Jason Hickel: Gutxiago gehiago denean

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAbK7RQ7L4c)

0:07

for d growth basically there are two main objectives one is an ecological objective which is to reduce resource

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and energy throughput and then the other is a social objective which is to improve people’s access to

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the things they need to live well and ensure that’s secure right so basically a social guarantee

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so i think the mmt proposal for how to think about taxation i.e not as a way of funding public activity

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but rather as a way of pulling demand out of the economy can be applied to ecological economics as a tool for

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reducing excess resource and energy use and that i think is very promising [Music]

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what i have said is that this campaign is not just about electing a president

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it is about making a political revolution

1:07

taking money from our children and borrowing

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from china people are dying is the program so critical it’s worth

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borrowing money from china to pay for it and if not i’ll get rid of it stop lying

1:26

[Music]

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now let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse all together here’s another episode of macro and cheese with your

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host steve grumbine all right this is steve with macro and cheese folks i’ve got dr jason hickle

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joining me today and i’ve tried to get together with this gentleman for a while now his work indeed growth is absolutely

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must read everything that he has put out has been absolute gold and it was my distinct

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honor for him to agree to come on with me let me introduce him a little bit more dr jason hickle is an economic

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anthropologist author and fellow of the royal society of arts he’s a visiting

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senior fellow at the international inequalities institute at the london school of economics

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and professor at the institute for environmental science and technology at the autonomous university of barcelona

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he is associate editor of the journal world development and serves on the

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statistical advisory panel for the un human development report in 2020 the

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advisory board of the green new deal for europe and the harvard landsat commission on reparations and

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redistributive justice jason’s research focuses on global inequality political economy host

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development and ecological economics which are the subjects of his two most recent books the divide a brief guide to

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global inequality and its solutions penguin 2017 and less is more how d

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growth will save the world penguin 2020. and let me say i’m a project manager by trade and my tagline is i am the lessest

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more project manager so this is really neat jason thank you so much for joining me today sir thanks

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very much steve it’s good to be with you absolutely so this word degrowth it

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scares some people that word is especially in economic terms it kind of jolts it

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what is degrowth yeah it is it’s a striking term i agree i should mention i didn’t come up with a

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term it was around before i started writing about it but in fact it’s got an interesting pedigree that is rooted in

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the anti-colonial struggle from the global stats we can discuss that later but before i describe what degrowth is

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let me just briefly kind of outline the key background stakes of this question okay

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so obviously we’re in a crisis of ecological breakdown and crucially this is not just about climate change which

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is what we focus on mostly in terms of our media and so on we’re also overshooting

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several other key planetary boundaries and we see this in the form of habitat destruction soil depletion deforestation

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and biodiversity loss okay and these dimensions of the crisis are being driven by excess resource use so

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in other words all the material stuff that we extract and produce and consume okay so we have to pay attention to both

4:27

of these issues emissions and energy on the one hand and resource use on the other and the two are very closely tied because the more

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resources we use the more energy we require and the more energy require the more difficult it is to decarbonize

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right and unfortunately you know too often the resource youth side of this equation falls out of the picture and it’s really

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important to bring that back in and that’s what ecological economics has been about for decades okay so

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now people have a tendency to think about the ecological crisis in terms of the anthropocene right and clearly this

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language is useful for certain purposes but it’s also incorrect it’s incorrect in the sense that it’s not actually

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humans as such that are causing this crisis but rather a global economic system capitalism that’s organized

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around the interests of powerful states corporations and rich individuals and this is very clear in the empirical

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record and this is something my work focuses on just to give two key points here the

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first is that the countries of the global north by which i mean the u.s canada europe australia new zealand

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israel japan are responsible for 92 of all global emissions in excess of the

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safe planetary boundary so in other words the emissions that are causing climate chaos meanwhile the majority of global south

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countries are still well within their fair share of the planetary boundary so right off the bat we have to recognize

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that what we’re facing in terms of the ecological crisis amounts to a process of colonization

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right and this is a term that scholars in the global south have used for a long time a process of atmospheric

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colonization understanding the atmosphere as a commons which all of us depend on for our survival but a small faction of rich

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countries have basically appropriated it for their own enrichment with severe consequences for all of life

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on earth and then the same is true of resource use and this is the second key piece of

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it more than three quarters of excess resource use is due to consumption of high income countries right on average

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they consume about 28 material tons of stuff per person per year which is around four times over the sustainable

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boundary okay so if everyone on the planet was to consume like that then we would need four planets to sustain us maybe you’ve heard

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this before again this is empirically derived research here and crucially all of this is

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disproportionately harming poor countries we know that climate breakdown hurts the global south the hardest in

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terms of droughts famines mass displacements our media doesn’t cover that very much

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but that’s a fact 98 of climate-related deaths happen in the global south even though they haven’t contributed almost

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anything to the crisis and the same is true of resource use again the majority of the material stuff that

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we consume in the global north is comprised of materials that are extracted from the global south so

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basically the benefits are captured in rich countries but the ecological impact of that extraction is effectively

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offshored to poorer countries and this is clear if you just look at like beef consumption in the usa depends on

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deforestation of the amazon the tech industry in germany depends on mining in the congo the cosmetic industry in

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britain depends on palm oil plantations in indonesia and so on okay so

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the key background point i want to establish here is that the crisis is playing out along colonial

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lines and entails processes of colonization that we need to be cognizant of

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so against this background we have deep growth and the degrowth principle is very simple

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recognizing that rich countries are driving this crisis it calls for rich countries to abandon growth as an

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objective and actively reduce excess resource and energy use

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in a safe just and equitable way and that last dimension there the safe

