PDF Summary:The Divide, by Jason Hickel

Today, many experts claim that life for humans has never been better. However, in The Divide, Jason Hickel argues that today’s Western-led world order causes massive global inequality while simultaneously trying to cover it up. Western elites amass wealth and power while billions remain trapped in poverty and hunger. This “divide,” he says, arose through centuries of violent and exploitative European colonization that devastated the Global South while enriching the West.

Hickel, an economic anthropologist from Eswatini, saw this divide firsthand while growing up in a poor Global South nation. Today, he studies the structural injustices of the global economy and the politics that enable it. The Divide is for anyone who wants to know more about these complex global issues—and about the lesser-known world history that explains them. It’s also for anyone eager to think about solutions to these problems. In our commentary, we’ll explore related perspectives on economics, inequality, and development, including those from Doughnut Economics and An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.

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Colonialism Gave Europe Developmental Advantages

Colonialism provided Europe with two main advantages that enabled it to develop. First, Hickel says, colonialism allowed European nations to significantly expand their control over material resources and labor. For instance, Spain funneled massive amounts of gold and silver from South America to Europe.

In turn, that wealth gave Europe the ability to outsource its agricultural production. With the economic advantages from the resources and labor of their colonies, European nations bought cheap foodstuffs from eastern powers like China. This allowed Europeans to transition their domestic economies into industrial manufacturing, leveraging emerging technologies like steam- and coal-powered engines to do so.

(Shortform note: In recent years, organizations like the CARICOM Reparations Commission have called for European nations to address the legacy of colonialism. Quantifying the scale of colonial extraction in modern terms is difficult, but scholars such as Utsa Patnaik have provided some estimates. For instance, a 2018 study suggests that Britain extracted nearly $45 trillion from India during its colonial rule from 1765 to 1938. As for Spanish colonization of the Americas, historians estimate that between 1503 and 1660, Spain extracted around 16 million kilograms of silver and 185,000 kilograms of gold, which could be valued in the trillions of dollars today. These staggering figures fuel ongoing debates about historical colonial injustices.)

England was the first empire to industrialize. It did so using the surplus of workers created by enclosure—a 1500s to 1600s movement when English elites privatized the majority of England’s land, forcing thousands off their traditional homes. Other European empires soon followed, and industrialization gave the West a leg up on countries without such advanced manufacturing capacities.

(Shortform note: England’s Enclosure Movement led to new attitudes toward society and economy—at least among elites—that laid the groundwork for modern capitalism. It was a fundamental change from communal land use to individual ownership, and it aligned with emerging capitalist thinking that emphasized private property rights and market-based economies. This process commodified not just land but also labor, creating a landless working class essential for industrial capitalism. These shifts in legal and economic structures concentrated wealth and power in fewer hands, setting the stage for colonialism and industrialization.)

Colonization Created Modern Poverty

Further, Hickel argues that European colonialism caused history’s first incidence of mass poverty. For much of history since the agricultural revolution, regular people lived as subsistence peasants who farmed small tracts of land. They were poor, as we’d use the word today, but not in poverty, as they still had secure access to food, water, and homes. Living standards were roughly equivalent across the globe prior to 1500, but colonialism caused living standards outside Europe to plummet.

(Shortform note: Experts corroborate this argument, adding that modern poverty arose not just due to Enclosure-like colonial practices but because of the new market economies that such practices enabled. However, poverty wasn’t defined until the 1940s, when the newly-established World Bank reported on the huge differences in per capita income between Americans and citizens of much of the developing world. Some argue that because that definition of poverty is a statistical measure based on a comparison to US lifestyle ideals, it doesn’t directly indicate quality of life.)

During colonialism, the capitalist incentive to improve and profit from the land pushed people off their traditional small-scale farms. When enclosure took off in England and spread later to colonial regions in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, millions lost their traditional livelihoods. Lacking access to food, water, and land, they had no choice but to sell their labor for wages—which were always pitifully low.

