Jason HickelEvery podcast appearance, updated as new ones drop

In this episode, I’m joined by economic anthropologist Jason Hickel, author of The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets (W.W. Norton, 2018), to discuss the complex and interconnected relationship between imperialism—both past and present—and global economic inequality. We examine why mainstream liberal frameworks for understanding the divide between rich and poor countries inevitably fall short, instead presenting an alternative account of global inequality that centers the crucial role of colonial plunder (as well as unequal exchange in the supposedly ‘postcolonial’ era) in keeping vast swaths of the world trapped in conditions of poverty, underdevelopment, and economic dependency. About the show: Return to Bandung is hosted by Pranay Somayajula, an Indian-American writer, researcher, and organizer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His work explores themes of diaspora, (inter)nationalism, anticolonial politics, and the many lives and afterlives of empire. You can learn more about Pranay and read his writing on his website , as well as on his Substack blog, culture shock . If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave a review or rating, and subscribe to the show on Spotify or Apple Podcasts! Sources and helpful links: GlobalInequality.org website Jason Hickel — The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets (W.W. Norton, 2018) Jason Hickel — Less is More: How Degrowth will Save the World (Penguin Random House, 2020) Jason Hickel — How Unequal Exchange Shapes our World (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, July 2025) Margarita Fajardo — How CEPAL’s Latin American Theorists Changed Our Understanding of the “Third World” (interview in Jacobin , July 2022) Jayati Ghosh — Interpreting contemporary imperialism: lessons from Samir Amin ( Review of African Political Economy , March 2021) Jason Hickel, Morena Hanbury Lemos, and Felix Barbour — Unequal exchange of labour in the world economy ( Nature Communicastions , July 2024) Jason Hickel, Dylan Sullivan, and Huzaifa Zoomkawala — Plunder in the Post-Colonial Era: Quantifying Drain from the Global South Through Unequal Exchange, 1960–2018 ( New Political Economy , 2021) Jason Hickel, Christian Dorninger, Hanspeter Wieland, and Intan Suwandi — Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015 ( Global Environmental Change , March 2022) Thomas Sankara — A United Front Against Debt (speech to the Organization of African Unity, July 1987) Walter Rodney — The Roots and Consequences of African Underdevelopment (lecture given in May 1979) Social links: Return to Bandung: Twitter: <a h

“A capitalist economy requires constant imperialist wars because it has to constantly suppress prices and wages and reorganize production in the global south around accumulation in the core. That is ultimately the system that we have to overcome.” Jason Hickel, who won our hearts a while back by accepting MMT, talks with Steve about the burning issue of our time. (No, not the US election, though they touch on the electoral system.) As much as Gaza is dominating social media, we must continue to stress its place in the capital order. Jason points us to Israel’s true role: sowing chaos and instability in the region. The conversation covers the historical and ongoing imperialistic strategies of the U.S. and its reactions to the mid-century liberation movements of the Global South, placing US support for Israel's actions as part of a broader capitalist agenda to maintain control over the world's resources and labor markets. Jason looks at China’s domestic successes and how they have led to the US virtually declaring war. He also touches on recent news about BRICS. Jason compares the history of the state of Israel to that of apartheid S. Africa. They used many of the same tactics and rationalizations. When it comes to the future for Israelis and Palestinians, S. Africa again provides a model: “What is the actual solution for this region? And I think we have to be clear. The alternative is democracy. The alternative to apartheid is democracy. Democracy and equal rights for all people in the land of Palestine, from the river to the sea... “We have to start thinking about what this means... This is exactly what South Africa did after they abolished apartheid... They disestablished the apartheid state. They disestablished the apartheid institutions. They ensured equal rights and democracy for all within the territory.” Dr. Jason Hickel is an economic anthropologist, author, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Visiting Senior Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics, and Chair Professor of Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo. Health. Jason's research focuses on global political economy, inequality, and ecological economics, which are the subjects of his two most recent books: The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions (Penguin, 2017), and Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (Penguin, 2020), which was listed by the Financial Times and New Scientist as a book of the year. @jasonhickel on Twitter

