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 It's a bunch of outdated garbage from the Cold War that was really just a thinly veiled dogwhistle for 'white/the good Asians' and 'not white'.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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I’m so confused by that last bit, do they think countries can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and become perfectly developed without any trade? They’re literally saying “dang isn’t it weird that embargoes and harsh sanctions work” to prove their point. Yeah no shit you need to be integrated with global trade networks to gain access to resources you can’t extract/create internally. That doesn’t mean that trade deals with great powers are fair and not ruthlessly exploiting the different market conditions. Just because you get some benefit from a bad deal you’re strong armed into taking doesn’t make it not exploitative (labor). What a shock that becoming a puppet state in strategic location leads to more foreign investment, clearly this proves neo-imperialism is actually based and good for everyone
So, because they don't actually think clearly about anything and the ones that do always go down the race science shit, they just kinda' ad-hoc why some countries are doing better than others in an neverending, absurdly complex, always unfolding web of ideas and bits of facts.
Broadly I think they think countries are all running the same capitalist realist race and just happened to start at separate times with any underdevelopment being solely due to factors outside capitalism. So they think every country outside the imperial core is a "developing country" is just behind and chugging along, except for when it doesn't and then they start spewing nonsense.