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“Global poverty it is not a natural feature of the world but rather an artifact of policy"

Jason Hickel, anthropologist, researcher at Goldsmiths College (University of London) and writer, delivered a conference on global poverty and inequalities on 27 May at the UPF.
13.09.2019

Imatge inicial

Jason Hickel is an anthropologist, author, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Is linked to the Goldsmiths College (University of London), where he convenes the MA in Anthropology and Cultural Politics.

He visited UPF on May 27 to give the conference "Global Poverty and Inequality: Prospects for Development in the Anthropocene", organized by the Critical Thinking Group of the UPF, Johns Hopkins University - Universitat Pompeu Fabra Public Policy Center, and the GREDS-EMCONET research group.

Jason's research focuses on global inequality, political economy, post-development, and ecological economics.  His most recent book, The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions, was published by Penguin Random House in 2017. The activity is part of the strategic UPF project in relation to Planetary Wellbeing.

Is poverty a political problem? Could it be prevented?

There is a common narrative out there that the poverty in poor countries in the global South is a natural phenomenon – that it is something “out there”. This is a politically convenient narrative, but it is wrong. In fact, poverty in the periphery of the world system is an artifact of accumulation in the centre. The rise of the North depended on processes – colonization, enclosure, enslavement, forced proletarianization, unequal treaties – that created mass impoverishment across most of the rest of the world. And this is not just a tragedy of the past: in The Divide I trace out how this exploitative relationship between rich countries and poor countries continues today. Can it be prevented? Of course it can. Not with aid or charity, though. It requires changing the rules of the global economy to make it fundamentally fairer to poor nations.

 Is inequality a consubstantial element of globalization?

It doesn’t have to be. But the form of globalization that has been pushed around the world since the 1980s has been of a very specific type, organized around the principles of Washington Consensus neoliberalism: corporate deregulation, the privatization of public assets, cuts in social spending, and so on. These policies have generated extraordinary inequality, not just within nations but also between them – to the extent that the per capita income gap between the global North and South has nearly quadrupled since the 1960s.

 "The per capita income gap between the global North and South has nearly quadrupled since the 1960s".

Did the Industrial Revolution and Colonialism lay the foundations for the current system of economic policy?

It’s important to understand that the Industrial Revolution didn’t just come out of nowhere. It was preceded by the enclosure movement – an incredibly violent process whereby Britain’s peasants were forcibly dispossessed of their land. This created the mass of cheap labour that capitalists needed to power the factories of the Industrial Revolution; people had no choice but to sell themselves for wages in order to survive. This same process of enclosure and dispossession was then pushed across the global South during the colonial period, with similar effects, laying the foundations for the capitalist world system that we live in today.

You affirm that depending on the metric used to measure inequality, it can be considered to have increased or decreased in recent decades. Is this a great paradox? What’s the reality?

There has been a concerted effort by some economists to argue that global inequality has decreased over the past few decades. These claims rely on a rather odd metrics that focused not on the actual income gap but rather on relative rates of change. So if the income of a poor country increases at a faster rate relative to its starting point than that of a rich country, this gets cast as a reduction of inequality even if the gap between them has grown.

Take for example a poor country whose average income goes from $500 to $1,000 (a 100% increase), and a rich country whose income goes from $50,000 to $75,000 (a 50% increase). The poor country’s income has grown twice as fast as the rich country’s, relative to its starting point. But the gap between them has nonetheless exploded, from $45,500 to $74,000. By any common-sense definition, inequality has worsened. This is what’s happening in reality.

The real per capita income gap between the global North and the global South has nearly quadrupled over the past few decades, going from $9,000 in 1960 to $35,000 today. There is no “convergence”, as some cynically want us to believe. It’s divergence, big time.

What is the best indicator and the best way to measure poverty? When is a person considered poor?

The dominant metric for measuring poverty is the International Poverty Line, which is set at $1.90 per day. But, remarkably, there is no empirical basis for the $1.90 line, in terms of its ability to satisfy basic human needs. It is arbitrary and meaningless as a measure of global poverty. In fact, we have tonnes of evidence that people living at this line remain crushingly poor, with terrible levels of malnutrition, life expectancy and infant mortality.

