Jason Hickel

Jason Hickel is a British-Swazi economic anthropologist, author, and academic whose work challenges mainstream narratives about global poverty, inequality, and economic growth. He is Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. His book The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions argues that poverty in the Global South is not a natural state to be fixed by foreign aid, but the result of deliberate economic policies that extract wealth from poor nations for the benefit of rich ones. His subsequent book Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World makes the case for moving beyond GDP growth as a measure of progress. Both books have been widely cited in debates about global justice and ecological economics. His audiobooks and books offer listeners and readers a bold, evidence-based challenge to received wisdom about why some countries are rich and others poor — economics that centres justice and sustainability over growth for its own sake.