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just and equitable principles are crucial because that’s what distinguishes degrowth from like a run-of-the-mill recession right so the

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idea here is to simultaneously scale down resource and energy use while at the same time

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improving people’s lives improving social outcomes so what does this look like in practice it’s actually

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very straightforward in terms of the principle right now every economist on the planet virtually except for ecological

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economists assume that all sectors of the economy must grow all the time regardless of

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whether or not we actually need them to and of course in an era of ecological crisis this is an insane thing to do

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so instead we propose we should decide what sectors or industries or forms of production we actually want to expand

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public transportation renewable energy public education whatever it might be things we need and what sectors are

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clearly destructive and should be actively scaled down and here i have in mind things like suv production private

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jet production industrial beef advertising fast fashion the military industrial complex the practice of

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planned obsolescence whereby corporations design products to break down so as to increase turnover there

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are huge chunks of our economy in the global north that are irrelevant to human well-being and are organized

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almost entirely around elite consumption and accumulation and corporate power okay so we have to

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be able to distinguish what’s important about production versus what is damaging and then from that principle we

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recognize that as we scale down less necessary industries clearly the economy needs less labor

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now under normal circumstances that would mean unemployment and this is basically why the conversation never happens right

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but ecological economists propose that there’s a very simple fix for this which is basically simply to

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shorten the working week and share necessary labor more evenly thereby putting an end to unemployment

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and of course the mmt principle of a public job guarantee can be a crucial tool toward this end to ensure everyone

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has access to the training necessary to participate in socially necessary useful activities right

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and then of course you distribute income more fairly using policies like a minimum income and a maximum income

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wealth taxes living wage policies etc and crucially and this is a really key part of d

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growth research is you decommodify and expand public services okay so not just

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healthcare and education but public transportation housing energy internet

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all the basics for good living should be decommodified those key goods should be decommodified so that everyone can

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access the goods they need to live well with a high standard of well-being without needing ever increasing income

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in order to do so so this principle of decommodification is key to improving what i call the

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welfare purchasing power of income income in and of itself is not actually

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a good metric for well-being what matters is what that income can buy in terms of access to key provisions and in

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a country like the usa where key provisions are all privatized and commodified and expensive then basically

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you have to have very high income to access those things which is why half the country can’t access decent healthcare can’t afford healthcare so

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you decommodify public services to improve the welfare purchasing power of income which takes a lot of pressure off of the need for additional growth so in

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sem it’s basically simply a matter of reorganizing the economy around meeting

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human needs rather than around elite consumption and capital accumulation

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so that’s kind of degrowth in a nutshell it’s interesting i was just reading lenin and the imperialism the

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final stage of capital or i don’t remember the title of it offhand but it’s just reading how he was talking

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about how finance capital is destroying the world he was saying this back in the 1900s

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here we are today growth has got to be predicated on finance capital this is

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where people are extracting surplus value from everything and everywhere in every country

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and i think you said in one of your most recent writings something to the effect of eight people have more wealth

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than 50 of the entire globe that’s absolutely insane and there’s no way

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they earn that that is 100 investment that’s finance that’s something other than

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earned income labor it’s absolutely terrifying

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you said something else too that i think is really important that i want to tap into and that is that the gdp is an

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indiscriminate number it doesn’t really say much of anything basically the sum total of all financial transactions

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if you will but simultaneously looking at the real resource usage they don’t seem to be

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tied together in sense of people are making money hand over fist without any kind of a hedge

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against the extractive nature of the resources they’re plundering i’m curious how do we decouple gdp and get away from

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gdp so we can actually look at what the real impacts on the economy are

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how in the world will we dislodge such a system it seems quite a challenge huh

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yeah okay i mean there’s so much in what you just raised i’m not sure where to start but let’s see so first of all yeah

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lenin i didn’t realize we’d be talking about lenin today but it’s sorry so let’s think about this though you

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know what’s interesting to me is when i engage in public conversations about these issues it becomes clear that

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people’s assumption about capitalism is that basically it’s a system of markets and trade and this is of course why it

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seems so natural and obvious and why could you ever disagree with capitalism it’s just what humans obviously do

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in reality of course this is not true markets and trade have been around for thousands of years and we’re around for

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thousands of years before capitalism capitalism is a recent phenomenon in world history only 500

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years old and is fundamentally distinguished by

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well on the one hand crucially it’s a system of enclosure and appropriation so by enclosure what i

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mean is the enclosure of commons and the commodification of the means of

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survival so as to create a desperate labor force a sort of a mass pool of

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exploitable labor and then the second key thing about capitalism is that it’s a system that’s organized around and dependent on

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perpetual expansion and it is the first and only economic system in all of history to be organized in that way

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and this is important to distinguish what we mean when we say capitalism so that we can have a conversation about

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what we’re actually dealing with here without assuming that this is just about markets and trade no you can have markets and trade without capitalism and

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that’s exactly what we have to pursue so let’s be able to talk about what capitalism is and what we might want to

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change about it that’s the one thing so then about gdp look gdp is a problem for all sorts of

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reasons for ecological economists the problem with gdp is that rising gdp is

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always just considered to be a good i mean this is taken for granted in economics virtually the entire discipline is organized around

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maximizing gdp on the assumption that gdp is automatically good

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and of course this is also effectively the alibi of capitalism right is growth

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if capitalism is a system of appropriation and elite accumulation and enclosure which quite often does significant harm to communities and to

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ecosystems how does it sustain its hegemony its ideological hegemony and the answer to

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that is the language of growth as long as what you’re doing leads to growth

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everyone’s going to buy into it because growth sounds so good it sounds so plants grow humans grow we all want