(Shortform note: For another view of the impact of European colonialism on traditional societies, look to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and its sequels. Achebe, an acclaimed 20th-century Nigerian novelist, uses his protagonist Okonkwo to portray the shifts in Igbo society from a communal land use system to the imposed British model of individual land ownership. This change not only disrupts the economic foundation of the society but also unravels its social fabric, traditional hierarchies, and cultural practices. By putting a human face on these sweeping changes, Achebe's writing makes Hickel’s abstract arguments more tangible.)

Western Imperialism Continues with Neocolonialism

The colonial period ended gradually, according to Hickel, with countries across the world fighting for national sovereignty from the mid-1800s to the late 1900s. By then, Western powers had enriched themselves and impoverished much of the rest of the world.

With that history in mind, we’ll next discuss how after independence, the Global South enjoyed a few decades of unimpeded development. However, the West then regained control through neocolonialism: a newer system of control based on subtler uses of political, military, and economic power.

The Global South’s Developmentalist Period

As Hickel explains, Global South nations gained independence and began to develop from the 1950s to the 1970s. Against the backdrop of the Cold War, key leaders from Yugoslavia, India, Egypt, Ghana, and Indonesia founded the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) to create solidarity for the Global South, protecting their interests without siding with the US or the USSR.

At the same time, these countries and others began to pursue developmentalism. This policy approach includes using high tariffs to protect infant industries, strong spending on social programs, nationalization of utilities and public services, and strong labor rights.

Under developmentalism, many Global South countries enjoyed increasing growth and stability. No wonder, Hickel says—they used many of the same policies that Western nations had adopted during the colonial period to develop at home.

(Shortform note: US economic history provides a striking parallel to Global South developmentalism. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, the US government used protectionist tariffs, supported infant industries, invested heavily in infrastructure and education, and intervened in banking and finance—policies remarkably similar to those adopted by Global South countries in the late 20th century. Yet, despite this history of state-led development and protectionism, the US later became one of the strongest advocates for free-market policies in the Global South—a contradiction that only strengthens Hickel’s indictment of Western powers.)

Western Efforts to Suppress Developmentalism

The West saw developmentalism as a threat to their long-standing economic dominance of the world, Hickel explains. Many private Western firms had held stakes in Global South nations. When those nations began to nationalize their industries and services, such firms suffered major financial losses.

Unwilling to sit idly by, powerful multinational corporations began lobbying their governments. And it worked: To protect corporate interests, the governments of the US and some European nations conducted violent coups to gain control over Global South governments—we’ll discuss these coups more in the next section.

(Shortform note: The Western reaction to Global South developmentalism reveals the deep influence of corporate power on foreign policy. In Defending the National Interest (1978), Stephen D. Krasner details the history of cooperation between the US government and US corporations. He explains that government officials saw securing raw materials as a matter of national security. The coups Hickel describes took place during the Cold War, when the US and the Soviet Union were jostling for political and economic control of various Global South regions—such as Latin America—and the natural resources they needed to stay in the arms and space races.)

Coups, Assassinations, and Dictators

First in Latin America and then across Africa and Asia, Hickel says, the US and allies including the United Kingdom and France conducted a number of violent coups. For instance, in 1954, the US’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) funded and supported a coup to depose President Jacobo Árbenz, the elected leader of Guatemala. While the US framed this coup as an effort to fight communism, Hickel contends that the real motive was to resecure plantation lands for the US’s United Fruit Company.

(Shortform note: The US’s involvement in this coup wasn’t known until years later, when scholars gained access to formerly classified documents. Although the US framed the coup as an effort to fight communism (as Hickel says), Arbenz had stated that he aimed to transform Guatemala into a capitalist nation. The United Fruit Company (UFCO) held a virtual monopoly on Guatemalan agricultural lands, as well as train and communication lines. Monopolies aren’t good for capitalist economies, which Árbenz likely knew, given his effort to redistribute UFCO’s largely unused landholdings to peasants who were ready to work.)

