Jason Hickel Profile picture
Professor at ICTA-UAB and Visiting Senior Fellow at LSE • Author of THE DIVIDE and LESS IS MORE • Global inequality, political economy and ecological economics
Dame Chris🌟🇺🇦😷 #RejoinEU #FBPE #GTTO🔶️ Profile picture Tracie Sawyers Profile picture Mark Flowerchild #MMT #RealProgressives Profile picture Scott Kloos Profile picture Stephen Hipkin Profile picture 54 subscribed
Feb 27 7 tweets 1 min read
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.
Feb 27 10 tweets 3 min read
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.
Jan 26 8 tweets 2 min read
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.
Jan 3 17 tweets 6 min read
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…
Dec 28, 2023 6 tweets 3 min read
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.
Dec 22, 2023 8 tweets 2 min read
"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."
Dec 8, 2023 5 tweets 3 min read
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…
Sep 30, 2023 12 tweets 2 min read
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.
Sep 21, 2023 7 tweets 2 min read
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.
Sep 9, 2023 5 tweets 1 min read
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.
Sep 5, 2023 11 tweets 4 min read
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…
Image 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.
Sep 4, 2023 18 tweets 3 min read
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.
Aug 31, 2023 8 tweets 2 min read
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:
Aug 24, 2023 10 tweets 2 min read
Degrowth climate mitigation strategies (scaling down less-necessary forms of production, cutting the purchasing power of the rich, UPS and a JG) offer several major advantages that can mean the difference between succeeding on the Paris Agreement or failing. 🧵 First, and most obviously, reducing less-necessary production means you are directly reducing emissions *in addition to* any emission reductions achieved through efficiency improvements and renewable energy rollout.
Aug 22, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
Even Western media outlets acknowledge the government in Niger has strong popular support. France needs to close its military bases. The EU and US need to cease their threats. The people of Niger have the right to control their own currency and resources for national development. France relies on Niger for 20% of the uranium that powers its national grid, while in Niger more than 80% of people do not have access to electricity. Niger has been purposefully underdeveloped to ensure a steady flow of cheap resources to France.
Aug 20, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
This week in 1953, US and British agents orchestrated a coup that overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh, the popular progressive leader of Iran, because he sought to restore national control over the country's oil reserves. Image It was the original sin that permanently poisoned US-Iran relations. It was also one of the first in a long series of Western-backed coups against progressive and socialist leaders across the global South.
Aug 9, 2023 8 tweets 3 min read
Bizarre that people continue to posit this false dichotomy. We can and must do both. Yes, embrace technological improvement. Also ban private jets, transition to rail networks where possible, and reduce less-necessary flights. A 20% reduction is great, and we need more innovations like this. But it will also rather quickly be wiped out by the scale effect of projected growth in aviation - we have to take this seriously. https://t.co/TKfyrD1LlNclimateactiontracker.org/sectors/aviati…
Image
Aug 7, 2023 13 tweets 4 min read
I'm excited to announce we have a new paper out today. We discuss:

-how capitalism *constrains* development in the global South and perpetuates mass deprivation.

-how socialist development policy is necessary to deliver decent living standards for all. https://t.co/9mLr4GUuwsjasonhickel.org/s/Hickel-and-S…
Image The paper builds on research we published in World Development last year, showing the rise of capitalism was associated with a decline in social indicators.

We advance the discussion with five key arguments:
Aug 6, 2023 7 tweets 3 min read
This image breaks me. At 2.7 degrees of warming, which is our present policy trajectory, two billion people will be exposed to extreme heat.

99.7% of those people live in the global South. People who have done nothing to cause this crisis. The injustice is staggering. Image We created the map based on data from this paper in Nature Sustainability. nature.com/articles/s4189…
Aug 5, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
Two different approaches to "growth":

Capitalism: production must be increased perpetually to maximise profits and elite accumulation.

Ecosocialism: production must be increased or decreased as necessary to achieve democratically ratified social and ecological goals. It's interesting how many people see the latter word and jump to "command economy, bad!". We already live in an economy commanded by the 1%, large financial firms and major corporations, who *plan* production around profit maximization and accumulation.
Jul 15, 2023 6 tweets 2 min read
Yes, capital limits the development of productive forces to only what is profitable. Yes, we must develop necessary technologies and increase production in certain sectors to meet human needs. But also, socially less-necessary production must be scaled down. It should not be difficult to grasp that these things can happen simultaneously, and indeed the former objectives are enabled by the latter.

In both of my contributions to the Monthly Review degrowth issue I make it very clear how the productive forces need to be developed.