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growth it’s the alibi of appropriation and so what we have to recognize is that

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we have to break that ideology that growth is a proxy for human well-being

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which very clearly is not we know for example that and this is the key thing to understand

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is that rich countries don’t need more growth in order to achieve improvements in human well-being past to certain points

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which rich nations have long exceeded the relationship between growth and human well-being completely breaks down

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and other factors are much more relevant so take the usa for example the most advanced capitalist country on

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the planet where commodification has gone further than anywhere else one of the richest countries in the world in terms of gdp

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per capita and yet spain beats the us in terms of social indicators across the

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board including a life expectancy that is five years longer despite having 55 percent less income

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portugal beats the us with 65 less and these are not just two examples there are dozens right so

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it becomes clear what actually matters when it comes to welfare is not aggregate gdp growth but rather

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effectively what are you producing that promote well-being are you producing tear gas are you producing vaccines right in gdp those things are considered

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equal by dollar amounts do people have access to useful things that you’re producing such as healthcare and

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education or are those things commodified and how is income distributed right do

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people ultimately have access to decent wages and livelihoods and access to public goods

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or do they not and the answer here is that in rich countries you don’t need more growth in order to do the latter to

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improve livelihoods improve access to housing education healthcare etc etc you can do it right now

17:37

by reducing inequality and investing in public services and decommodifying them so that’s kind of the key principle here

17:42

we have to break that ideology that links growth with automatically good

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and of course look the truth is it’s actually quite annoying that we’re still having this conversation because this

17:53

has been known about gdp for nearly 100 years right simon kuznets himself who designed the

18:00

measure pointed out that this is a terrible way to measure social progress

18:07

because gdp leaves so much out there’s so much value because it only counts commodities

18:13

so there’s so much value that gets left out subsistence commons sharing care

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volunteering nature the value of public services is left out of gdp pretty much anything that doesn’t

18:24

have a price is excluded right regardless of how fundamental it is to our civilization

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and then on the other hand it doesn’t count the social and ecological costs of commodity production so you tear down a

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forest and sell the timber to ikea gdp goes up doesn’t count the cost of losing that forest as habitat for species or a

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future resource for humans if you privatize the uk health service

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gdp goes up because you’re turning into a commodity but access to health care goes down and

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that’s not accounted for in gdp so we’re so far away from kuznets warning

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which was simply to say calls for more growth should always specify growth of what and for what

19:06

purpose and our economists and our politicians have lost touch with that reality

19:13

so it’s essential that we have a conversation about shifting away from this mindless machine of expansion

19:20

a friend of mine named phil lawn he’s an ecological economist down in australia

19:25

has been hyping the genuine progress indicator as a replacement for gdp for

19:30

some time now he seems like a lonely voice in the wilderness screaming out is there any progress for pushing a

19:38

model that actually does represent things like what steve keane puts out with gauging energy use and soil

19:44

consumption and the genuine progress indicator that phil lawn and guys like stephen hale talk about

19:50

where have you seen the trend going if anything yeah the genuine progress indicator gpi super

19:58

important intervention and i think it’s gaining traction these days thanks to the efforts of your friends

20:04

so basically for your listeners who don’t know gpi effectively very simplified starts with gdp

20:10

and then adds things like values that are not counted by gdp and then subtracts the costs

20:16

in terms of social and ecological costs associated with commodity production so what you’re left with is an indicator

20:22

that gives you a much more holistic view of what’s happening in the economy in terms of net improvement and that

20:29

decline and the idea is if politicians were maximizing something like gpi rather

20:34

than gdp then they would be incentivized to try to improve social and ecological outcomes while reducing social and

20:41

ecological bads right we would all agree this is a better approach to take but the other alternative to gpi

20:48

proposed by ecological economists is effectively a dashboard approach so recognizing that one of the problems

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with gdp is the fact that it’s an aggregate indicator and it’s difficult to solve that problem

21:00

with another aggregate indicator so there’s always a danger of fetishizing aggregate indicators so yes

21:07

and the weights within them are always contested right and we need to be able to see

21:13

that waiting and most people don’t have access to that so a better approach is maybe to establish what it is that you

21:18

want your economy to achieve in terms of social and ecological goals so let’s have a conversation about it

21:25

the social goals we want to achieve are maybe full employment better access to livelihoods housing education healthcare

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public transportation renewable energy etc so focus on improving those with specific targets

21:38

rather than just growing aggregate commodity production as a proxy and hoping that

21:43

that will somehow magically solve your social problems right and then also establish clearly your ecological goals

21:50

and those ecological goals for rich countries must include clear caps on fossil fuel and resource

21:57

use you cap fossil fuel and resource use and then you scale it down on an annual

22:03

schedule until they’re back within sustainable levels by some target date okay 20 35 2050 whatever it might be

22:10

so in some ways i’m actually like i love gpi actually i think it’s super useful but in some ways i would actually

22:17

promote probably above that this sort of dashboard oriented approach which i think is a bit more accessible to people

22:22

and this way when the news announces every day or every quarter or whatever it is what the results are of the

22:28

economy we’re actually talking about things like the level of biodiversity and the level

22:34

of decent housing access and the level of renewable energy and the level of soil health etc etc which i

22:40

think would just it would help our conversation publicly so much because right now all of that is off the table

22:46

and not being considered at all you know it’s interesting we talk about stock flow consistent modeling and

22:52

sectoral balances approach to understanding the economy itself and i could see this rolling into

22:59

something like that you’re looking at domestic public rest of world or the

23:04

import export position balance of trade and something adding to that to make that even more valid that

23:12

is an accounting identity but it’s also a measure if you understand where you are in your flows

23:18

you can understand where you need to apply deficit spending right in this case these indicators every time i see

23:25

an indicator when i understand the underlying formula that generates that indicator it informs me of what i might

23:32

need to do differently so how might this dashboard approach

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inform policy activism this is a bit expansive but i think they’re tied hand in hand

23:44

yeah exactly and look i think actually mmt comes into this equation i wanted to make sure to talk about mnt

23:50

while i’m with you so i’ve been thinking about like the synergies between mmt and d growth and i

23:56

think this actually pertains to the dashboard question quite directly so let me expand so yeah for d growth basically

24:02

there are two main objectives one is an ecological objective which is to reduce resource and energy throughput and then

24:08

the other is a social objective which is to improve people’s access to the things they need to live well and ensure that

24:14

secure right so basically a social guarantee so mmt has done a really good job at

24:20

pointing out that you can basically issue the currency if you have control over sovereign currency issue the

24:25

currency to fund a job guarantee and universal public services thereby solving in effect the social question

24:32

clearly you can also use it to invest in renewable energy and regenerative agriculture right at the same time

24:38

and that’s clear effectively what you’re doing is you’re mobilizing domestic resources and energy around these key objectives

24:44

on the other hand mmt talks about taxation as useful in as much as you can pull

24:50

demand out of the economy when necessary to prevent inflation to check inflation risks right

24:56

what i think is overlooked here is that by the same token you can use taxation

25:01

to pull excess demand out of the economy to reduce resource and energy use right specifically among the rich

25:08

constraining the resource and energy use of the rich is essential to bringing our economies back into balance with the

25:14

living world can’t we just the rich [Laughter] so i think the mmt proposal for how to

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think about taxation i.e not as a way of funding public activity

25:25

but rather as a way of pulling demand out of the economy can be applied to ecological economics as a tool for

25:32

reducing excess resource and energy use and that i think is very promising and so i think that when we have a

25:37

dashboard in front of us of ecological and social goals we want to achieve mmt can be a tool to accomplish quite a lot

25:43

of that of course assuming you have a progressive government and the political will to do so

25:48

and those are big deals and i got to be honest with you this is one of the things that snatches my soul from me

25:55

each of these governments that creates their own unit of account and has control of their unit of account has a

26:01

margin of food sovereignty energy sovereignty baked into their monetary

26:06

sovereignty they don’t really require money they’re not seeking money they

26:11

create money at will so what they’re really seeking is resources

26:17

resource extraction access to markets which then indicates well the countries

26:22

aren’t businesses so what exactly is it that they’re clearing markets for

26:28

i mean the corporate class capturing our governments around the world this neoliberal structure

26:34

this corporatist style of government is taking capitalism to a whole new level

26:40

how do we decouple corporations from our government take cut control back

26:46

short of a ill-fated revolution that none of us are prepared for i hate to say it

26:51

there’s got to be some sort of mechanism because otherwise we’re coming

26:56

up with all these great ideas wonderful scenarios that could save us from extinction

27:02

so how do we get these governments to serve mankind instead of capital

27:08

your observation about sovereign currency i think is so powerful and this should strike anyone who has read the

27:14

mmt literature is immediately the question becomes if there’s no scarcity of money then why

27:19

do we have a scarcity of money right and the answer basically is it’s an artificial scarcity there’s a scarcity

27:26

that is induced in our economy for the purposes of ensuring that you

27:31

have control over labor and resources right so basically mmt proposes that you can

27:37

pretty easily solve the social question but governments don’t do that because what would happen then is there would be

27:42

no incentive for workers to sell themselves for cheap to corporations like why would you work for mcdonald’s

27:48

flipping burgers for a few dollars an hour when you could have a living wage doing

27:54

dignified socially necessary work through a public job guarantee system that has democratic control of the

27:59

workplace etc etc participating the most important collective projects of our era

28:05

you would not choose to work for mcdonald’s you would not and so in order to maintain the supply of labor

28:10

to corporations there’s an artificial scarcity of money and provisioning that has to be induced

28:17

right the us government is a great example of this so one of the reasons why our even progressive governments

28:23

like say dubai demonstration buy into the support for corporations

28:29

the catastrophe that you’re mentioning is because they believe that growth is good and so anything that delivers

28:35

growth is something they pursue and if that means handing power to corporations and heading resources to corporations and

28:40

ensuring a steady flow of deep labor etc etc then you do that only once progressive politics breaks from the

28:47

obsession with growthism can we have a more rational conversation about how to run the economy and then

28:52

what you do is you do what’s called for in the degrowth literature as you actively disaccumulate capital and you

28:58

decommodify key parts of the economy and markets continue to operate but within those parameters right so

29:04

disaccumulation beak modification and then caps on resource and energy use these are the core principles

29:10

but right now the progressive movement is effectively not talking about this so that has to change i think that

29:16

challenging the ideological hegemony of growth is an essential step there

29:32

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30:13

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30:21

i’m going to say something that you may object to but i want to say it clearly so that you hear where i’m coming from

30:27

i was a huge bernie sanders supporter and he’s probably short of henry wallace

30:33

probably the most progressive we’ve ever had we haven’t really had a guy like a

30:39

bernie sanders leading a left movement in the united states and around the world bernie wouldn’t look all that left

30:45

he’d look kind of normal so when i hear biden put up as a progressive i can’t help but chuckle

30:51

just a little bit because biden and her right neo-liberal

30:57

and i gotta tell you my listeners will hate me for saying this but there’s been a few moments where i’ve

31:03

had to tip my hat to biden and i did not intend to tip my hat to he’s done a lot of things that i’m not happy about from