Despite these coups and other efforts, the West couldn’t quash the upwelling of developmentalist progress across the Global South. Developing countries knew that they held power in the form of abundant natural resources that the West needed. Some countries organized into economic blocs, like the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and New International Economic Order (NIEO), to consolidate their control over these resources and pool their bargaining power.

This gave these nations more sway on the global playing field—but, as we’ll explain shortly, it wasn’t enough to compete with Western nations that had, for centuries, been amassing economic, political, and military might.

(Shortform note: Why are natural resources so contested? In Resource Wars, Michael T. Klare argues that increasingly scarce natural resources shape global power dynamics because under capitalism, nations need such resources to fuel their economies and industries. These resources provide materials for manufacturing, energy, and consumer goods, and they offer potentially huge profits for corporations. Though some Global South nations have maintained sovereign access to their natural resources, not all have—many African nations, for instance, remain vulnerable to foreign exploitation.)

Debt and Structural Adjustment Programs

Where these efforts at control through violence didn’t quite work, a different method did: Debt and Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs).

In the late 1970s, a number of Global South nations fell into unserviceable debt, many due to predatory loans from Western banks that hid sky-high interest rates in the fine print. Soon after, Western governments led by the US took the opportunity to regain control of these nations by rolling out SAPs.

SAPs were one-size-fits-all economic blueprints that the West imposed on Global South nations, such as Mexico and Argentina, in exchange for debt assistance. SAPs required debtors in the Global South to adopt broadly neoliberal economic policies. Neoliberal theory champions the notion of free trade: an effort to solve some of society’s problems through minimal government oversight of the economy, minimal barriers to international trade, deregulation of the private sector, and reliance on market competition. According to Hickel, these policies favor the wealthy.

Supposedly, these neoliberal economic policies would allow for greater economic growth by removing all fetters from capitalist innovation and competition. In turn, this would bring work and wealth to the people of the countries in which those businesses operated. However, Hickel explains that neoliberal economics more often led to the multinational corporations’ exploitation of Global South nations. Indebted and desperate for income, many of these nations formerly allied under the NAM broke ranks and competed with each other for corporate investment. Unhindered by regulations or labor rights, private Western firms could drive wages and labor conditions down by constantly moving their operations to wherever the lowest bidders were.

(Shortform note: While Hickel’s argument seems to suggest that the NAM fell apart, it’s in fact still around. With 119 member states, it holds sway as the largest bloc of nations not committed to either of the major security blocs (that of the United States and NATO and that of Russia and China). Russia’s war on Ukraine has also sparked new debates about the legality and purposes of neutrality and non-alignment, with some suggesting that Ukraine could be “neutralized” as a sort of buffer zone between NATO and Russia that could promote peaceful coexistence.)

SAPs and Neoliberalism Today

In 2018, the IMF released a report that criticized the structural adjustment programs it ran from 2011 to 2017. Published just a year after The Divide, the report found that:

• Loan conditions had increased in number: Developing nations had to agree to an average of 26.8 policies per SAP, up from 19.5 in 2013.

• Expectations of program success were too high: Programs rarely produced as much economic growth or civil benefits as hoped for.

• Debt relief works but isn’t given often: The IMF acknowledges the value of restructuring debt but bailed out lenders more often than borrowers.

Despite these findings and others—such as how SAPs tend to increase civil unrest—the IMF hasn’t changed its use of neoliberal economic policies.

Still, some argue that neoliberalism has run its course. While its policies, such as deregulation, privatization, and free trade, have contributed overall to global economic growth, they have also led to increased inequality and corporate monopolization. Possibly in response to this, both major US political parties (Democrats and Republicans) are moving away from these sorts of neoliberal policies. Under Donald Trump, Republicans were focused on fighting an ideological culture war; and under Joe Biden, Democrats have embraced significant government spending.