The title of this week’s episode is taken from an article to be published in September’s Monthly Review. The author, Jason Hickel, talks to Steve about the topic in his third visit to the podcast. Before we look at the double objective of ecosocialism we must analyze the double crisis we’re facing – ecological and social. Both are caused by the same underlying issue: the capitalist mode of production. Capitalism creates an almost perfect circuit that begins and ends with commodification and enclosure. Well, actually, it ends with massive profits... and that double crisis we mentioned. With essential goods and services outside our control, we have no bargaining power when it comes to the cost of living. We are helpless in the face of artificial scarcity and price-gouging. Faced with the high price of necessities we are forced to work longer and harder in order to simply survive. And of course, the more we need to work, the less control we have over our wages. The capitalist class makes out at both ends. There are at least two undeniable problems with this system. It wreaks havoc on the environment and is inconsistent with democracy, if you care about that sort of thing. “This is where our analysis has to ultimately lead, and the underlying pathology is basically that capitalism is fundamentally not democratic.” Even those of us who live in the US, Europe, or other countries with nominally democratic electoral systems have no illusions about their undemocratic nature. “More importantly, when it comes to the system of production, which all of us are engaged in every day, on which our livelihoods and our existence depends, not even the shallowest illusion of democracy is allowed to enter.” After identifying the quagmire, Jason and Steve talk about a solution. Jason lays out the necessary policies that ecosocialism should provide: universal public services, a public works program, and the job guarantee. Jason even suggests the possibility of post-capitalist firms and post-capitalist markets, and describes how they might operate in such a system. We can’t have a Jason Hickel episode without a discussion of degrowth and whether that concept applies to the exploitation of the Global South. Nor is there a means of achieving our goals without domestic and international class solidarity. “We can't underestimate the scale of the struggle that is really involved here. I think we have to take inspiration from successful social movements that have occurred in the past. There's this amazing line from Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso that goes 'we are the heirs of the world's revolutions'. Pretty much every good thing that we have is the result of revolutionary forces that fought to bring that to be. Everything from literally the minimum wage, as pitiful as it is, to the weekends, to whatever admittedly meager forms of democracy we get to exercise. These are all the benefits of revolutionary movements that have at least won some concessions in the past, and in some cases against extraordinary odds.” Dr. Jason Hickel is an economic anthropologist, author, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Visiting Senior Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics, and Chair Professor of Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo. Health. Jason's research focuses on global political economy, inequality, and ecological economics, which are the subjects of his two most recent books: The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality

We've always said that environmentalism needs to understand class if it wants to protect the world from climate catastrophe. Degrowth has been accused by some on the Left as green austerity or just a terrible political message. To debunk degrowth myths and to discuss why class is at the heart of any just transition and a degrowth economy we are join by Jason Hickel . Jason is the author of "Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World" and a world-leading scientist and scholar on degrowth. We discuss how class politics and environmentalism should work in tandem, why capitalism can't stop the climate crisis, why Universal Basic Services (UBS) is at the heart of a degrowth economy, how trade unions need to remember their radical past and how the EU conference on beyond growth is opening the doors for more radical policy in Europe. Links Read Jason's book "Less is More: How Degrowth with Save the World" HERE Read " The Conquest of Bread " by Pëtr Kropotkin HERE Shout outs Prabhat Patnaik & Utsa Patnaik, authors of " Capital and Imperialism" , which you can buy HERE Max Ajl, Check out our episode with him back in 2021 HERE Senegalese economist Ndongo Samba Sylla Mark Burton for introducing Ads to Degrowth. Support the show

Near the start of this episode, Jason Hickel raises Noam Chomsky’s position that the urgency of the climate crisis is so dire it will have to be dealt with under capitalism. There isn’t time to transition to socialism. Hickel disagrees. Capitalism is incapable of handling the problem. Hickel, an economic anthropologist, begins the interview pointing out the mistaken notion that we have no climate policy, no action, when in fact this is exactly what climate policy action under capitalism looks like: systematic denial and nonstop investment in fossil fuel expansion. It is not due to ignorance. We have the knowledge. We have the science. It boils down to class; the interests of the ruling class are anti-environmental and anti-poor. Capitalism is anti-democratic. “The status quo is not just a failure, it's a death march. Our governments are failing us and failing all of life on Earth. We have to face up to that.” In less than an hour, Hickel lays out the political and economic history of the ecological effects of neocolonialism. He explains why mainstream solutions (if you can call them solutions) to the climate crisis cannot work, despite UN climate resolutions, annual COP conferences, and IPCC reports. As an MMT-informed ecosocialist, Hickel has powerful suggestions for radical systemic change, including a job guarantee and universal public services. The single most important step would be to nationalize the fossil fuel industry. We talk about capping and shrinking emissions, which are caused by burning fossil fuels, so why are we not targeting the industry itself? The environmental movement constantly faces fossil capital, with its grip on politicians and the media (and unethical scientists). Fossil fuel companies are a dangerous foe. They must be treated as such. In addition to policy, Hickel also addresses strategy. He urges us to look to the civil rights movement and the anti-colonial national liberation movements of the mid-20th century. A crisis on the scale we are facing requires all hands on deck. We need a working class as well as a global perspective. “We have a global economy where growth and accumulation in the global North depends on a net appropriation and drain from the global South through unequal exchange, which is an effect basically, of the out-sized geopolitical and commercial power of northern firms ... An ecosocialist transition that is not also anti-imperialist, not also organized around global justice, is not an ecosocialism worth having.” We’ll let you in on a little secret: Jason Hickel is one of our favorite interview guests of all time. This little description is woefully inadequate. Listen to it and tell us what you think. There is a transcript and “Extras” page for this and every episode at realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast/ Jason Hickel is an economic anthropologist. His research focuses on global inequality, political economy, post-development, and ecological economics, which are the subjects of his two most recent books: "The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions" and "Less Is More: How De-Growth Will Save the World". Find his work at jasonhickel.org @jasonhickel on Twitter

Jason Hickel is an economic anthropologist and author of Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. In this eye-opening talk he debunks the belief that GDP growth is equivalent to human progress and discusses the ways in which our emphasis on GDP growth has been responsible for the overconsumption of high income nations, which has led to total ecological overshoot. He elucidates the tyranny of growth that lies at the heart of our economies and puts forward several ideas for a post-growth economy, emphasising the need for a scale down of our economic activity which does not have to be at the expense of enhancing human flourishing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Steve’s guest, Dr. Jason Hickel, is an economic anthropologist whose research focuses on global inequality, political economy, post-development and ecological economics. After listening to this episode, “degrowth” will become part of your vocabulary. For MMTers, it is a natural fit. Before unpacking the implications of degrowth, we need to understand how the language of growth has served to justify the exploitative ravages of capitalism and, to paraphrase Lenin, its highest stage – imperialism. Jason tracks inequality between the global South and North from the industrial revolution and the colonial era to the present day. You don’t need to be an economic historian to see that growth in the north relied on forms of appropriation from the south. As Marx pointed out in the 19th century, price inequalities are not natural; they are induced through geopolitical and commercial power. So in the colonial era, of course, you drove down wages by enclosing Commons and dispossessing people and destroying subsistence economies to create massive unemployed people. Today it is through a variety of different mechanisms, the structural adjustment programs that were imposed across the global south by the World Bank and the IMF, which are controlled by the US government primarily. G-7 countries made massive cuts in public sector employment as well as labor and environmental standards. Neoliberal structural adjustment programs of the 1970s and 80s further induced price inequalities. Today countries of the global South are heavily dependent on foreign currency and are forced to compete to attract foreign investment. They are in a global race to the bottom to deliver cheap labor and resources to multinational companies effectively as tribute. This is why I come to degrowth from the perspective of anti-imperialism, recognizing that we live in an imperialist world economy. Degrowth is a demand for ending those patterns of net appropriation that sustains such high levels of access consumption in rich nations ... Rich countries should reduce the resources to get back within sustainable levels, while poor countries should reclaim their resources, mobilizing them around meeting human needs with throughput converging globally at a level that's consistent with universal welfare and ecological stability. That is the world we should be imagining and calling for. Jason and Steve discuss the gross inadequacies of the GDP as an indicator of growth and the need to break from the ideology that defines growth as a positive, desirable goal or outcome. GDP only counts commodities regardless of their social value or harm. It doesn’t distinguish between $100 of books or bullets. It says nothing about whether people’s needs are met. As an alternative to GDP, Jason leans toward a dashboard approach instead of the Genuine Prosperity Index. Understanding MMT shows the way to meet the main objectives of degrowth. Jason adds that the MMT proposal for thinking about taxation - i.e., not as a way of funding public activity but as a way of pulling demand out of the economy - can be applied to ecological economics as a tool for reducing excess resource and energy use. Dr. Jason Hickel is an economic anthropologist, author and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics and Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is Associate Editor of the journal World Development and serves on the Statistical Advisory Panel for the UN Human Development Report and the advisory board of the Green New Deal for Europe . Jason's research focuses on global inequality, political economy, post-development and ecol

How fighting inequality and beating climate change means we must end our addiction to economic growth and fast. We’re asking: How are inequality, climate breakdown and growth linked? Why is green growth an impossibility? If rich nations must stop growing, what does this mean for developing countries? Nadia and Max have an amazing conversation with Dr. Jason Hickel – economic anthropologist, activist, academic and author of ‘Less is More ’ and ‘ The Divide ’ . Jason is a leading thinker on both inequality and climate, and a passionate advocate of degrowth; the idea that the pursuit of economic growth by rich nations is destroying the planet and needs to stop, and that pursuit of equality is vital to saving our planet. Please do share the episode on your social media. If you’re joining us on EQUALS for the first time, tune in to our earlier interviews – from talking with the award-winning journalist Gary Younge on what we can learn from Martin Luther King Jr to fight inequality, to best-selling author Anand Giridharadas on whether we need billionaires, Zambian music artist PilAto on the power of music, thinker Ece Temelkuran on beating fascism, climate activist Hindou Ibrahim on nature, and the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund Kristalina Georgieva on what comes after the pandemic. Don't just listen, join thousands of others reading our weekly digest on inequality. Sign up at https://www.equals.ink/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode welcomes Robert Pollin and Jason Hickel to discuss the climate crisis and degrowth. The show is divided into four main parts. First, it lays out key concepts and information about the climate crisis. We then discuss solutions, including a global Green New Deal and a post-growth, redistributive solutions for society. Next, we explore the concept of “degrowth”, as understood within the context of colonialism and global inequality. This section includes a conversation between Pollin and Hickel about planetary boundaries and the growing degrowth current within the environmental movement. Finally, we discuss the Biden administration and European policy, as well as workers’ movements and international activism from below.Robert Pollin is Co-Director and Distinguished Professor of Economics of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His most recent book is called Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet, co-authored with Noam Chomsky.Jason Hickel is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics, and Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. His most recent book is called Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. You can follow Jason on Twitter at @jasonhickel.Michael Kwet is a Visiting Fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and received his PhD in Sociology from Rhodes University in South Africa. You can follow Michael on Twitter at @michael_kwet.Robert Pollin at UMass-Amherst: https://www.umass.edu/economics/pollin Jason Hickel at Twitter: https://twitter.com/jasonhickel Michael Kwet at Twitter: https://twitter.com/Michael_Kwet Tech Empire at Twitter: https://twitter.com/techempirecast

We live in a society addicted to growth, yet on a planet with finite resources. Something needs to give. The Extinction Rebellion Podcast talks to a star of the degrowth movement, Jason Hickel. Jason is an academic and the author of The Divide and the upcoming book, Less is More: Why Degrowth Will Save the World. This episode was first released in May 2020 and produced by Jessica Townsend & Bill Leuty for Extinction Rebellion, www.extinctionrebellion.uk , distributed by The Real Agenda Network, podcasts for progressive change: www.realagenda.org

We live in a society addicted to growth, yet on a planet with finite resources. Something needs to give. The Extinction Rebellion Podcast talks to a star of the degrowth movement, Jason Hickel. Jason is an academic and the author of The Divide and the upcoming book, Less is More: Why Degrowth Will Save the World. Extinction Rebellion has three demands. 1) Tell the Truth - Government must tell the truth by declaring a climate and ecological emergency, working with other institutions to communicate the urgency for change. 2) Act Now - Government must act now to halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025. 3) Beyond Politics - Government must create and be led by the decision of a Citizens' Assembly on climate and ecological justice. Presenters – Jessica Townsend, Will Producer / Editor – Bill Leuty, Jessica Townsend Social Media – Barney Weston