The Divide

by Jason Hickel

  p. 28 ‘For example, ActionAid reports that . . .’ Luke Balleny, ‘Corporate tax breaks cost poor nations $138 billion a year – report’, Reuters, 4 July 2013.

  p. 28 ‘Remittances sent home by immigrant workers . . .’ Remittances totalled $432 billion in 2015, and fees averaged 7.68 per cent.

  p. 29 ‘Global South economies lose . . .’ H. Kharas, Measuring the Cost of Aid Volatility, Wolfensohn Center for Development working paper no. 3 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2008). Kharas calculates that aid volatility causes losses equal to 20 per cent of the total value of aid.

  p. 29 ‘Then there are forms of extraction . . .’ According to the Land Matrix database (www.landmatrix.org), with data accurate as of January 2017.

  p. 29 ‘And then, of course, there are . . .’ According to the Climate Vulnerability Monitor’s 2012 report.

  p. 29 ‘Indeed, some of this damage . . .’ There have been attempts by some NGOs to campaign on these more structural issues: the Make Trade Fair campaign run by Oxfam, for instance, or the Jubilee Debt campaign. Even Make Poverty History had trade and debt in the mix, and Christian Aid and ActionAid have campaigned on tax evasion for several years, gradually dragging more conservative NGOs to at least acknowledge the problem. But such efforts are almost completely drowned out by the dominant framing of charity and aid that the very same NGOs promote.

  Two: The End of Poverty . . . Has Been Postponed

  p. 36 ‘The same is true . . .’ Gains against maternal mortality fell far short of the target; and because it is so difficult to measure, experts have raised questions about the validity of even the modest improvements that the UN has claimed. See Amir Attaran, ‘An immeasurable crisis: a criticism of the Millennium Development Goals and why they cannot be measured’, PLoS Medicine 2(10), 2005. Of maternal mortality, the author notes: ‘The limitations of current estimation techniques are so profound that UNICEF and WHO scientists warn that “it would be inappropriate to compare the 2000 estimates with those for 1990 . . . and draw conclusions about trends.” ’ Child mortality is, on the other hand, much easier to measure.

  p. 37 ‘The new commitment was to . . .’ Article 19 of the Millennium Declaration. Emphasis mine.

  p. 38 ‘This backdating took particular advantage . . .’ 165 million people at the $1.08 (1993 PPP) poverty line, and 400 million at the $1.25 (2005 PPP) poverty line.

  p. 38 ‘and deceptively chalked them up as . . .’ Thomas Pogge has been instrumental in highlighting the sleight of hand practised by the Millennium Campaign. For example: ‘Millions Killed by Clever Dilution of Our Promise’, CROP Poverty Brief, August 2010; ‘How World Poverty is Measured and Tracked’, in Elcke Mack, Michael Schramm, Stephan Klasen and Thomas Pogge (eds), Absolute Poverty and Global Justice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 51–68; ‘The first United Nations Millennium Development Goal: a cause for celebration?’, Journal of Human Development 5(3), 2004, pp. 377–97.

  p. 38 ‘This also meant that they . . .’ I am indebted to Thomas Pogge for bringing all of this to my attention.

  p. 39 ‘But that’s not the only . . .’ Sanjay Reddy and Thomas Pogge have been instrumental in articulating this argument in How Not to Count the Poor (mimeo, Columbia University Academic Commons, 2005).

  p. 39 ‘It seemed reasonable, he thought . . .’ M. Ravallion et al., ‘Quantifying absolute poverty in the developing world’, Review of Income and Wealth 37(4), 1991, pp. 345–61.

  p. 40 ‘ “The absolute number of those . . .” ’ World Bank, World Development Report 1999/2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 25. Emphasis mine.

  p. 40 ‘Not only that, it also . . .’ See William Easterly, ‘The lost decades: developing countries’ stagnation in spite of policy reform 1980–1998’, Journal of Economic Growth 6, 2001, pp. 135–57.

  p. 40 ‘ “Over the past few years . . .” ’ Wolfensohn in speech to G20 finance ministers and central governors, Ottawa, 17 November 2001.

  p. 41 ‘Then, three years later . . .’ Shohua Chen and Martin Ravallion, How Have the World’s Poorest Fared since the Early 1980s?, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3341, June 2004.

