27 Facts About Jason Hickel

Jason Edward Hickel was born on 1982 and is an anthropologist and professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Jason Hickel is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a visiting senior fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics, and was the Chair of Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo.

Jason Hickel is associate editor of the journal World Development, and serves on the Climate and Macroeconomics Roundtable of the US National Academy of Sciences.

Jason Hickel is known for his books The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions and Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World.

Jason Hickel was born and raised in Swaziland where his parents were doctors at the height of the AIDS crisis.

Jason Hickel holds a bachelor's degree in anthropology from Wheaton College, USA.

Jason Hickel worked in the non-profit sector in Nagaland, India and in Swaziland, and received his PhD in anthropology from the University of Virginia in August 2011.

Jason Hickel taught at the London School of Economics from 2011 to 2017, where he held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, and at Goldsmiths, University of London, from 2017 to 2021.

Jason Hickel argues in The Divide that pre-colonial societies were not poor.

Jason Hickel argues that precolonial agricultural societies in Africa and India were "quite content" with a "subsistence lifestyle" and that it was colonialism that made them worse off.

Jason Hickel argues that the dominant narrative of "progress" in international development is overstated, and that poverty remains a widespread and persistent feature of the global economy, reproduced by power imbalances between the Global North and Global South.

Jason Hickel argues that US$7.40 per day is required for nutrition and health.

However, all scholars and intellectuals, including Jason Hickel, agree that the incomes of the poorest people in the world have increased since 1981.

Nevertheless, Sullivan and Jason Hickel argue that poverty persists under contemporary global capitalism because masses of working people are cut off from common land and resources, have no ownership or control over the means of production, and have their labor power "appropriated by a ruling class or an external imperial power," thereby maintaining extreme inequality.

Noah Smith has criticized Jason Hickel for using a single threshold of poverty and ignoring increases in incomes below that threshold.

On his blog, Jason Hickel has criticised claims by Hans Rosling and others that global inequality has been decreasing and the gap between poor countries and rich countries has disappeared.

Jason Hickel has argued that absolute metrics are the appropriate measure for assessing inequality trends in the world economy.

Jason Hickel argues that trade between developed countries and developing countries is not mutually beneficial.

In contrast to Jason Hickel, Rutar argues that the transition to capitalist institutions in countries such as England did not lead to deterioration, but rather to a stabilization or improvement in living standards.

Jason Hickel argues that many colonial powers in the early modern period were still pre-capitalist.

In 2020, Jason Hickel published research in The Lancet Planetary Health based on 2015 data.

Jason Hickel has argued that high-income nations are disproportionately responsible for other forms of global ecological breakdown, given their high levels of resource use.

Critics of Jason Hickel argue that economic growth can occur while emissions decrease, pointing to data that shows that many countries have transitioned to green forms of energy while still experiencing economic growth.

Jason Hickel has suggested that modern monetary theory could be applied to further these ends and to transition towards a "post-growth, post-capitalist economy".

In 2020, Jason Hickel proposed a Sustainable Development Index, which adjusts the Human Development Index by accounting for nations' ecological impact, in terms of per capita emissions and resource use.

Jason Hickel has criticized United Nations' most important environmental metric, the Sustainable Development Goals Index.

Jason Hickel writes on global development and political economy, and has contributed to The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Al Jazeera, Jacobin, Monthly Review and other media outlets.