Jason Hickel

The Divide attracted attention for arguing 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.[12][13][14] Jason Hickel points out that the poverty line 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, an argument that has been supported by the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights.[15] 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.[16][17][18] 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.

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 "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,[19] 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.[20] Hickel has argued that absolute metrics are the appropriate measure for assessing inequality trends in the world economy.[21][22]

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.[23] 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.[24] 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.

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 CO₂emissions 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%.[25] 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.[26]

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.[27] Hickel and his colleagues argue that high-income nations need to scale down excess energy and resource use (i.e., "degrowth") in order to achieve a rapid transition to 100% renewable energy and reverse ecological breakdown.[28] 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.[29]

Hickel designed the Sustainable Development Index in 2020. The SDI adjusts the Human Development Index by accounting for nations' ecological impact, in terms of per capita emissions and resource use.[30]

Hickel's ethnographic research in South Africa explored the political conflict between migrant workers from rural Zululand and the African National Congress (ANC). His book Democracy as Death (2015) showed that rural migrants rejected many of the liberal values and policies of the ANC's platform, which they saw as undermining the kinship arrangements that rural communities consider to be important to collective well-being. In this book, and in a collection edited with Meghan Healy-Clancy, Ekhaya: The Politics of Home in KwaZulu-Natal, he argued that visions of kinship and domestic space in South Africa have been sources of political struggle from the colonial era to today. Later research on finance in South Africa explored conflicts over monetary and economic policy between the South African Reserve Bank and the labour movement.

His work has been funded by Fulbright, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation, and the Leverhulme Trust.