  p. 42 ‘The World Bank’s economists claimed . . .’ Reddy and Pogge, How Not to Count the Poor. See Ravallion’s response: ‘How Not to Count the Poor? A Reply to Reddy and Pogge’, in Sudhir Anand et al. (eds), Debates on the Measurement of Poverty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

  p. 43 ‘This is a crucial point . . .’ Robert Wade, Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

  p. 43 ‘The UN was forced to . . .’ FAO, The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2008 (Rome: The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, 2008), p. 8.

  p. 44 ‘The 2013 report of . . .’ United Nations, Millennium Development Goals Report 2013, p. 10.

  p. 44 ‘In addition, the FAO revised . . .’ FAO, ‘Food Security Methodology’, FAO (2012). This second phase of changes was reflected in the 2012 report.

  p. 44 ‘They also adjusted the hunger . . .’ The FAO also used revised data on average population heights, which are used in turn to calculate the minimum dietary energy requirements (MDER) for each country (i.e. the calorie threshold at which hunger is measured). The new calorie thresholds were adjusted significantly downwards across the board, but with greater reductions (over the previous thresholds) at the end of the period than at the beginning, with the result that – all other things being equal – the number of hungry people would appear to slope downwards more rapidly than under the previous measurements. Compare the new MDER (http://www.docs-library.com/xls/1/7/2217-2548.html) with the old MDER (http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/ess/documents/food_security_statistics/MinimumDietaryEnergyRequirement_en.xls).

  p. 44 ‘The UN counts people as . . .’ FAO, The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2012 (Rome: The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, 2012), p. 12.

  p. 45 ‘The average rickshaw driver . . .’ ‘A Recovery with a Human Face’, UNICEF e-discussion, accessed 12 October 2015, http://www.recoveryhumanface.org/. See Thomas Pogge’s posts in June 2015.

  p. 45 ‘The FAO itself recognises . . .’ FAO, State of Food Insecurity 2012, p. 12.

  p. 45 ‘This is two to three . . .’ See also F. Moore Lappé, J. Clapp, M. Anderson, R. Broad, E. Messer, T. Pogge and T. Wise, ‘How we count hunger matters’, Ethics and International Affairs 27(3), 2013, pp. 251–9.

  p. 46 ‘So people who have . . .’ FAO, State of Food Insecurity 2012, p. 23.

  p. 46 ‘ “The reference period should be . . .” ’ FAO, State of Food Insecurity 2012, p. 50.

  p. 46 ‘In other words, the FAO’s . . .’ I am indebted to Thomas Pogge (personal correspondence) for drawing my attention to this issue.

  p. 46 ‘And this tragedy persists . . .’ ‘World Hunger and Poverty Facts and Statistics 2015’, World Hunger Education Service, Washington DC, http://www.world hunger.org/2015-world-hunger-and-poverty-facts-and-statistics/.

  p. 46 ‘In the US and Europe . . .’ Rebecca Smithers, ‘Almost half of the world’s food thrown away, report finds’, Guardian, 10 January 2013.

  p. 46 ‘The UN finds that cutting . . .’ Kate Lyon, ‘Cutting food waste by a quarter would mean enough for everyone, says UN’, Guardian, 12 August 2015.

  p. 47 ‘ “The morally relevant comparison . . .” ’ T. Pogge, ‘The end of poverty?’, Mark News, 29 May 2014.

  p. 47 ‘But the World Bank . . .’ World Bank, World Development Report 1999/2000, p. 237.

  p. 48 ‘But empirical research in India . . .’ ‘Poverty in India 2.5 times the official figure: study’, NDTV India, 20 February 2014.

  p. 48 ‘So not only does the . . .’ Vijay Prashad, ‘Making poverty history’, Jacobin, 10 November 2014, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/11/making-poverty-history/.

  p. 48 ‘In Niger, babies born . . .’ Adam Wagstaff, ‘Child health on a dollar a day: some tentative cross-country comparis
ons’, Social Science and Medicine 57(9), 2003, pp. 1529–38.

  p. 48 ‘Even this minor shift would . . .’ ‘Asians poorer than official data suggest, says ADB’, Financial Times, 20 August 2014.

  p. 48 ‘But the US government itself . . .’ USDA, Thrifty Food Plan 2005 (Washington DC: United States Department of Agriculture, 2005).

  p. 49 ‘According to British economist . . .’ David Woodward, ‘How poor is too poor?’, New Internationalist, 1 July 2010.