31:10

bombing families in afghanistan but that notwithstanding compared to his predecessor he’s done a

31:17

few things that make you go wow maybe he’s listening to some people i think the tepid response to

31:23

student loan forgiveness just an absolute albatross on older workers that had to go back to school to reinvent

31:30

themselves after the last global crash that we had in 08 and 09 he has also not helped young kids out in

31:37

any way in terms of their student debt he threw 50 million of a two trillion dollar albatross

31:43

and he basically shot all over a green new deal so there’s some things about buying that

31:48

you have to tip your hat to i’ve never seen a democrat less concerned about the deficit

31:54

biden is obviously broken clearly away from obama and definitely broken away from the clintons so in that sense he

32:00

scores some major progressive points but i would say though that we need a lot better and i’m afraid that we need it a

32:06

lot quicker than we’re going to get it i think you talked about the soil and its ability to sustain agriculture

32:14

maybe 60 years as it stands now if we continue farming as we are so there’s a lot of things that are

32:20

happening really quickly life is coming at us fast and we don’t have time for dinosaurs

32:25

like the biden administration that has not adopted these things full-throatedly and we’re the ones that are the worst

32:32

offenders and yet we’re only providing tepid responses so this kind of leads me to the more

32:38

fundamental question that i raised when i talked to you about war and about the approach to

32:43

not just colonizing the planet but policing and extracting from the planet

32:48

and the modus operandi of invading these countries for underlying resources and

32:54

that’s both anecdotal but i think there’s a lot of empirical evidence that would suggest that our military actions

33:00

are less altruistic and more extractive and also more

33:06

devastating to the environment and ecology as a whole what would you say to that yes there’s no question i think

33:12

that the most effective analysis of war and specifically the us and nato war machine

33:18

i guess is to point out that it is about strategic control over access to

33:24

resource flows right and that is important because growth in the u.s and western europe the global

33:30

north basically at large depends heavily on net appropriation of resources

33:36

energy and labor in the global south right and this is not just the loony rantings of someone who’s

33:42

talking about abstract neocolonialism this is empirically demonstrated and i’d love to talk about this a little bit actually so

33:48

yes but first let me rewind and just talk about the colonial period proper we know from economic historians very

33:53

clearly that growth in the north relied on forms of appropriation from the south think about the industrial revolution

34:00

the main commodity of the industrial revolution was cotton right cotton of course not grown in england

34:06

cotton grown on land appropriated from indigenous americans and grown by enslaved africans

34:12

but also relied on sugar grown in the same fashion grain appropriated from india on a mass scale timber

34:18

appropriated from india countless resources appropriated from colonial africa etc and all of this crucially

34:23

also with significant ecological consequences which are often not spoken about jason moore’s work does a really

34:30

good job on pointing to the fact that colonial forms of appropriation were devastating for local

34:36

ecologies including mass deforestation in the americas now that economy

34:42

remains more or less in place today growth in the global north continues to rely on a large net appropriation of

34:49

resources from the south although now it’s facilitated not primarily through direct military occupation and colonial

34:55

control but rather through price inequalities in international trade and commodity supply chains right

35:01

now let me explain briefly what i’m after here sure in international trade when you have price inequalities i.e

35:07

wages and resource prices in the south are lower than they are in the north what that means is for every unit of

35:14

embodied labor and resources the south imports from the north they have to export many more times to pay for it

35:20

which facilitates a net transfer from the south to north now price inequalities are not natural as marx

35:26

famously pointed out in the 19th century they are induced through geopolitical

35:31

power right and commercial power so in the colonial era of course you drive down wages by enclosing commons

35:39

and dispossessing people and destroying subsistence economies to create a mass of unemployed people

35:44

today it is through a variety of different mechanisms the structural adjustment programs that

35:50

were imposed across the global south by the world bank and the imf which are controlled by the us government

35:55

primarily but the g7 more generally massively cut public sector employment

36:00

they cut labor standards they cut environmental standards et cetera et cetera in order to

36:07

depress the costs of labor and resources and restore northern access to the cheap

36:12

labor and raw materials they had enjoyed under the colonial period right and so price inequalities were induced

36:18

by neoliberal structural adjustment programs in the 80s and 90s today as a consequence of neoliberal

36:25

globalization global south countries are heavily dependent on foreign currency to finance

36:30

debt and imports therefore they’re all competing to attract foreign investments therefore they’re in a global race to the bottom

36:36

to deliver cheap labor and resources to multinational companies effectively as tribute and these multinational companies also

36:43

furthermore exercise extraordinary monopoly power firms from the global north control 97

36:49

of all patents in the global economy which gives them tremendous power to depress

36:54

the prices of suppliers who again are overwhelmingly in the south where all of the labor and resources are mobilized

37:00

think of your iphone think of your laptop think of your clothes thus squeezing suppliers and pushing wages to

37:06

below the cost of subsistence right the result being of course mass poverty across the global south that is

37:12

intractable so all of this induces price inequalities which sustain a flow of resources from

37:18

south to north on a mass scale and let me just give you an idea for what the scale of this is

37:24

this comes from research from christian dorninger published earlier this year using input output models

37:31

a net transfer of 10 billion tons of embodied raw materials okay so that’s double the total mass of resources

37:38

extracted from the continents of africa per year net transferred from south of the north 800 million hectares of embodied lands

37:45

which is twice the size of india imagine land twice the size of india

37:50

mobilized entirely around net transfers to the north of land-based goods

37:55

overwhelming it’s overwhelming 23 exajoules of embodied energy which is five times more than iran’s total annual

