Redditors gather around to cry about jason hickel's article on unequal exchange. Lot of genius scientist economists chime in to deboonk all the bad science.
Redditors gather around to cry about jason hickel's article on unequal exchange. Lot of genius scientist economists chime in to deboonk all the bad science.
Posted in r/science by u/six-sided-bear • 3,689 points and 377 comments
Some genius takes:
The whole Global North/South split is a pet peeve of mine as a social scientist working in development policy. It's a bunch of outdated garbage from the Cold War that was really just a thinly veiled dogwhistle for 'white/the good Asians' and 'not white'. It doesn't hold up to any rational examination. South Africa was part of the Global North until white rule under Apartheid ended, and now they're in the Global South. southern nations.
Real educated economist chimes in:
Jason Hickel is an anthropologist (read: not economist) and degrowther. Despite having no background and seemingly almost no understanding of economics as a field, he somehow continues to get 'economics' papers published in reputable journals despite their obvious low quality. But to anyone with a cursory understanding of economics, it should be entirely unsurprising that exports from developing nations to developed are more labor intensive than vice-versa. This is not a novel conclusion and is not 'appropriation', but is entirely explained by a concept in economics called comparative advantage.
Another genius owns the article epic style
This paper is a demonstration of why input-output (IO) models are bad for economic research. IO models were used by the soviet central planners to allocate resources. IO models are bad for research for the same reason the are bad for planning. The authors look at “embodied labor” (adjusted for human capital), the idea being that any two things produced by an hour of (human capital adjusted) labor must have the same value (btw, this “labor theory of value” goes back to Adam Smith, and was later promulgated by Marx).
Other facts that the authors’ framework will struggle to explain: why is it that the poor countries that most integrated with global trade networks became rich (s korea, Japan, Singapore) or are otherwise growing quickly (china, Panama, Vietnam)? Why is it that countries with severe barriers to trade with the global north struggle to grow (n Korea, India for second half of 20th century)? That’s very hard to explain if trade with the global north is fundamentally exploitative.
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s korea, Japan, Singapore
massive infusions of western capital in a desperate struggle against communism
china, Panama, Vietnam
socialism, dunno probably because they finally control the canal, socialism
n korea, India for second half of 20th century
sanctions and siege warfare by the west, and dunno
India had literal billions of dollars of production, goods, labor, services, etc, etc, etc, drained from it by British rule up until their independence. Its no shock that they've had struggles for the past ~70 years.
China emerged from its civil war at pretty much the same time and did massively better. While the British did commit atrocities and suppress industrialisation for a long time, India has been independent of British influence for long enough that other factors constitute most of the reason why it's in its current state.
Also, S. Korea, Taiwan and Singapore were “allowed” to have very non-neoliberal industrial policies that pragmatically speaking was much closer to how China grew their industrial capacity than anything resembling free market neoliberal “comparative advantage”.
If the global South is exploited then how come these colonial outposts famous for nightmarish working conditions have high GDPs?
If "the global north" was a real way of analysing geopolitics, then how come South Africa stopped being part of it when it was no longer ruled by white people?Real big brain takes over here. Pack it up people, Reddit sent their best and they busted us