  p. 49 ‘Recent studies place this . . .’ P. Edward, ‘The Ethical Poverty Line: a moral quantification of absolute poverty’, Third World Quarterly 27(2), 2006, pp. 377–93.

  p. 50 ‘Economists Rahul Lahoti and . . .’ R. Lahoti and S. Reddy, ‘$1.90 per day: what does it say?’, Institute for New Economic Thinking, 2015. Lahoti and Reddy put the food poverty line at $5.04 at 2011 PPP; I have adjusted here to 2005 PPP, to enable the comparison.

  p. 50 ‘The New Economics Foundation . . .’ David Woodward, How Poor Is ‘Poor’? Toward a Rights-Based Poverty Line (London: New Economics Foundation, 2010).

  p. 50 ‘As it turns out, $5 . . .’ Andrew Sumner, ‘Did global poverty just fall a lot, quite a bit, or not at all?’, Global Policy Journal, accessed 16 June 2014, http://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/16/06/2014/donors%E2%80%99-dilemma-did-global-poverty-just-fall-lot-quite-bit-or-not-all.

  p. 50 ‘ “In more developed regions . . .” ’ ‘There are multiple international poverty lines. Which one should I use?’, World Bank.

  p. 50 ‘Harvard economist Lant Pritchett . . .’ L. Pritchett, ‘Monitoring progress on poverty: the case for a high global poverty line’, 2013, www.developmentprogress.org.

  p. 50 ‘Even with China factored in . . .’ At the IPL of $2.50 (2005 PPP), the World Bank calculations show that the poverty headcount increased by 852 million between 1981 and 2005, excluding China.

  p. 50 ‘At the $10-a-day line . . .’ World Bank Development Indicators 2008.

  p. 51 ‘In 2016 the World Bank’s . . .’ B. Milanović, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2016).

  p. 52 ‘In fact, the economists . . .’ S. Anand and P. Segal, ‘The global distribution of income’, in Anthony B. Atkinson and Francois Bourguignon (eds), Handbook of Income Distribution (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2014).

  p. 52 ‘This is important because . . .’ Robert Wade, Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

  p. 53 ‘Sudhir Anand and Paul Segal . . .’ ‘The global distribution of income’.

  p. 55 ‘In 2015, the economist . . .’ David Woodward, ‘Incrementum ad absurdum: global growth, inequality and poverty eradication in a carbon-constrained world’, World Economic Review 4, 2015, World Economic Association.

  p. 56 ‘ “There is simply no way . . .” ’ David Woodward, ‘How progressive is the push to eradicate extreme poverty?’, Guardian, 7 June 2013.

  Three: Where Did Poverty Come From? A Creation Story

  p. 64 ‘But archaeological records show . . .’ Richard Steckel and Jerome Rose (eds), The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Life expectancy figures for foragers are often skewed downwards by higher infant mortality rates compared to their settled counterparts. If we correct for this, some researchers find that forager lifespans reached well into the seventies. See: M. Gurven and H. Kaplan, ‘Longevity among hunter-gatherers: a cross-cultural examination’, Population and Development Review 33, 2007, pp. 321–65. Also, Marshall Sahlins draws on a variety of historical and ethnographic sources to argue that forager societies enjoyed significantly longer life expectancies than state societies. See ‘The original affluent society’ in his Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1972).

  p. 64 ‘They were healthier, stronger, taller . . .’ Steckel and Rose (eds), The Backbone of History. See also: Karl Widerquist and Grant McCall, Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017); Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997); Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (London: Random House, 2014).

  p. 64 ‘In the Americas of the . . .’ According to George Murdoch’s Ethnographic Atlas (representing data from 1500 to 1960, with the majority from the 19th century), only about 20 per cent of societies in America north of the Isthmus lived in compact, permanent settlements and depended on agriculture for the majority of their subsistence. Only 1 per cent of societies are classed as ‘complex’ states.

  p. 65 ‘Asia exceeded Europe in many . . .’ These figures come from data collated by Kenneth Pomeranz from a variety of leading extant sources. See his The Great Divergence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 36ff. The initial figure for England accounts for infant mortality. Data on life expectancy in India at the time is not good enough to be conclusive. The figure for the English working class comes from Edwin Chadwick’s report on The Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population, cited in Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1845).

  p. 65 ‘In fact, by the time . . .’ Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System (New York: Academic Press, 1974).

  p. 66 ‘In his journals, Columbus reported . . .’ Quoted in Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 3.