"Scholars have long insisted that we need a more meaningful poverty line".

Scholars have long insisted that we need a more meaningful poverty line. Most propose that we use $7.40 per day, which is the minimum necessary to achieve basic nutrition and normal life expectancy. If we use this metric, we see that there are 4.2 billion people living in poverty today, some 60% of the human population – and this number has grown significantly since the 1980s.

Is the traditional North-South divide valid today or has this divide become more complex?

A number of people have tried to argue that this divide is no longer valid, but unfortunately there is little evidence for this claim. Again, the per capita income gap between the North and South is growing, not shrinking. Why is this? Because the North continues to control a vastly disproportionate share of voting power in the World Bank and the IMF, and to exercise a disproportionate share of bargaining power in the World Trade Organization. These institutions control the economic policy decisions of poorer countries through debt and conditional finance. They manage virtually all of the world’s secrecy jurisdictions, which enable multinational companies to illegally extract untaxed profits from poorer nations. They retain the ability to topple foreign governments whose economic policies run against their interests, and occupy countries they regard as strategic in terms of resources and geography. These geopolitical power imbalances sustain and reproduce a global class divide that has worsened – not improved – in the decades since the end of colonialism.

What is the role of some institutions like the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank to sustain the current situation?

The World Bank and the IMF were established during the colonial period. At the time, the lion’s share of the voting power was handed to the US, Britain, and a few Western countries. The colonies were given little, if any, control over major decisions. That pattern remains more or less in place today. The US holds a veto. The global South, which makes up about 80% of the world’s population, has less than 50% of the vote. Even if all of them went together and agreed to change something about the global economy, they would not be able to do so. This is why, when the World Bank and the IMF imposed structural adjustment programmes across the global South during the 1980s and 1990s, no one was able to stop them – even though we could see in real time how destructive these policies were to people’s lives.

What structural changes are required to reverse inequality in the world economy?

In The Divide I set out a number of solutions to the crisis of global inequality. The most important first step would be to democratize the institutions of global governance – the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO – so that poor countries can have a fair say in the decisions that affect them. Next, we need to do something about the debt system. Right now, rich nations leverage debt in order to control the economic policy decisions of poor countries, preventing them from pursuing the progressive reforms they need for development. Cancelling unpayable debts would free poor countries from this stranglehold. Third, we could roll out a global minimum wage, pegged to 50% of each country’s median wage, in order to ensure that workers in the global South get a fair share of the value they contribute to the global economy. If capitalism is going to be globalized, it stands to reason that labour standards should be globalized too. There are lots of other ideas we might explore – many of them not only exciting but also very feasible.

 "If capitalism is going to be globalized, it stands to reason that labour standards should be globalized too".

What kind of revolution would be necessary at the level of thought?

The first step is to change the way we think about global poverty, recognize that it is not a natural feature of the world but rather an artifact of policy – an artifact of power. We need to repoliticize, and rehistoricize, the discourse on poverty. And we need to shift from a paradigm of charity to a paradigm of justice, seeking to change the rules of the global economy to make it fundamentally fairer for the world’s majority.

  Could the university contribute to this revolution?

Huge numbers of students are concerned with global problems like poverty and inequality. They want to help create a better world. But they get easily sucked up into simplistic, anti-intellectual narratives about charity and aid. So they travel around the world trying to help, building orphanages in Ghana and digging wells in Honduras, things like that. These are well-intentioned efforts – but they ultimately miss the point. We need to be smarter than that.

 "The question of global poverty and inequality is a question, ultimately, about class struggle".

University students who care about these problems need to try to identify the deeper structural and political determinants of poverty and inequality, and pursue them. Of course, this means going up against entrenched interests that benefit significantly from the status quo. But that’s exactly what has to happen. The question of global poverty and inequality is a question, ultimately, about class struggle.

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