Jason Hickel
An economic anthropologist who moved from studying why South African politics turned anti-liberal to quantifying how much the rich world takes from the poor world, and who now argues that high-income countries have to plan a reduction in what they consume.
- Born 1982 in Swaziland, now Eswatini, where his parents were doctors working through the AIDS crisis. He is the grandson of Wally Hickel, the American businessman who twice served as Governor of Alaska.
- BA in anthropology from Wheaton College (2004), then an MA and a PhD in anthropology from the University of Virginia (2011). His doctoral fieldwork was in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
- Past posts at the London School of Economics (2011 to 2017) and Goldsmiths, University of London (2017 to 2021), where he convened the MA in Anthropology and Cultural Politics.
- Now an ICREA Professor at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) and the Department of Political Science and Public Law at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, from 2024. Associate Editor of the journal World Development.
- Lead co-investigator on the European Research Council grant "REAL: A Post-Growth Deal" (2023 to 2029).
- His name is Hickel. He gets confused online with Jackson Hinkle, an unrelated commentator. He has no connection to that person.
The work
The Divide
2017 · Penguin Random House UKWhy poor countries are poor
His argument is that global poverty was not a natural condition waiting on aid to fix. It was made, through unequal integration into the world economy: rigged trade terms, tax evasion, land grabs and debt. The standard story of steady development progress is, in his account, overstated. The US edition in 2018 was retitled The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets; he added a new preface and afterword in 2024.
Less is More
2020 · William Heinemann / PenguinThe book the movement runs on
The core claim is that capitalism's requirement of perpetual expansion is the primary driver of ecological breakdown, so the solution is a planned reduction in energy and material throughput in high-income countries, paired with redistribution, shorter working hours and expanded public services. He is careful to separate this from recession: a recession is a shrinking of the existing economy, while degrowth calls for a different economy, one that does not need growth to function. Named a book of the year by the Financial Times and New Scientist.
"Is Green Growth Possible?"
2020 · with Giorgos Kallis · New Political EconomyThe paper the argument turns on
Their finding: there is no empirical evidence that absolute decoupling of resource use from economic growth can be achieved globally while the economy keeps growing, and that emissions decoupling is highly unlikely to happen fast enough to hold warming under 1.5 or 2 degrees. This is the load-bearing claim. If it is wrong, most of the rest of the case falls with it, which is why so much of the criticism aims here.
His numbers
2018 to 2024 · peer-reviewedWhat the rich world takes
These are the figures we find most useful, all from peer-reviewed work:
- In 2015 the global North net-appropriated from the South 12 billion tonnes of raw materials, 822 million hectares of land, and 188 million person-years of labour, worth $10.8 trillion. Cumulative over 1990 to 2015: $242 trillion. He argues that single year's flow was enough to end extreme poverty seventy times over.
- In 2021 the North net-appropriated 826 billion hours of embodied labour from the South, worth €16.9 trillion — roughly doubling the labour available for Northern consumption. Southern workers contribute 90 per cent of the labour that powers the world economy and receive 21 per cent of global income. Wages in the South are 87 to 95 per cent lower for work of equal skill.
- On carbon, as of 2015 the United States was responsible for 40 per cent of global emissions above the 350 ppm boundary, the EU 29 per cent, and the global North 92 per cent. Most of the South, including India and China, was inside its fair share.
- Their 2023 paper with Andrew Fanning found the North would overshoot its equality-based share of the 1.5 degree carbon budget threefold, taking half the South's share, with compensation owed by 2050 of $192 trillion, about $940 per person per year.
- The empirical test with Jefim Vogel: of eleven high-income countries that cut emissions in absolute terms between 2013 and 2019, at the rates achieved they would need more than 220 years to cut emissions 95 per cent, emitting 27 times their remaining fair share along the way. To hit fair shares while still growing, their decoupling rates would have to rise tenfold by 2025.
- On poverty he rejects the World Bank's $1.90 a day line as having no basis in what a human actually needs, arguing $7.40 a day is what nutrition and normal life expectancy require. On that measure he counts poverty as having risen from 3.2 billion people in 1981 to 4.2 billion in 2015.