  p. 66 ‘They lived in communal buildings . . .’ Quoted in Zinn, A People’s History, p. 1.

  p. 66 ‘Columbus was eager to exploit . . .’ Quoted in Zinn, A People’s History, p. 1.

  p. 68 ‘ “They lifted up the gold . . .” ’ Quoted in Eduardo Galeano, ‘Open Veins of Latin America’, Monthly Review Press, 1973, pp. 18–19.

  p. 68 ‘Before long the metal . . .’ Galeano, ‘Open Veins’, p. 22.

  p. 68 ‘And that was on top . . .’ Galeano, ‘Open Veins’, p. 23.

  p. 68 ‘By the early 1800s . . .’ Timothy Walton, The Spanish Treasure Fleets (Florida: Pineapple Press, 1994).

  p. 69 ‘It was a massive infusion . . .’ The silver was ‘free’ in the sense that it was dug up by unpaid slave labour. Also, the Spanish Crown claimed a 27.5–40 per cent share of all silver shipments. See Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, p. 269.

  p. 69 ‘We can think of this . . .’ Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, p. 269ff.

  p. 69 ‘The numbers vary by source . . .’ The high number for 1492 is about 112 million, but the general ‘consensus figure’ for Latin America’s population at the time is about 54 million. William Denevan (ed.), The Native Population of the Americas in 1492 (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992).

  p. 69 ‘By the middle of the . . .’ Galeano puts the figure at 3.5 million, but others put it at 4 million. See Jorge Brea, ‘Population Dynamics in Latin America’, Population Bulletin 58(1), 2003.

  p. 70 ‘In the 1700s, Portuguese Brazil . . .’ Galeano, ‘Open Veins’, p. 52.

  p. 70 ‘By the end of the . . .’ These figures probably do not capture the slaves that were smuggled illegally across the Atlantic until at least 1870.

  p. 71 ‘Valued at the US minimum . . .’ These figures come from a 1993 article in Harper’s magazine. Note that the minimum wage is calculated at the 1993 rate, interest is calculated only through 1993, and the total figure is expressed in 1993 dollars. In other words, the updated figure would be much higher than this.

  p. 71 ‘They have not disclosed . . .’ ‘14 Caribbean nations sue Britain, Holland and France for slavery reparations’, Daily Mail, 10 October 2013.

  p. 71 ‘For example, sugar came to . . .’ Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, p. 275.

  p. 71 ‘If we add timber imports . . .’ Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, p. 276.

  p. 72 ‘Or even just a proportion . . .’ Of course, it wasn’t only Europeans who plundered Africa of bodies. In ‘The Impact of the Slave Trade on Africa’, Elikia M’Bokol
o writes that ‘The African continent was bled of its human resources via all possible routes. Across the Sahara, through the Red Sea, from the Indian Ocean ports and across the Atlantic. At least ten centuries of slavery for the benefit of the Muslim countries (from the ninth to the nineteenth) . . . Four million enslaved people exported via the Red Sea, another four million through the Swahili ports of the Indian Ocean, [and] perhaps as many as nine million along the trans-Saharan caravan route.’ Le Monde Diplomatique, April 1998.

  p. 73 ‘ “The discovery of gold and . . .” ’ Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (1867), chapter 3.

  p. 75 ‘They also began to privatise . . .’ In chapter 3 of Capital, vol. 1, Marx notes that before the enclosure movement there were about 3 acres of agricultural land for every 1 acre of pasture, but the enclosure movement reversed this ratio.

  p. 75 ‘They had to increase their . . .’ Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, 2002).

  p. 75 ‘It meant that, for the . . .’ See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1944).

  p. 76 ‘Thousands of protestors pulled down . . .’ These rebellions are listed in Simon Fairlie, ‘A Short History of Enclosure in Britain’, The Land 7, 2009. Fairlie mentions a peasants’ revolt in 1381 as an early expression of resistance against enclosure, although enclosure was not the main issue at stake.

  p. 76 ‘Between 1760 and 1870 . . .’ Fairlie, ‘A Short History of Enclosure’. The parliamentary enclosures, as they are known, focused less on wool and more on the ‘improvement’ of agricultural land.

  p. 76 ‘By the middle of the . . .’ I draw this conclusion from mapping the word ‘poverty’ through Google Ngram, along with ‘vagabond’, ‘pauper’ and other common synonyms from the time.