Here’s a quick roundup of highlights from research we published in 2024, on unequal exchange, ecosocialism, and post-capitalist transformation.

As always, free PDFs are available via the link at the end of the thread. 🧵 1) This is my top highlight. We found that the global North net-appropriates more than 800 billion hours of labour from the South per year. This occurs because Southern wages are 83–98% lower than Northern wages for work of equal skill in the same sector. nature.com/articles/s4146…

People often assume that capitalist globalization is closing the wage gap between workers in the global North and global South.

But it's not happening. In fact, the North-South wage gap is *increasing*. And this is not due to sectoral differences. It is occurring across all sectors, even as the global South's share of industrial manufacturing and high-skilled labour in the world economy has increased dramatically over this very period.

This Bloomberg report is a stark reminder: we cannot rely on capital to achieve green transition. Capital is not investing enough in green energy because it's not as profitable as fossil fuels. The solution? We need a public finance strategy and fast.

bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-… Public finance, together with a credit guidance framework. Central banks have the power to force capital to stop making climate-destroying investments and direct investment instead in necessary activities: foreignpolicy.com/2024/08/16/cli…

I strongly disagree with these remarks. They are empirically incorrect, but also illustrate a terrible reactionary tendency among some environmentalists that must be rejected. The claim is that ecological collapse will undermine industrial production, so we should not pursue development to meet needs in the South.

For instance, we should not ensure refrigerators for people b/c this would inhibit their ability to migrate away from uninhabitable zones!

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…
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).

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…
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…
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.

Here’s a quick roundup of highlights from research we published in 2023, on climate change, capitalism, colonialism, degrowth and post-capitalist futures. As always, free PDFs are available via the link at the end of the thread. 🧵 1) This one is my top highlight. Rich countries have dramatically exceeded their fair-shares of the carbon budget for 1.5°C. In a zero-by-2050 scenario they will owe $192 trillion to global South countries in compensation for atmospheric appropriation. nature.com/articles/s4189…

Thanks to a lot of tech bros and economists getting Very Upset about degrowth, this article is now the number one trending publication at Nature. nature.com/articles/d4158… I mean, the authors of this piece wrote totally obscene things like "Wealthy economies should scale down destructive and unnecessary forms of production to reduce energy and material use, and focus economic activity around securing human needs and well-being." Heretics, all.

"Those who wish to unleash technological innovation and production to achieve ecological objectives often hitch this dream to the wagon of capitalist growth.  But in fact capitalism and growthism *limit* what we can achieve."
jasonhickel.org/blog/2023/12/2… "Scaling down less-necessary production liberates productive capacities (factories, labour, materials) which can then be remobilized to do the production and innovation required for rapid decarbonization."

People need to understand that the prominent writers, journalists and other civilian figures who have been killed in Gaza—including Dr Refaat al-Areer—were in most cases intentionally targeted by Israel. These are intentional assassinations of civilians, not collateral damage. Haaretz report on Israel's use of the Gaza population registry (names, addresses, relatives, etc):

OCHA report on the targeting of journalists in Gaza:

Targeting of Dr Refaat al-Areer:

...haaretz.com/israel-news/20…
reliefweb.int/report/occupie…

https://twitter.com/RamAbdu/status/1733106399784169815

Capitalism perpetrates an egregious misallocation of labour, and prevents us from producing socially and ecologically necessary things. If we want to fix our broken world, we must gain democratic control of our productive capacities: Think about it: *we* are the producers. Nothing gets produced without our labour, our skills, our knowledge, and our planet's resources.  We have *extraordinary* capacities. Together, we can do virtually anything we can imagine.

This is exciting new research quantifying the material requirements of "decent living". It helps us answer the question, can good lives be provisioned for all while stopping ecological breakdown?

The answer: yes. 🧵pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ac… The results show that decent living can be provisioned with 6 tons of material per capita per year (the reference scenario), or as little as 3 tons per capita if we assume a strong transition toward renewable energy, public transit and plant-based diets.

We’re told that capitalism is all about innovation. But capital does not invest in innovations that are not profitable, even if they would dramatically improve well-being and ecology. The quality of innovation could be dramatically improved in a post-capitalist economy. One of the most obvious but obscene examples of this is of course the fact that, while renewable energy is increasingly cheap, capital doesn’t invest in it much because fossil fuels are substantially more profitable.

We've all seen these charts. They go viral on social media every few months, with claims that "green growth is happening".

Is green growth really happening? We assess this question empirically in a new article out today in The Lancet Planetary Health: 🧵 thelancet.com/journals/lanpl…
First, CO2-GDP decoupling is not news. We have known about it for a long time. It's been happening in some countries since the 1990s, even in trade-adjusted terms. It is the predictable and expected result of transitioning to lower-carbon energy sources.

I'm excited to share this new article, "The double objective of democratic ecosocialism", published today in Monthly Review.

"This is not a time for mild reformism, tweaking around the edges of a failing system. This is a time for revolutionary change." monthlyreview.org/2023/09/01/the… We face a double crisis in the 21st c. It is an ecological crisis but also a social crisis: several billion people are deprived of access to basic goods and services. Deprivation is most extreme in the periphery — due to imperialist dynamics — but is also widespread in the core.

We have a new paper out, led by the brilliant Mengyu Li. This work makes it possible to model degrowth scenarios on an established IAM, for inclusion in the IPCC scenario database. This is a big step, but there's also much more to be done: 🧵 tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108… The paper modifies the MESSAGEix IAM, and shows that post-growth and degrowth approaches are potentially quite powerful as climate mitigation pathways.

But our approach does not yet fully capture degrowth as defined in the literature. Several problems arise: