The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets

by Jason Hickel Narrated by Jonathan Cowley

Overview

Sixty percent of humanity?some 4.3 billion people?live in debilitating poverty. The standard development narrative suggests that alleviating poverty in poor countries is a matter of getting the internal policies right, combined with aid from rich countries. But anthropologist Jason Hickel argues that this approach misses the broader political forces at play. Global poverty?and the growing divide between "developing" and "developed" countries?has to do with how the global economy has been designed over the course of five hundred years through conquest, colonialism, regime change, debt, and trade deals. Global inequality doesn't just exist; it has been created.



To close the divide, Dr. Hickel proposes dramatic action rooted in real justice: we must abolish debt burdens in the developing world; democratize the IMF, World Bank, and WTO; and institute a global minimum wage, among many other vital steps. Only then will we have a chance at a world built on equal footing.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

10/30/2017
According to this blistering diatribe from Hickel (Democracy As Death), an anthropology professor at the London School of Economics, there is little distinction between the old colonialism and the global aid offered by established economies to the developing world today. He aggressively questions the conventional wisdom that, by offering global aid, developed countries serve as benefactors to developing ones. Rather, argues Hickel, accepting World Bank and the International Monetary Fund loans reduces debtor nations to an indentured servitude comparable to the imperial yoke of old. Hostage to servicing the debt from such loans, nascent economies are hindered from the kinds of domestic investment that would provide a route out of poverty. Hickel’s clear-eyed debunking of the platitudes of international aid is refreshing and revolutionary. Americans and Western Europeans, he charges, have long ignored their countries’ complicity in assassinations of and coups against the leaders of developing nations who suggest defaulting on sovereign debt or nationalizing industry. Hickel also notes that, with the onset of global warming, developed economies are rapidly transforming the Earth into a death trap for rich and poor countries alike. His writing penetratingly explores those forces that perpetuate global inequality and shreds the notion that the fissure between rich and poor is anything other than intentional. (Feb.)

Danny Dorling

"With passion and panache, Jason Hickel tells a very different story of why poverty exists, what progress is, and who we are. The Divide is myth busting at its best."

Firoze Manji

"The Divide is exceptional, necessary, and essential…Written in a captivating and easy-to-read style, this book must become the standard text for everyone studying, working, or interested in development."

Ha-Joon Chang

"In this iconoclastic book, Jason Hickel shakes up the prevailing paradigm of ‘development.’ . . . [The Divide] will radically change the way in which you understand the workings of the global economic system and the challenges faced by poor countries trying to advance within it."

Alnoor Ladha

"An evolutionary leap in our understanding of inequality and poverty. [The Divide] should be required reading for anyone hoping to realize a better world."

Antony Loewenstein

"A book that crackles with facts, indignation, and heart. Why hasn’t global poverty and hunger really declined in the last decades?…Journalists, aid workers, and anybody who has ever given aid (i.e., nearly everybody) should read this book."

Kirkus Reviews

2017-10-30
A sharply argued analysis of the traditional explanations for wealth and poverty in the world, offering a program for easing misery while addressing structural inequalities.Hickel (Anthropology/London School of Economics; Democracy as Death: The Moral Order of Anti-Liberal Politics in South Africa, 2015, etc.) examines the conventional wisdom that holds that the reasons parts of the world are rich and parts poor have to do with comparative advantage, supply and demand, distribution of labor and capital, and market conditions, with the rich ones having "the right institutions and the right economic policies" and the poor ones being alms-begging basket cases because of some supposed natural order of things. While global inequality mirrors the inequality of wealth within economies, the gap is widening ever more rapidly between rich and poor countries, such that the gulf between per capita incomes in the global North and the global South "has roughly tripled in size since 1960." Even the beginning of that era wasn't as bad as the 1980s, a period that the Millennium Development Goals program of the United Nations overlooks, training all development specialists "to forget everything that happened before 1990." Hickel, though, isn't inclined to forget, and one of the things to which he ascribes at least some measure of Western wealth is unpaid labor over hundreds of years in the form of slavery, which added nearly $100 trillion to the coffers of the United States alone. "Why do poor countries have an abundance of labor in the first place?" asks the author, answering himself with the observation that under colonial rule, indigenous economies were overturned in favor of dependent ones even as their resources were carted off to the capitals of Europe and North America. Hickel proposes several remedies, including debt relief, tax rationalization, and putting an end to land grabs, all meant to level the playing field.Sure to distress the neoliberals in the audience but a powerful case for reform in the cause of economic justice.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171446307
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	02/13/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

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