Jason Hickel Profile picture
Jul 29 13 tweets 4 min read Read on X
In this new paper we calculate the unequal exchange of labour between the global North and global South. The results are quite staggering. You'll want to look at this... 🧵

nature.com/articles/s4146…
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First, a crucial point. Workers in the global South contribute 90% of the labour that powers the world economy, and 91% of labour for international trade.

The South provides the majority of the world's labour in all sectors (including 93% of global manufacturing labour).Image
And a lot of this is high-skill labour.

The South now contributes more high-skilled labour to the world economy than all the high-, medium- and low-skilled labour contributions of the global North combined.
But... global wage inequalities are truly massive. Southern wages are 87–95% lower than Northern wages for work of equal skill.

And the wage gaps are getting worse.Image
Is this because the South performs labour in primary sectors while the North performs labour in secondary sectors?

No. Southern wages are 83–98% lower than Northern wages for work of equal skill within the same sector.Image
There is nothing normal about this. These wage inequalities are a result of imperialist dynamics in the world economy that act to suppress wages and consumption in the global South. Why? Because it massively benefits Northern capital.
Systematic price inequalities mean that for every hour of embodied labour the South imports from the North, they have to export 11 hours to "pay" for it. This results in large net flows of value from South to North.
In 2021, the North net-appropriated 826 billion hours of labour from the global South. This occurs across all skill levels and sectors (sectors visible in the red graph at top of thread).

That's more labour than what is rendered by all workers in the US and Europe combined.Image
Roughly 50% of all labour that is consumed in the North is net-appropriated from the South.

This means that without unequal exchange, Northern economies would have to reduce their consumption by half, or double their working hours.
If the net-appropriated labour were valued in terms of Northern wages by skill level, it would total €16.9 trillion in in 2021. Or €310 trillion over the whole period from 1995-2021. Image
This is labour that could be mobilized to meet human needs and achieve national development objectives in the South (if Southern states and workers had greater control over production), but instead is siphoned away to support consumption and accumulation in the imperial core.
The paper is published in Nature Communications. A big congratulations to my brilliant co-authors, @morenahanbury and Felix Barbour. Stay tuned for more from each of them soon!

You can read it open-access here: nature.com/articles/s4146…Image
An important implication of this: the global North model of a "service economy" is not universalizable. It exists because the North can appropriate labour in agriculture and manufacturing from the global South. This is a reality that development pundits need to grapple with.

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More from @jasonhickel

Jul 25
New paper: "How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all?"

Is it possible to realise this vision without exacerbating ecological breakdown? Yes! But it requires a totally different approach to the question of growth and development. 🧵
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
Image
Some narratives hold that ending poverty and achieving good lives for all will require every country to reach the GDP/cap of high-income countries. But this would have severe ecological consequences. It forces a brutal dilemma between poverty reduction and ecological stability.
Convergence along these lines is also not possible given the imperialist structure of the world economy. High consumption in the core of the world-system depends on massive net-appropriation from the periphery. This model cannot be universalized.
Read 13 tweets
Jul 12
I'm excited to announce the latest release of the Sustainable Development Index, now with data through 2022. Costa Rica tops the list!

sustainabledevelopmentindex.org
As usual, middle-income countries that have strong public provisioning systems tend to perform best. This model allows countries to deliver relatively high levels of human welfare with relatively low levels of resource use.
Latin America boasts eight of the ten best-performing countries.

Most high-income countries continue to decline. Norway and Iceland— often mistakenly regarded as sustainability leaders — have declined nearly to the level of the United States.
aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/…
Read 7 tweets
Jun 26
People would better understand North Korea’s disposition toward the US if they remembered that US forces perpetrated an industrial-scale bombing campaign that destroyed nearly all of the country’s cities and towns, civilian infrastructure, and 85% of all buildings.
Hundreds of thousands of civilians were incinerated. The US dropped more bombs on North Korea in the early 1950s than they did in the entire Pacific theatre during WW2, making North Korea one of the most bombed countries in the world. You don’t easily forget such a thing.
All of these are war crimes today under Protocol I of the Geneva Convention.

“After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops.” en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_o…
Read 4 tweets
Feb 27
We have *extraordinary* productive capacities. We can do virtually anything. Renewable energy? Integrated public transit? Regenerative farming? High-quality affordable housing for all? DONE. But we are prevented from doing these things because they are not profitable to capital.
Medicines to end preventable diseases. Universal public healthcare. Insulated buildings. High-efficiency appliances in every household...

We live in a *shadow* of the society we could have because we do not have democratic control over finance and production.
We face mass deprivation, human misery and ecological crisis all around us. All of it totally unnecessary. And we are told to believe that this is somehow natural and "normal". It's wild.
Read 7 tweets
Feb 27
Major investors like BlackRock and JPMorgan have pulled out of Climate Action commitments because they can achieve higher profits doing fossil fuels and emissions. A clear reminder that capitalism cannot achieve green transition with the necessary speed. ft.com/content/ab26da…
Renewables are cheap. Rapid decarbonization can be achieved. But affordability and feasibility are not what matters to capital. What matters is profits. They will invest in whatever is most profitable, and all of us are hostage to their insane logic.
It is critical to understand: finance represents power over our collective productive capacities - *our* labour and resources. With these capacities we can easily solve social & ecological problems. But we are prevented from doing so because capital directs our efforts elsewhere.
Read 10 tweets
Jan 26
Did capitalist reforms reduce extreme poverty in China? New empirical data suggests the opposite. In the 1980s, socialist China had some of the lowest rates of extreme poverty in the periphery, while the capitalist reforms caused poverty to increase. theconversation.com/chinas-capital…
Image
Scholars have long argued that the World Bank's $1.90 method suffers from a significant limitation, as it does not tell us whether people can actually afford essential goods (food, shelter, clothing, fuel), whose prices may move differently to the rest of the economy.
To overcome this limitation, we need to measure incomes against the cost of basic needs. This is a more robust approach.

With this method, we see that China's public provisioning systems ensured that even low-income people could access essential goods.
Read 8 tweets

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