By Jason Hickel, Jason Hickel blog
We could live in a highly educated, technologically advanced society with zero poverty and zero hunger, all with significantly less resources and energy than we presently use.
By Samuel Miller McDonald, Jason Hickel, The Trouble
At its most distilled, “degrowth” refers to a process of reducing the material impact of the economy on the world’s many imperiled ecologies, abandoning GDP as a measurement of well-being, and forging an equitable steady-state economy.
By Jason Hickel, Jason Hickel blog
We cannot let ourselves be dragged into framing our aspirations for a better world in the language of growth, for it immediately traps us within the logic of capital; and on that terrain we will lose.
By Jason Hickel, Jason Hickel blog
In sum, it is irrational to hope, against the evidence, that our existing economic system will deliver the development outcomes we want while at the same time reversing ecological breakdown. We need to be smarter than that.
By Jason Hickel, Jason Hickel blog
My appeal to McAfee: let’s try to get beyond this sort of thing and engage more honestly with the empirical and theoretical work that has been done, so we can have more meaningful conversations. If we are going to realise our shared goals, we can and must do better.
By Jason Hickel, Jason Hickel blog
As Giorgos Kallis has put it, “capitalism cannot survive under conditions of abundance”. MMT provides an opportunity for us to create a post-growth, post-capitalist economy.
By Jason Hickel, New Internationalist
We can end poverty, right now, without any additional aggregate economic growth at all. The key here is to recognize that we don’t live in a poor world. On the contrary, we live in an incredibly rich world. Global poverty is a product not of any actual scarcity, but rather of the systematic creation of artificial scarcity.
By Jason Hickel, Jason Hickel blog
Ultimately, the voting system at the WB/IMF contributes to the perpetuation of global inequality. The system ensures that the very countries that became rich by plundering the global South during the colonial period are now, by dint of their plunder, empowered to determine the rules of the global economy in their own interests, indefinitely. Inequality begets inequality.