Jason Hickel

 ( Jasonhickel.org Official Website ) 

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, (US$1.90 per day in 2011 PPP, the World Bank's definition of extreme poverty), 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 (in spite of it being highly productive) 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 ($7.40 per day) and ignoring increases in incomes below that threshold. Smith notes 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. Additionally, 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.

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.

On his blog, Hickel has criticised claims by Hans Rosling 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 Branko Milanovic), 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 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.

Hickel argues that trade between developed countries and developing countries is not mutually beneficial.

Professor of Sociology Tibor Rutar criticizes Hickel's work in a scientific paper (2024) where 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 (though above it) 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.

According to Tibor Rutar, the relationship between capitalism and colonialism is more complex than is often suggested. He argues that many colonial powers (such as Spain and Portugal) 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.