Jason HickelVerified account

@jasonhickel

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

Joined September 2011

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  1. Pinned Tweet
    28 Jan 2019

    Is neoliberal capitalism really making the world better and better? Here's my response to the narrative promoted by Gates, Pinker, Kristof, Bono and the Davos set.

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  2. The letter is now open for additional signatories:

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  3. I've joined 500 other academics in calling for universities to stop accepting fossil fuel funding for climate research. Story here:

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  4. Further discussion about this here, along with excerpts from relevant texts:

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  5. So, if a public good or service that is available to people for free at the point of use is privatized and given a final price, then yes GDP goes up. Even if the final value available to people decreases and social outcomes decline.

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  6. John Smith also engages this question in his book "Imperialism in the 21st century". He highlights the need to avoid confusing the expenditure and production approaches to measuring GDP (a confusion that people routinely commit):

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  7. Even if we look at expenditures, we see that when public services are more efficient than private ones, they are apparently worth less according to GDP, even if they deliver superior social outcomes. Here's the NHS vs the US healthcare system:

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  8. Mazzucato discusses this problem in her book 'The value of everything', in Chapter 8: 'Undervaluing the public sector'. In sum: "Nothing the government does is considered to fall within the production boundary".

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  9. For those asking about public services in GDP, they appear only as costs in the expenditure approach (unless they are sold at market prices, in which case they are categorized in the market sector). If the final price of the good is zero, they produce zero value according to GDP.

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  10. Mar 20

    Needless to say, in addition to improving social outcomes this approach is extremely powerful when it comes to climate mitigation, as we describe in this Nature Energy piece, and could keep 1.5 degrees within reach.

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  11. Mar 20

    This would liberate us from the growth imperative and free us to think more rationally about the economy. What sectors do we want to improve? And what sectors are clearly destructive and should be scaled down? In other words, growth of what, for what end, and for whom?

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  12. Mar 20

    But we could just as easily do the opposite. De-enclose and de-commodify key social goods in order to make them universally accessible to all. This would allow people to live well without needing constant growth in order to do so.

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  13. Mar 20

    Indeed, this is the engine of growthism. The privatizers and austerity-mongers know this. They seek to induce an artificial scarcity in order to compel people to constantly increase their production for capital, which is of course the primary beneficiary of this treadmill.

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  14. Mar 20

    Then they tell us the solution to this is... more growth. "We need more growth to meet people's basic needs!" So we all have to produce *more stuff* in sectors that we don't necessarily need to expand just in order to access things that we clearly *do* need to survive.

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  15. Mar 20

    But who benefits from that growth? The people who own the privatized goods. Their income goes up. For the rest of us, we're stuck with a rising cost to access these essentials. In other words, we're poorer, even if our income is unchanged, and even as GDP per capita is rising.

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  16. Mar 20

    Remember, GDP only measures things with market prices. When you push a public good into the market, GDP goes up. So privatizing healthcare systems, privatizing public housing stock, all of this is great for "growth"...

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  17. Mar 20

    First, capital seeks to privatize and enclose key goods that we need in order to live - healthcare, housing, energy, transport, etc - making these things increasingly expensive for us to access. This is done *explicitly* in the name of growth.

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  18. Mar 20

    There is an extraordinary paradox at the heart of capitalist growth in rich economies, which is important to understand. Here's how it works:🧵

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  19. Mar 19

    The climate movement needs its Bandung Conference moment. The spirit of 1955.

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  20. Mar 19

    Expecting Northern governments to voluntarily take sufficient action on climate is like expecting colonizers to voluntarily decolonize. It's not going to happen. It will require a coordinated movement to compel them.

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  21. Mar 19

    Economies in the global North depend utterly on labour, resources and production in the South. If Southern governments cooperated under a renewed Non-Aligned Movement they could leverage this to force radical action on climate justice.

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