the divide a brief guide to global inequality

He serves on the Statistical Advisory Panel for the UN Human Development Report 2020, the advisory board of the Green New Deal for Europe, and on the Harvard-Lancet Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice. He is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics, and Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. Jason Hickel is an economic anthropologist, author, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Drawing on pioneering research, detailed analysis and years of first-hand experience, The Divide is a provocative, urgent and ultimately uplifting account of how the world works, and how it can change.ĭr. The Divide offers a range of revelatory answers, but also explains that something much more radical is needed – a revolution in our way of thinking. The Divide tracks the evolution of this system, from the expeditions of Christopher Columbus in the 1490s to the international debt regime, which has allowed a handful of rich countries to effectively control economic policies in the rest of the world.īecause poverty is a political problem, it requires political solutions. Aid only works to hide the deep patterns of wealth extraction that cause poverty and inequality in the first place: rigged trade deals, tax evasion, land grabs and the costs associated with climate change. Poor countries are poor because they are integrated into the global economic system on unequal terms. But in reality it is a political problem: poverty doesn’t just exist, it has been created. What is causing this growing divide? We are told that poverty is a natural phenomenon that can be fixed with aid. The richest eight people now control the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world combined. Some 1 billion live on less than $1 a day. Today 4.3 billion people, 60 per cent of the world's population, live on less than $5 per day. Since 1960, the income gap between the North and South has roughly tripled in size. It’s a comforting tale, and one that is endorsed by the world’s most powerful governments and corporations.

We have been told that development is working: that the global South is catching up to the North, that poverty has been cut in half over the past thirty years, and will be eradicated by 2030. For decades we have been told a story about the divide between rich countries and poor countries.

The divide a brief guide to global inequality