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The Divide

Metadata

  • Author: Jason Hickel
  • ASIN: B073SG4L8T
  • ISBN: 0393651363
  • Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073SG4L8T
  • Kindle link

Highlights

the global economic system was organised in such a way as to make meaningful development nearly impossible. — location: 168 ^ref-58397

when I pointed them out to one of World Vision’s managers, I was told that they were too ‘political’; — location: 169 ^ref-36839

Europe’s development couldn’t have happened without colonial loot. — location: 261 ^ref-11467

Rich countries aren’t developing poor countries; poor countries are effectively developing rich countries – and they have been since the late 15th century. — location: 416 ^ref-17220

ever since the end of colonialism, Africans have been actively prevented from establishing democracies. The legacy of strongman rule in Africa is largely a Western invention, not an indigenous proclivity. — location: 1691 ^ref-2112

Even The Economist called it ‘an orgy of self-mutilation’. — location: 1809 ^ref-12991

the only reason the economy didn’t fall apart completely was because Codelco, the state copper mining company, had never been privatised and continued to supply 85 per cent of the country’s revenue. — location: 1812 ^ref-65401

In order to aggressively deregulate the economy, you first have to aggressively regulate the political sphere. Total market freedom requires total political unfreedom, even to the extent of mass imprisonment and concentration camps. — location: 1830 ^ref-25296

Keynesianism had failed, they claimed, and the system needed to be scrapped. In the end, this argument prevailed. Not because it was correct, but because it had more firepower behind it — location: 1851 ^ref-15383

Reagan didn’t cut taxes for everyone; in order to plug the hole left by tax cuts for the rich, he raised payroll taxes on the working class. — location: 1866 ^ref-4739

Productivity increased steadily while wages stagnated, effectively shifting an increasing proportion of profits from workers to the owners of capital. — location: 1877 ^ref-57203

real development requires the redistribution of power, which then in most cases naturally precipitates a redistribution of resources. — location: 1898 ^ref-37113

Rapid economic growth, industrialisation and ‘modernisation’ came with significant costs. — location: 1918 ^ref-60542

The IMF was originally designed to use its own money to lend to countries with balance of payments problems, so that they could keep government spending up and therefore avoid another depression. — location: 2037 ^ref-46070

Western policymakers told developing countries that they had to liberalise their economies in order to grow, but that’s exactly what the West did not do during its own period of economic consolidation. Every one of today’s rich countries developed its economy through protectionist measures. — location: 2188 ^ref-60485

the president of the World Bank is always an American, while the president of the IMF is always European. — location: 2213 ^ref-47723

In a crisis of over-accumulation, capital begins to lose its value — location: 2252 ^ref-39525

Hamilton knew from studying the British experience that a country’s industries needed protection from foreign competition during the early stages of their development. — location: 2484 ^ref-44446

Hamilton knew that for young economies like that of the United States, strong protectionism and solid state support were the only path to real industrial development. — location: 2489 ^ref-9411

To suggest that the global South should focus on exporting raw material while the North should focus on capital-intensive industry is the equivalent of saying that black people are just naturally better at working in the cotton fields while white people are just naturally better at being overseers, and that investing in educating a black person to become anything other than a common labourer is a ‘distortion’ that runs against their natural abilities. — location: 2549 ^ref-11971

The only way to ensure that some kind of productive transition takes place is to provide substantial unemployment benefits and training programmes – something that poor countries can rarely afford. — location: 2665 ^ref-45662

The mobility of liquid capital is too perfect, while that of labour and fixed capital is not perfect enough. — location: 2672 ^ref-20382

The United States responded by threatening them with crushing sanctions through the WTO’s court – and the world watched in horror at this callous move. But then something happened in the United States that weakened their case. In 2001, a number of Americans died of exposure to anthrax. The US government feared that an epidemic might be on the horizon, possibly triggered by biological weapons. Just in case, they decided to stockpile Cipro, the antibiotic that treats anthrax. But Cipro was under patent by Bayer, making it very expensive to buy. So the US government stepped in and, citing a possible public health emergency, forced Bayer to suspend its patent so that generic versions could be produced. — location: 2711 ^ref-30259

84 per cent of research on pharmaceuticals is funded by governments and other public sources, while only 12 per cent comes from the pharmaceutical industry. — location: 2727 ^ref-41058

In this sense, democracy itself is targeted, bizarrely, as anti-democratic, inasmuch as it grants voters control over the economic policies that affect their lives. — location: 2866 ^ref-17124

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve. Henry David Thoreau — location: 3389 ^ref-25531

Fairness is better than charity. In the absence of fairness, charity carries the whiff of a scam. — location: 3450 ^ref-53548

Every time I walk into a store and see items labelled fair trade, I’m always struck by what their presence implies: that the rest of the ‘normal’ products are unfair. — location: 3605 ^ref-54414

You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. — location: 3698 ^ref-15427