38:02

production of oil i mean a tremendous scale so think about it

38:07

and this is where the ecological economic arguments about thinking about resources in terms of use value becomes

38:13

important that quantity of land could provide nutritious food for four to six

38:18

billion people ending hunger forever right but instead it’s used to produce things like sugar

38:24

for coca-cola and beef for mcdonald’s consumed in the global north that quantity of energy could provide

38:30

electricity for 1.5 billion people which is the entire population of the continents of africa

38:35

while powering infrastructure for public healthcare education transportation internet for everybody

38:41

but instead it’s appropriated to power suvs in europe for example right so

38:47

we live in this global economy where the south’s vast resources

38:52

and vast reserves of labor are being mobilized around servicing northern consumerism and growth

38:59

when they could be used to meet local human needs and this is why i come to de-growth from the perspective

39:05

of anti-imperialism recognizing that we live in an imperialist world economy and de-growth

39:11

as a demand for ending those patterns of net appropriation that sustain such high levels of excess consumption of rich

39:17

nations the ultimate demand being one of effectively convergence right

39:24

rich countries should reduce their resource use to get back within sustainable levels while poor countries should reclaim

39:31

their resources mobilizing them around meeting human needs with throughput converging globally at a

39:38

level that’s consistent with universal welfare and ecological stability that is

39:43

the world we should be imagining and calling for and that vision emerges clearly from

39:48

this literature i want to throw you a bone here on this one this is something i don’t think a

39:54

lot of people talk about but the epicenter of where all this

39:59

race to the bottom mindset begins i look in the united states directly as

40:05

rust belts are created as sweetheart deals for tax bases are given in texas

40:11

to extract a company from detroit and leaving them destitute and leaving

40:16

all those people behind and this mindset of the states competing

40:22

for business has generated the race to the bottom there is no up there is only

40:27

down and the states are currency users they have no ability to generate currency to

40:33

be able to offset those shortages that are left behind and so schools which are funded by the

40:39

income taxes of zip codes those schools become destitute we create this impoverished area once again that has no

40:46

hope unless the federal government steps in on a global scale the exact same

40:51

model and this is why i brought up lenin in the beginning was that i was having a flashback

40:58

as to watching finance capital capturing whatever territory it’s trying to

41:04

capture and in this case on a global scale we got the haves in the north stealing from the have-nots in the south

41:12

and in the u.s i can’t quantify this so this is purely conjecture but i’m guessing that the

41:18

states that are the quote-unquote net producers the ones that have the businesses internally in their state

41:25

are like germany if you will in the eu whereas the ones that are not in that

41:31

condition are like greece and you can see this dynamic through sectoral balances but i think this is

41:37

why i come back to the dashboard idea that you had merging it with that sectoral balances approach because

41:43

if you realize there’s a deficit in the public space you have a remedy you know we need to

41:49

deficit spend let’s see where and that’s where that dashboard would kick in and let us understand how to tune the eq

41:56

but in this case do you see any tie-in to what i stated there with the states and competing with one another and

42:02

extracting those companies based on cutting the bottom out of taxes and ultimately drying up the public service

42:09

and the public purpose in each of those states i think it’s almost a one for one i could be wrong but i think i see that

42:16

i think you’re absolutely right ever since i encountered mmt this has struck me as well about the us is that clearly there’s a crisis for the

42:23

poor states that are not able to issue their own currency right which is a huge problem

42:29

it means they’re reliant entirely on whatever federal funding they can achieve or gdp growth and so

42:35

which means attracting companies and cutting your taxes this is a major issue i feel so bad for

42:41

anybody who’s in state governments because your hands are literally tied and that’s a disaster i don’t know what the solution is to this

42:47

i’d love to hear what mt people think about that but clearly i 100 affirm what you’re

42:53

saying which is that imperialism does not operate only on the world stage although that’s its primary

42:58

manifestation clearly within the us there are clear imperial dynamics and we

43:03

can see this very clearly when it comes to the resource frontiers in the u.s itself

43:09

look at the indigenous struggle against the pipelines right there’s a militarized fight for access

43:15

to resources that are effectively controlled by indigenous communities and that’s to say nothing about their

43:20

long-term appropriation over the past several hundred years so we have to recognize imperial

43:25

dynamics that continue to operate within the us today it is after all a colonized territory and has not been decolonized

43:32

and we have to call for that what’s interesting in the mmt space is that

43:38

there’s this movement among progressive economists in the global south people like fadel kaboob and ndongosambasia

43:45

who have been pointing out that you can use mmt principles as a tool for

43:51

decolonization as a tool for reducing your dependence on foreign currency by

43:56

reducing your dependence on imports and so on right yes and that’s powerful it’s

44:01

interesting for me to think about mmt as a tool for anti-imperialist economic policy but yes

44:08

the u.s states or u.s communities to be more specific don’t have that option which is really unfortunate

44:15

and dango and foddle are both friends of mine have interviewed indongo about the cfa frank and that whole approach to

44:23

colonial africa and decolonizing and talking about job guarantee in emerging

44:29

countries and foddle is very close to our program you’ll frequently see him with a real

44:34

progressive shirt on and he’s a core part of what we do here

44:39

and his approach to the global south and a global green new deal this is exactly why i’m trying to marry

44:46

these things together i see you as very much a part of our world and i want to tie these adjacent minded

44:53

schools when i think of mmt i think of it as plumbing it’s not really ideological at

44:59

its core so narrow mmt is accounting it’s understanding banking the way it

45:05

really flows once you can demystify and debunk all the false scarcity ideas about money

45:12

then you start what i call next leveling with the work that you’re doing and the work that steve keane is doing about