The other papers
2016 to 2026The rest of the record
Democracy as Death (2015, University of California Press) is his first book, an ethnography of post-apartheid politics in KwaZulu-Natal. "Degrowth: a theory of radical abundance" (Real-World Economics Review, 2019) sets his target: a global cap on material use of 50 billion tonnes a year, or 6 to 8 tonnes per person. With colleagues he has published on the sustainable development index, the social shortfall and ecological overshoot of nations, unequal exchange through history, and the case that capitalism did not improve living standards for most people — with Dylan Sullivan, a 2023 paper in World Development arguing that the rise of capitalism caused a deterioration in real wages, human height and mortality. In 2022 the journal Nature carried a comment signed by Hickel, Kallis, Steinberger, O'Neill, Schor and others titled "Degrowth can work — here's how science can help."
Where he runs into trouble
- The most serious attack is on the field, not just him. Ivan Savin and Jeroen van den Bergh reviewed 561 studies with degrowth or post-growth in the title and concluded that close to 90 per cent are opinions rather than analysis, that few use real data and fewer still formal modelling, and that most of the research on public support finds degrowth policies socially and politically infeasible. Hickel called the methodology extremely flawed; Giorgos Kallis called it a bad-faith hit piece; Julia Steinberger called it unfair. Timothée Parrique's rebuttal argues the sampling method excludes most work on the subject, since much of the relevant empirical research does not carry "degrowth" in its title. That is a real methodological dispute and we have no way to settle it here.
- On decoupling, ecomodernists argue he asks the wrong question. Linus Blomqvist of the Breakthrough Institute wrote that Hickel focuses on the tonnage of resources consumed rather than the environmental damage they do, and that materials differ by orders of magnitude in impact — so a falling total says little on its own. He argued decoupling's true problem is speed, not possibility. Hickel dismissed the examples as cherry-picked.
- Rikard Warlenius, in Ecological Economics, argues the pessimistic decoupling assessment rests on mystification rather than robust argument, and that cases already exist where emissions fell faster than the four per cent a year threshold Hickel's model assumes.
- On the poverty numbers he is accused of moving the goalposts. Noah Smith's essay "Against Hickelism" argues that treating poverty as a single high finish line makes a rise from $1.90 to $7.39 a day count as nothing, when it is a change most people would call life-changing. Hickel's reply is that the low line has no basis in human need. Both agree average incomes of the poorest have risen since 1981; the fight is over what that means.
- On the colonial and mortality claims the numbers are disputed. His figure of 165 million excess deaths in India between 1880 and 1920 under British rule — sometimes reported as 100 million — was contested by the economic historian Tirthankar Roy, and Hickel and Sullivan published a detailed reply. Rutar, in the International Review of Sociology, re-examined their pre-capitalism poverty work and found the data mostly do not support it.
- Criticism from his own side. Leftcom argued his line that the real problem "lies much deeper, in the realm of ontology" leads toward reformist politics and away from class analysis. Liam Kruger in Marxist Left Review argued attempts to fuse degrowth and Marxism are fundamentally incompatible. Vincent Liegey, Anitra Nelson and Terry Leahy wrote a public response objecting to his 2025 claim that degrowth is not a movement with the capacity to take power — a claim that caused a genuine row inside the movement. The recurring criticism from the left and from the global South is that degrowth is an idea for comfortable Westerners with little to say to a country that needs to build housing.
- Others. Kelsey Piper in Vox called his vision wildly optimistic and his prescriptions for how to get there surprisingly sparse. The climatologist Michael Mann argues it is highly implausible the world abandons capitalism in the ten years available, and that the crisis must be met inside the current system. Ursula Weidenfeld called The Divide radically one-sided.
What the record shows
Where the evidence is thin
- His nationality is reported inconsistently and we are not going to settle it. Wikipedia calls him Swazi. His publisher says he is originally from Eswatini. El País called him British. His family is partly American — his grandfather governed Alaska. No source states his citizenship, so we say where he was born and leave the label alone.
- A claim we were handed and could not support: a Welsh background. We found nothing for it. The Welsh search results belong to an unrelated BBC Wales presenter. We have left it out.
- Two of his headline numbers are reported at different values. The compensation figure appears as both $170 trillion and $192 trillion; we have used the peer-reviewed $192 trillion. The India mortality figure appears as both 100 million and 165 million; we give the range.
- His post is stable but described differently across sources. His own site and his ICREA CV, which we have followed, say ICREA Professor at ICTA-UAB from 2024. The University of Oslo position listed on Wikipedia as past is a time-limited 2023 Arne Næss professorship.
