Jason Hickel

Quotes

1. From his base on , the island shared today by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, he forced the local inhabitants – the – to bring him a certain quantity of gold every three months. Those who failed to do so would have their hands chopped off or were hunted down and killed. Men were forced to spend their lives in mines, stripping the mountains in search of gold. Up to a third of workers died every six months. Within two years of the Spanish invasion, some 125,000 people had been killed - half the island's population. Most of the remaining inhabitants of Hispaniola were forced into slave labour on plantations. A few decades later, only a few hundred Arawaks remained alive.

   p. 70

2. 

   Today, some 4.3 billion people – more than 60 per cent of the – live in debilitating poverty, struggling to survive on less than the equivalent of $5 per day. Half do not have access to enough food. And these numbers have been growing steadily over the past few decades. Meanwhile, the wealth of the very richest is piling up to levels unprecedented in human history. As I write this, it has just been announced that the eight richest men in the world have as much wealth between them as the poorest half of the world's population combined.

   p. 2

3. 

   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 '' than wealth.

   p. 285

4. 

   In light of this, perhaps we should regard countries like Costa Rica not as underdeveloped, but rather as appropriately developed. We should look at societies where people live long and happy lives at low levels of income and consumption not as backwaters that need to be developed according to Western models, but as exemplars of efficient living – and begin to call on rich countries to cut their excess consumption.

   p. 293

5. 

   Some people have the tendency to think of neoliberalism as a mistake – an overtly-extreme version of capitalism that we should reject in favor of returning to the somewhat more humane version that prevailed in prior decades. But the shift to neoliberalism was not a mistake; it was driven by the growth imperative. In order to restore the rate of profit and keep capitalism afloat, governments had to shift away from social objectives (use-values) to focus instead on improving the conditions for capital accumulation (exchange value). The interests of capital came to be internalized by the state, to the point where today the distinction between growth and capital accumulation has almost completely collapsed. Now the goal is to tear down barriers to profit – to make humans and nature cheaper – for the sake of growth.

   p. 95

6. 

   Economists often speculate that the failed to develop because of a lack of capital. But there was no such lack. The wealth that might have provided the capital for development (precious metals in Latin America and surplus labour in Africa) was effectively stolen by Europe and harnessed to the service of Europe's own development. The global South could theoretically have developed as Europe did were it not for the plunder of its resources and labour, and were it not for the fact that it was forced by Europe to supply raw materials while importing manufactured goods. Whether or not they would or should have done so is another matter, of course - after all, much of European-style development required violence towards other lands and other peoples. But the point remains: it is impossible to examine the economic growth of the West without looking at the base on which it drew.

   p. 75

7. 

   Scientists tell us that up to 140,000 species of plants and animals are disappearing each year due to our of the Earth's ecosystems. This rate of extinction is 100 to 1,000 times faster than before the Industrial Revolution - so fast that scientists have classed this as the event in the planet's history, with the last one having occurred some 66 million years ago.

   p. 281

8. 

   Some critics have claimed that degrowth is nothing more than a new version of austerity. But in fact exactly the opposite is true. Austerity calls for scarcity in order to generate more growth. Degrowth calls for abundance in order to render growth unnecessary. If we are to avert climate breakdown, the environmentalism of the twenty-first century must articulate a new demand: a demand for radical abundance.

   p. 236

9. 

   The plunder of Latin America left in its wake. In India, 30 million died of . Average living standards in India and China, which had been on a par with Britain before the colonial period, collapsed.

   p. 19

10. 

    A few years ago, virtually no one was talking about this . . . everyone just assumed that the web of life would always be intact. Now the situation is so severe that the United Nations has set up a special task force to monitor it: the (IPBES). In 2019, it published its first – a groundbreaking assessment of the planet's living species, drawing on 15,000 studies from around the world and representing the consensus of hundreds of scientists. It found an accelerating rate of global , unprecedented in human history.

    p. 8

11. 

    It was only with the rise of capitalism over the past few hundred years, and the breathtaking acceleration of industrialization from the 1950s, that on a planetary scale things began to tip out of balance.

    p. 39

12. 

    We are sleepwalking into a mass extinction event – the sixth in our planet's history, and the first to be caused by human economic activity. The rate of extinction is now 1,000 times faster than before the Industrial Revolution.

    p. 8