Jason Hickel, an economic anthropologist, writes about global inequality, poverty, degrowth, and critiques of claims of progress against poverty.
Commenters recommend his book Less is More and his open letter to Steven Pinker as a starting point on contested claims about poverty progress.
Undoubtedly that personal award goes to Citations Needed Episode 73: Western Media’s Narrow, Colonial Definition of ‘Corruption’. You can read the transcript on Medium [1] or listen on Spotify [2].
It may seem a bit bromide for HN, but it really shattered my world view. Or at least was the impetus of a rather radical shift in how I viewed global power structures, old wealth, and the evil systems in place today that continue to perpetuate global inequality. In the episode, they dig into these popular "corruption" indices, why the Global South is always painted as the "most corrupt", true sources of institutionalized corruption, where the real tax havens and how they operate. It even highlights a (previously unknown to me at least!) stark and admittedly macabre distinction between London, the city in England and the ancient The City of London [3]. Yes there is a huge difference with the latter being a 1,000 British colonial-era holdover that's home to the largest tax haven hub in the world.
As a bonus, it features Jason Hickel, an economic anthropologist who wrote The Divide [4]. Which, for reasons outlined above, is also one of my favorite books ever. If you find my poor attempt of summary or the article/podcast interesting, I'd implore you to buy the book and learn something new.
All the world is a stage and indeed we are merely players.
[1] - https://citationsneeded.medium.com/episode-73-western-medias-narrow-colonial-definition-of-corruption-ec8d06cc5a96
[2] -…
I understand that academics are just humans, and can lose their temper like the rest of us.
However what I find very troubling is that the main point that Hickel raised in the blog post[1] – GDP data has the particular potentially crucial problems Allen has raised when used to assess historical poverty – Roser chooses to not actually address it, but instead throws blanket statements of there being continued discussion between academics of different datasets and their merits.
However this particular graph of historical extreme poverty is used by the most powerful people in the world to advocate for continuing with the status quo. That is why it caught Hickel's attention. It is therefore very important that the heading of the graph is very well justified.
As a layperson reading Allen's research, and knowing there is a discontinuation point in the graph 1981 when the dataset changes, I think the graph ought to be labelled very differently. Roser continuing to label it as "extreme poverty" knowing there is an ongoing debate about what data if any is a good proxy historical poverty, and not answering head on Allen's criticism, really makes me not trust Roser.
1: https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2021/3/28/extreme-poverty-isnt-natural-it-is-created
Reports released by IPCC and other organizations [0] indicate that we have 15 years to take drastic action on the environment. This tracks with the extremely accurate prediction from The Limits to Growth [1] published in 1972.
If we do not take action on climate _now_ then _nothing_ is going to matter.
We will enter into an irreversible feedback loop that causes human extinction, yet it won't be apparent until it is literally on the doorstep for people to realize.
If you are not quitting your job and working to advance the existential threat of climate change and the main driver of the catastrophe (capitalism and perpetual growth) then you are wasting your (and your children's) time.
An excellent book on what needs to be done is Less is More by Jason Hickel [2]. This is the only problem that matters since literally existence depends on solving it. The time for deep concern is over. Action is needed and it is needed now. Education, degrowth, reuse, technology. So put everything else aside or you are laboring (and living) for nothing.
[0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-023-01157-x
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
[2]: https://www.jasonhickel.org/less-is-more
> I would love renewable or fusion to cover all our needs, and keep my comfortable life as it is today
I've been reading Jason Hickel's book "Less is More" [1], which talks a bit about energy use, in general, and how it must be reduced, regardless of what technologies we wind up with. And one of his points is examining how much energy is just flat-out wasted. ~50% of food is just wasted, for example—whether because it's ugly, or left in a refrigerator too long, and rots. Think about how most American cities are designed, and how it's just normal for most Americans to own and drive personal vehicles for hours each day. Those resources and the energy needed to extract those resources is largely just unnecessarily wasted.
Consider countries like Costa Rica, Finland, Taiwan, etc., where quality of life is better than in the US. Life expectancy is higher. Infant mortality is lower. Education is better. And they need a tiny fraction of the energy the U.S. does. Clearly there's room for a lot of improvement with how we use energy.
[1] https://www.jasonhickel.org/less-is-more
Actually I just didn't share data because I forgot the name of the author who has best spoken to this critique, but I dug him up and it's Jason Hickel. He responded directly to Steven Pinker's rosy optimism about the world, in particular pointing out that our bar for what is extreme poverty is a made up number that is too low. If you use a more reasonable measure for extreme poverty, the situation looks a little different. It has improved in some areas and expanded in others. Notably, people like Pinker use their argument to say basically that capitalism is good. But Hickel points out that most of the gains were in China, where the economic system that led to all this growth was a very mixed system of capitalism combined with heavy state control. So under no circumstances can we conclude that free market capitalism is the main driver of reductions in extreme poverty.
https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-poverty
> The alternative is the silly measures of "poverty" we use in the first world which are mathematically unachievable by design so they can always be used to justify measures politicians want to pass: "won't you think of the child poverty you heartless monster" etc.
No, I disagree. The alternative, as the original comment said, is to measure access to calories, nutrition, or other metrics like prevalence of starvation, access to shelter, access to sanitation, prevalence of certain health issues, etc.
Measuring poverty via the international poverty line has often been criticized [1][2][3].
[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337335330_A_critique_of_the_Income_Poverty_Line_and_Global_Multidimensional_Poverty_Index
[2]: https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2021/3/28/extreme-poverty-isnt-natural-it-is-created
[3]: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/8/21/exposing-the-great-poverty-reduction-lie/