Modern Western Economic Control

Hickel thus argues that debt became the West’s key tool in reasserting control over the Global South. With many developing countries losing ground under coup-installed dictatorships, SAPs, and sometimes both, momentum across the Global South began to falter. Let’s explore three examples of this.

1) Neoliberalism has spread: Hickel explains that during the 1980s, the World Bank began lending under the exploitative terms of SAPs. As a result, most of the Global South has fallen into insurmountable debt, worsening poverty, hunger, and income inequality.

(Shortform note: While Hickel explores the overall negative effects of SAPs, he doesn’t detail its effects on specific groups of people. One 2017 research review does—specifically, it found that SAPs negatively impact child and maternal health in developing countries. This finding is based on 13 studies from 2000 onward that showed SAPs undermine access to quality healthcare, decrease incomes, and increase food scarcity. All of these factors make it harder for mothers and their children to survive, no less thrive. It also suggests that achieving the Sustainable Development Goals—the 17-point program adopted by the UN and member nations in 2015— will require international financial institutions to fundamentally rethink these programs.)

2) Western powers aren’t accountable: According to Hickel, the IMF and World Bank, headquartered in Washington, D.C., enjoy legal immunity under US law. This allows them to dispense policy plans without accountability. These institutions are de facto controlled by Western elites, with voting rights proportional to countries' economic size and leadership positions historically held only by Americans and Europeans.

(Shortform note: In 2019, the World Bank’s legal immunity was called into question. The US Supreme Court ruled 7-1 against the International Finance Corporation, a branch of the World Bank that had claimed absolute immunity from US lawsuits. This case, brought by Indian fisherfolk affected by an IFC-financed power plant, argued that the IFC's immunity should be restricted like foreign governments' immunity. The ruling potentially allows the IFC to be sued for project-related harm, and it marks a potential shift in accountability policies for international financial institutions in general.)

3) Debt enables rule from afar: Through SAPs, Western elites effectively dictate the economic policies of nations in the Global South, bypassing their sovereignty, asserting neocolonial control, and pursuing resource extraction and wealth accumulation at others’ expense.

(Shortform note: In Globalization and Its Discontents, Joseph Stiglitz agrees that international debt can undermine national sovereignty, especially for developing countries. He adds that remote policy control of the sort Hickel describes can also worsen economic crises. The IMF’s own research supports this, showing that the 2008 financial crisis hit low-income Global South nations with export-based economies harder than others.)

The Western Economic Order Is Unsustainable

Moving beyond the situation for humankind alone, Hickel also says that the global economy is speeding us towards irreversible climate catastrophe. This is because it requires indefinite growth, which means we need to keep growing the economy at a steady or increasing rate to keep it afloat. Eventually, this would consume every last resource on the planet, making it uninhabitable.

Our economic system demands indefinite growth because we lean too heavily on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as our chief measure of progress. GDP isn’t inherently bad. Rather, the problem is our belief that we need to always increase it, Hickel argues. Although GDP is just a way to quantify economic activity, we also take it to indicate quality of life. We view a growing economy as positive and a shrinking economy as problematic. With this mindset, businesses and investors seek continual growth. Politicians, too, campaign on promises of GDP growth because regular people assume that life will get worse if the economy shrinks.

But as Hickel says, GDP only measures things with straightforward monetary value. It doesn't account for hard-to-quantify factors such as happiness, good relationships, human well-being, and ecological well-being. So fixating on it doesn’t create as much progress as we think—and the indefinite growth this fixation encourages is unsustainable.

Why is it unsustainable? The global economy relies on fossil fuels to grow. But overuse of fossil fuels is driving unprecedented climate change. We've already exceeded the carbon budget that would've kept us under 1.5°C of warming and are heading toward 2°C. Continuing on this path could lead to 4°C of warming, resulting in worldwide coastal flooding, mass failure of agricultural yields, desertification, and other unpredictable consequences.

Does This Change Everything?

Some would say that the arguments Hickel makes here are the most important things in the world today. Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything agrees, writing that global neoliberal capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with sustainability.