45:19

various things that exceed that monetary thing because ultimately mmt’s purpose is to make money the least important

45:25

thing to consider here it’s really all about resources to take jacque fresco’s respect of on a

45:33

resource-based economy mmt takes that approach as well in terms

45:38

of understanding that it’s really do we have an economy that can produce the real resources that

45:45

we need for consumption that really is the key indicator of what you’ve got versus money

45:52

so from that standpoint i want to take it one final step and this is where i would like to close this out

45:59

the word the growth as we said in the beginning is a bit of a shocker just like mmt is horrific for marketing

46:06

anytime you add theory to something theory is a very scientific word but it was also more of a blog post where

46:13

somebody said hey maybe we call them mmt but degrowth has that same thing

46:18

you may as well said communism here how do we take these principles

46:24

and advance them how do we market this because i am very sympathetic to socialism i’m very sympathetic to

46:30

communism the writers and the struggles of the past haiti and russian revolution

46:36

that speaks to my heart but clearly even in the face of the calamity we’re facing this

46:42

hurricane that tore through the us here recently should be a light bulb moment for a lot of people

46:48

and the fires in the pacific northwest how do we market this to where regular

46:54

people are starting to use this as part of their common vernacular so they’re thinking this way because

47:00

we can’t survive if we don’t get this right we’re done yeah so there’s a lot to think about

47:05

here first of all the term degrowth the idea of it it’s a missile word

47:10

it immediately triggers a response and the response illuminates the

47:16

assumptions that people have about growth and how the economy should work which creates space for a conversation

47:21

now quite often it’s a tense conversation people are like resistant but what’s

47:26

interesting about it and this is what happened to me with it is that if you’re reflective enough to be like whoa okay uh my assumptions are being

47:33

challenged here let me investigate this further think about it more carefully and then it can produce epiphanies and i

47:39

think that’s very useful intellectually terms like this similar to say using the term

47:44

decolonization in like 1920 most people in polite europeans decided to be like what are you talking about

47:50

that sounds crazy but then it opens a space for you to say decolonization is crucial for an ethical society right and

47:57

that’s effectively the conversation that’s been provoked with the growth now there’s a question here do you want that

48:03

to be a public facing term i’m not committed to that necessarily people want to say they’re

48:08

eco-socialists which i would consider myself i think basically the principle of ecosocialism being design the economy

48:15

such that it meets everyone’s needs at a high standard while at the same time operating within planetary boundaries

48:22

right and also it should not be an imperialist economy so and then of course d growth is simply

48:28

what rich nations need to do to get to that vision scale down excess resource and energy

48:33

use etc so i don’t know if de-growth is like the isms it’s like less the horizon and more

48:39

of the path if you will but the question is raised is eco-socialism any less of a triggering

48:45

term for people in the u.s i doubt that’s the case and i would still like to retain the use of d

48:52

growth because it’s such a useful analytical tool and has been so well defined in the literature

48:57

and is so urgent as well in terms of the ecological crisis i find it useful in that respect but i

49:03

think what’s important of course is the policies we have to get the policies taken up

49:08

regardless of what we’re calling them and i think that one way to approach that is to shift the conversation away

49:14

from emissions as such but rather to fossil fuels and people understand that fossil fuels

49:20

are causing climate breakdown and so it should be rational therefore to cap fossil fuels and ratchet them down on an

49:28

annual schedule until they are at zero by say 2035 in the case of the us and

49:33

the uk etc now you scale up renewable energy as fast as you can in the meantime but with

49:38

any energy gap that you have the idea is you want to allocate energy in such a way that you prioritize

49:45

people’s needs and well-being and essential services etc and this is where de-growth social policies become so

49:52

essential we can establish universal access to the resources people need to live well and to good

49:57

livelihoods with mmt policy with degrowth policy etc and that can all be packaged into

50:04

a demand for declining fossil fuels which sounds so reasonable but it’s

50:09

remarkable that this is not a public-facing demand the idea for capping and declining fossil fuels and

50:15

it needs to be we need to be rallying around that you’ve heard kerry talk about the u.s

50:20

emissions plan we’re going to cut emissions by half in 10 years how are you going to do that

50:26

and the answer i kid you not is with technology we don’t have yet that technology being fantasy is about

50:33

carbon capture and storage that scientists routinely question the feasibility of and all this is a method

50:40

for getting away from the core question which is the urgency of capping and declining fossil fuel use

50:46

so if we can frame the ecological question around that then i think that we have a lot of traction and maybe

50:52

that’s the way to approach it but look i’m open to suggestions here well one of the things that jumps out at

50:57

me was biden’s buildback better approach and his focus now he’s almost going full ronald reagan

51:05

which should be terrifying to most lefties because he’s demonizing china

51:10

and using a cold war rhetoric to ramp up our

51:16

innovation and compete with china well competition at that level

51:21

is not going to generate de-growth it’s going to generate growth and dirty growth and a lot of friction as well

51:29

china has a totally different model of approaching not only their economy but

51:34

their relationships around the world but this is no less volatile and i

51:40

wonder i think biden is trying to appeal to republicans i think that we are in a collision

51:47

course with state capital neo-liberalism

51:52

any number of public-private partnerships we’re in a position now where getting

51:57

rid of patent laws and shrinking copyright protection basically creating a global commons to help everyone grow

52:05

we’re the opposite that we’re actually growing the other direction building more protections and becoming

52:11

more private i don’t want to worship at the altar of bill gates or any of these other rich

52:17

guys that are building phallic symbols to fly into space i want to really focus

52:23

on reinventing rediscovering the public purpose and it seems like the train is leaving

52:29

the station going that way and you and i are over here talking about a train going this way that doesn’t exist yet