- No formal role in the International Degrowth Network. His ties to the movement run through conferences, writing for degrowth.info, and co-authorship. We found no evidence of a governing position there, so we make no such claim.
- The source we lean on least. Wikipedia's article on him carries a banner warning that it relies too heavily on primary sources. We have used it for biography only, and taken the substantive claims from the papers themselves.
Our take
We came to Hickel the way most small farmers do, by noticing that the farm works better when we buy less. We raise our own hay instead of hauling it in, we save seed instead of ordering it, and we sell direct instead of through a buyer. Every one of those is a reduction in throughput. So when he argues that a rich country cannot consume its way into a stable climate, our own books already agree with him.
His numbers on appropriation are the ones we use most. A county like ours is on the losing end of the same current he describes, and it helps to see it named and counted rather than called a skills gap.
We will not pretend the criticism isn't real. He has built a case on the claim that decoupling cannot work, and serious people have gone after that claim directly. If they turn out to be right, the specific programme changes. The part that survives either way is the part we act on: after a certain point, more does not make anybody's life better. We got to that conclusion with a wood stove and a feed bill long before we read him.
Where we differ from him is on who does the planning. His degrowth is a national project, decided by assemblies and delivered through public services. Ours starts at the fence line, and we are not going to wait for Barcelona. The two do not conflict, but ours is the one we can do tomorrow.
Sources
- Jason Hickel, own site and ICREA CV. Source for his post at ICTA-UAB from 2024, his past posts at the LSE and Goldsmiths, his grants, his degrees and his editing role at World Development.
- New Statesman, Q&A, April 2021. Source for his birth in Swaziland in 1982 and for the toddler kidnapping account.
- Hickel and Kallis, "Is Green Growth Possible?", New Political Economy 25(4), 2020. Source for the decoupling finding that the rest of the argument rests on.
- Hickel, "Degrowth: a theory of radical abundance", Real-World Economics Review 87, 2019. Source for his definition of degrowth, the 50 billion tonne material cap, the low energy demand scenario figures, the decoupling arithmetic, and the Costa Rica and Europe wellbeing comparisons.
- Hickel et al., "Imperialist appropriation in the world economy", Global Environmental Change 73, 2022. Source for the $10.8 trillion annual appropriation and the $242 trillion cumulative figure.
- Hickel et al., "Unequal exchange of labour in the world economy", Nature Communications 15, 2024. Source for the 826 billion hours, €16.9 trillion, the 90 per cent / 21 per cent split, and the wage gap.
- Hickel, "Quantifying national responsibility for climate breakdown", The Lancet Planetary Health 4(9), 2020. Source for the 40 per cent US, 29 per cent EU and 92 per cent global North carbon responsibility figures.
- Fanning and Hickel, "Compensation for atmospheric appropriation", Nature Sustainability 6, 2023. Source for the threefold overshoot and the $192 trillion compensation figure.
- Vogel and Hickel, "Is green growth happening?", The Lancet Planetary Health 7(9), 2023. Source for the eleven high-income countries, the 220 years, the 27 times fair share and the tenfold figure.
- Savin and van den Bergh, review of 561 degrowth studies, Ecological Economics, 2024, and the degrowth response. Sources for the most systematic criticism of the field and for the rebuttal.
- Linus Blomqvist, "Green Growth Is Still Possible", Breakthrough Institute, 2018, and Hickel, reply. Source for the ecomodernist criticism and his answer to it.
- Noah Smith, "Against Hickelism", 2021, and Hickel, response to Max Roser. Sources for the dispute over the poverty line and the goalpost criticism.
- Hickel and Sullivan, "Capitalism and extreme poverty", World Development 161, 2023, and their reply to Tirthankar Roy. Sources for the capitalism and living standards argument and the disputed India mortality figure.
- Vincent Liegey, Anitra Nelson and Terry Leahy, "Debating degrowth: A response to Jason Hickel", degrowth.info, 2025; Leftcom, "Degrowth and Marxism"; Liam Kruger, Marxist Left Review. Sources for the criticism from within the movement and from Marxists.
- Wikipedia, Jason Hickel. Used for biography only, and for the collection of published criticism; the article carries a warning about over-reliance on primary sources.