Jason Hickel

Jason Hickel is an anthropologist, author, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

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Quotes

As it turns out, making rich people richer doesn't make the rest of us richer. Nor does it stimulate economic growth, which is the sole justification of supply-side economics. In fact, quite the opposite is true: since the onset of neoliberalism, the rich countries of the OECD have seen per capita growth rates fall from an average of 3.5 per cent during the 1960s and 1970s down to an average of 2 per cent during the 1980s and 1990s As the numbers show, neoliberalism has failed as a tool for economic development - but it has worked brilliantly as a tool for restoring power to the wealthy elite.
- p. 138

If we dig behind the rhetoric, it becomes clear that Western support for right-wing coups had little to do with Cold War ideology, and certainly nothing to do with promoting democracy (quite the opposite!); the goal, rather, was to defend Western economic interests. The veil of the Cold War has obscured this blunt fact from view.
- p. 140

People commonly think of neoliberalism as an ideology that promotes totally free markets, where the state retreats from the scene and abandons all interventionist policies. But if we step back a bit, it becomes clear that the extention of neoliberalism has entailed powerful new forms of state intervention. The creation of a global 'free market' required not only violent coups and dictatorships backed by Western governments, but also the invention of a totalizing global bureaucracy – the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and bilateral free-trade agreements – with reams of new laws, backed up by the military power of the United States. In other words, an unprecedented expansion of state power was necessary to force countries around the world to liberalize their markets against their will. As the global south has known ever since the Opium Wars in 1842, when British gunboats invaded China in order to knock down China's trade barriers, free trade has never actually been about freedom. On the contrary, as we have seen, free trade has a tendency to gradually undermine national sovereignty and electoral democracy.
- p. 218

To get a sense of how extreme overconsumption is: if we all were to live like the average citizen of the average high-income country, we would require the ecological capacity equivalent of 3.4 earths.
- p. 281

Scientists tell us that up to 140,000 species of plants and animals are disappearing each year due to our over-exploitation of the Earth's ecosystems. This rate of extinction is 100 to 1,000 times faster than before the Industrial Revolution - so fast that scientists have classed this as the sixth mass extinction event in the planet's history, with the last one having occurred some 66 million years ago.
- p. 281

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Jason Hickel