Jason Hickel on Poverty
born 1982 Eswatini
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Extreme poverty is not a natural condition, but an effect of dispossession, enclosure, and exploitation. It need not exist anywhere, and certainly should not exist in any just and humane society. It can and must be abolished immediately.
While global real GDP has nearly tripled since 1980, the number of people living in poverty, below $5 per day, has increased by more than 1.1 billion. Why is this? Because past a certain point, GDP growth begins to produce more negative outcomes than positive ones – more 'illth' than wealth.
The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets (2018)
The rise of capitalism, rather than delivering improvements in human welfare, was associated with plummeting wages, a reduction in human stature, and a marked upturn in the incidence of famine. Progress did not begin until the 1880s in the European core, and the 20th century in the European periphery, the latter roughly a century later than the standard narrative suggests.