason Hickel articles
for
Al Jazeera Al Jazeera ( ar, الجزيرة, translit-std=DIN, translit=al-jazīrah, , "The Island") is a state-owned Arabic-language international radio and TV broadcaster of Qatar. It is based in Doha and operated by the media conglomerate Al Jazeera M ...

Jason Hickel articles
for '' Current Affairs''
Jason Hickel articles
for ''
Foreign Policy A state's foreign policy or external policy (as opposed to internal or domestic policy) is its objectives and activities in relation to its interactions with other states, unions, and other political entities, whether bilaterally or through ...
''
Jason Hickel articles
for ''
The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
''.
Jason Hickel articles
for ''
Jacobin , logo = JacobinVignette03.jpg , logo_size = 180px , logo_caption = Seal of the Jacobin Club (1792–1794) , motto = "Live free or die"(french: Vivre libre ou mourir) , successor = P ...
''. {{DEFAULTSORT:Hickel, Jason 1982 births Living people Swazi Wheaton College (Illinois) alumni University of Virginia alumni American anthropologists Labour Party (UK) people Ecological economists People associated with criticism of economic growth Economic anthropologists