Not all experts do, though. For one, Klein has been criticized for not checking her own biases: Canadian economist Mark Jaccard says that she decided ahead of time on her thesis (that capitalism and sustainability are incompatible) and selectively picked evidence that supported that view. For instance, she ignores the fact that California has taken major strides to reduce its emissions while also having a thriving capitalist economy.

Jaccard argues that any climate solution must be a win-win for both capitalists and environmentalists, and that the two groups aren’t mutually exclusive. He points to policies like carbon credits, which incentivize energy companies to reduce their emissions while still making a profit. Other experts say that the basic mechanism of capitalism—an open market full of companies competing to provide solutions to problems—is well-suited to solving climate change. In this view, the issue isn’t with capitalism, but with poor regulation and backroom corruption that has, for instance, allowed large corporations to cause pollution without consequences.

Imagining a New World

If, as Hickel argues, today’s world order is so broken—based on violence, immoral debt, and an economic system that will likely consume the planet—then where does that leave us?

In this section, we’ll explore Hickel’s recommendations for solving these deep problems. We’ll discuss his suggestions for reforms of global trade and policy administration, as well as how to respond to the climate crisis. All of Hickel’s suggestions stem from his assertion that since these are structural problems rooted in centuries past, any solution has to address things on a structural level.

Why Incremental Change Isn’t Enough

How come incremental or surface-level change often isn’t enough to solve difficult global issues, climate change or political instability? Global issues are systemic, or embedded throughout the whole structure they affect. Changing them requires comprehensive, thoroughgoing effort to address many different factors.

As an analogy, take the body: You can fracture a bone, causing a localized problem; or you might get osteoporosis, which is a generalized bone weakness. Fixing that fracture is straightforward, but treating osteoporosis requires a more holistic and long-term approach, involving nutrition, exercise, physical therapy, and medication.

Making systems-level change is difficult, but some argue it can be done. Leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi have, for instance, led large-scale change movements that reshaped whole societies. Lessons from such leaders include aiming for long-term change (as in the Greek proverb “planting trees whose shade you’ll never sit in”) and collaborating with everyone who has a stake in the problem at hand—whether they’re rich or poor, whether they want or oppose change.

Solution 1: Liberate the Global South from Debt

First, Hickel argues that the debt held by Global South nations should be canceled outright so they can start fresh. Many of these countries have paid off the principal of the original loans many times over, yet compound interest has buried them in mountains of debt they’ll never be able to pay off.

They shouldn’t have to, Hickel contends, because that debt is based on violence and is morally hypocritical. Western creditors frame debt repayment as a moral obligation, when in reality, the loans were unscrupulously given—they were predatory and intended to plunge Global South nations into insurmountable debt. If we cancel this debt, Global South nations can regain sovereignty over their economic decisions and policies.

(Shortform note: In Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber takes this argument about the immorality of debt even further. He writes that in early human societies, debt worked as a practice of “everyday communism” wherein family, friends, and neighbors would give to each other on the basis of reciprocity. When societies got larger, financial practices such as precise accounting developed to track the debts in relationships that lacked that basic trust. Yet without it, lenders could become unscrupulous, much as Hickel says about the Western banks. Ultimately, debt became something that lenders could abuse to profit from these purely transactional relationships.)

Level the Playing Field

Hickel argues for democratizing the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund by apportioning votes more fairly, such as based on a country's population. He suggests removing the US's de facto veto power in the World Bank and IMF—it holds around 16% of the vote in both, and 85% is needed to pass a decision. He also suggests allowing each nation’s voters to elect their representatives in these institutions. In theory, this would give Global South nations a say in the policies they’re subject to—which at present, they don’t.

(Shortform: Hickel isn’t the only one to advocate for change to the institutions discussed above. Democracy Without Borders calls for similar changes, advocating for a specific way of apportioning votes: a third based on economic power, a third based on population size, and a third as a default “one country one vote” portion. This would offset the problems with a voting system based only on population size or only on economic power, either of which would disadvantage, for instance, tiny island nations with populations in the thousands.)