52:35

and we’ve got to make it exist and that terrifies me jason this is one of the primary reasons

52:40

why i had you on here and you have been absolutely amazing let me give you the final thought on that and then we’ll

52:47

close out with where we can find your work yeah so the question of the us stands towards china is terrifying and also

52:53

just absurd given the fact that look the discourse on china and this needn’t be

52:58

read as a defense of china okay we’re all aware of china’s problems but china’s gdp per

53:04

capita is one-sixth that of the usa’s and yet it’s being trumped up as this

53:10

economic threat what does that mean i mean if you think about the significance of this the us is basically saying

53:16

global south countries are only allowed to develop up to a certain point but they’re never allowed to achieve

53:22

full sovereignty because that is a threat to our interests and that’s very troubling that’s a very

53:28

troubling claim which i think reveals the core imperialism of u.s geopolitical

53:35

strategy and i think that we need to reject it at every turn because that’s extremely dangerous

53:40

you’re right things are moving in that direction how do we get the train to move in the other direction in terms of strategy i think this is key

53:48

the environmentalist movements which is presently the movement addressing the ecological crisis is not going to

53:54

succeed on that matter alone and the reason is because they don’t have the political power to do so and there’s no

54:01

clear way they’ll be able to attain that political power so extinction rebellion fighters for future etc they can do a

54:06

great job at raising awareness and maybe even closing down streets say in central london or new york but they don’t have

54:13

the political power to establish the fundamental changes that we need what does have that political power is

54:18

working class formations now one of the problems we face is that the unions right now

54:24

and this has been true for decades tend to be resolutely growthists which is strange when you think that when you

54:30

consider the job of unions is to be a counterweight to capital unions are effectively aligning with the

54:37

interest of capital for the sake of endless commodity expansion on the grounds of this is the only way to

54:42

improve livelihoods and to improve people’s lives right so it’s essential that we’re organizing

54:49

within working-class formations and alongside them in alliance with them to build an awareness of how the social

54:56

problem can be solved in rich nations without additional growth and again mmt offers us the tools for doing that

55:02

public job guarantee shorter working week expanded public services etc if we can establish the principle of a

55:08

social guarantee then i think we’re on strong footing to start having a conversation about

55:14

actively scaling down destructive sectors of the economy because we no longer have to worry about

55:20

the boogeyman of unemployment right that artificial scarcity is now off the table

55:25

and we can have a rational conversation about the economy and so i guess this is simply to say alliances with working-class movements

55:32

are essential and i say this recognizing that in the us they’re very weak in western europe they’re much stronger

55:37

and that gives some hope i think there’s that and then the other thing i think is important here is alliances

55:43

with global south movements against imperialism and that’s important because again as

55:48

i’ve been at pains to establish the global economy is structured according to principles of imperialism the

55:54

ecological crisis is a symptom of imperialist forms of appropriation the people that have the skin in the

55:59

game here are the exploited countries of the world and the social movements there are very

56:05

clear that the crisis of ecological breakdown was not primarily a crisis of technology but rather primarily a crisis

56:11

of colonization and appropriation read for example the people’s agreements of kochibamba signed in 2010 by

56:18

thousands of social movements across the global south this principle is clear what we need to do in response is to

56:24

align as much as possible with anti-imperialist social movements in the global south

56:30

because anti-colonial struggle is the only struggle that has ever substantially changed the structure of

56:35

the global economy which happened in the mid 20th century before being reversed of course by neoliberal structural

56:41

adjustments and there’s potential for that to happen again and those are the alliances we need to create

56:46

and that’s important because right now in the global north the discussion about progressive economics and ecological

56:52

breakdown etc almost entirely excludes that dimension and certainly entirely excludes those

56:59

kinds of alliances it’s not an internationalist conversation in any true sense of the word and so i think

57:04

that is what we need to focus on establishing i think that is very well stated so i

57:11

have all your books and as i told you before i have not read all of your books but i own all of them because i want to

57:19

read them and with that in mind why don’t you tell our audience where they can find your

57:25

work and what you’re working on now okay so less is more and the divide are both

57:32

published by penguin you can buy them anywhere not but if you’re in the uk then hive is a

57:37

good kind of ethical alternative to amazon i’m less certain about the us but in the us i know you can buy less is

57:43

more from blackwell’s which is a british company that ships for free to the us and they send you a nice

57:50

oxford looking bookmark very cute so my work is all freely available on my

57:56

website jasonhickle.org my published academic work and my essays and so on and in terms of what i’m working on

58:03

these days increasingly working on further defining how imperialism works in the global economy

58:10

and how it relates to ecological breakdown and what strategies are sort of feasible

58:16

for us to pursue against that dual emergency so keep an eye out for more coming down the

58:21

pipeline in the next couple of months this has been absolutely amazing and i say this because all the guests i bring

58:28

on here i believe are amazing but this truly took me to a new place and

58:33

i’ve been super excited about this and you didn’t disappoint my friend i hope

58:38

that we can do this again in the future i hope you found value in coming on here because i’d like to marry d growth and

58:44

mmt i want the community that i work within and represent to really see this as

58:49

an extension of all the work that they’re doing i really find this to be a great marriage and i hope you do too

58:56

yeah thanks so much for the conversation it’s actually really enjoyable to talk to somebody who’s familiar with and he

59:01

was led actually on a lot of these spaces so thank you yeah it’s been really interesting for me

59:07

fantastic all right with that i’m steve grumbine with jason hickle macaron cheese we’re out of here

59:19

macro and cheese is produced by andy kennedy descriptive writing by virginia cox and promotional artwork by mindy

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