Find Alternative Measures of Progress

None of this will matter, Hickel says, if we can’t see past our fixation on GDP. He suggests several alternatives, such as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), a measure which builds on GDP by including factors like human well-being, happiness, strength of relationships, quality of education, and other less tangible things. GPI also counts things like environmental degradation as negatives, so it discourages reckless economic growth.

(Shortform note: Kate Raworth proposes in Doughnut Economics that we move beyond GDP as the primary measure of economic success and instead use a doughnut-shaped diagram to visualize economic goals. In this model, the inner ring represents social foundations that no one should fall below (like access to food, water, and education), and the outer ring represents ecological ceilings that shouldn't be exceeded (such as climate change and biodiversity loss). Raworth argues for focusing on meeting human needs within planetary boundaries, rather than perpetual growth. And like Hickel, she advocates for metrics that measure human wellbeing, ecological health, and social equity.)

Seek Regenerative Solutions

Finally, Hickel argues for aggressively cutting back on energy use and emissions. To prevent ourselves from overshooting 2°C of warming, he says that the US and Europe need to reach zero emissions by 2035 and that the developing world needs to reach the same mark by 2050.

(Shortform note: According to September 2023 progress reports on the 2015 Paris Agreements, the world is “not on track” to meet sustainability goals such as preventing 2°C of warming. That said, multiple countries have strengthened their original pledges to reduce emissions below previous highs, many taking 2030 as their target. For instance, US President Joe Biden has doubled former President Obama’s earlier commitment to cut carbon emissions and taken other actions including revoking permits for oil pipelines and protecting national ecological monuments.)

To prevent 2°C or more of warming, Hickel recommends that we end fossil fuel subsidies—which he cites at $5.5 trillion annually—and instead direct that money into renewable energy. While this alone won’t solve the problem, it’ll buy us some time.

(Shortform note: Hickel isn’t alone in his opposition to fossil fuel subsidies. In 2012 and again in 2024, US Senator Bernie Sanders (VT) introduced the End Polluter Welfare Act, which aims to end the US’s $17 billion annual subsidies to oil, gas, and coal companies. Sanders also connects this industry to climate change, arguing that we shouldn’t be handing money out to the people that cause environmental problems while ignoring the poor who suffer most from them. He adds that these companies have knowingly deceived the public about climate change by downplaying their impact. They also stand in the way of renewable energy investment, with $137 million spent on lobbying for their interests in 2023 alone.)

With the time we buy through funding renewable energy, Hickel says that we must take further actions to regenerate the environment around us. One key move is to engage in widespread regenerative agriculture—farming practices that aim to heal damaged soil ecosystems—to restore the 40% of agricultural lands that are severely depleted. Soil sequesters more carbon than even forests, and emerging permacultural techniques produce more and healthier food than mass monocropping of grains like corn.

(Shortform note: Organizations such as the Rodale Institute have been developing regenerative farming methods that show promise in carbon sequestration. These practices emphasize building healthy soil ecosystems, minimizing disturbances, and maximizing plant diversity, all of which can increase soil organic carbon content. Studies support the value and validity of various organic farming practices, but they’re difficult to scale and spread more widely.)

With renewable energy and regenerative agriculture slowing down climate change, Global South nations—freed of debt—will have the opportunity to pioneer new forms of civilization that take root in indigenous sensibilities and honor the needs and well-being of both people and the planet. With all of humanity playing on the same team, Hickel says, we just might make it.

(Shortform note: One way in which indigenous lifeways differ from those of modern Western society lies in how each takes resources from the Earth. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer describes the principle of the honorable harvest, which involves taking only what’s needed from nature, using resources wisely, and giving back in the spirit of reciprocity. This approach stands in stark contrast to large-scale agriculture, which places more value on yield and profit than on ecological balance. Now imagine: What if these basic principles of respect and reciprocity were applied in other areas, like finance or government?)