All of the books on Hickel’s reading list are historians and none of them are economic historians because it’s impossible to make the case he wants to make if y

All of the books on Hickel’s reading list are historians and none of them are economic historians because it’s impossible to make the case he wants to make if you use data gathered by economic historians. Hickel references Beckert’s Empire of Cotton, which, whatever its many virtues does not accord with economic history at all. The other books he referenced are similarly useless for answering what is a question of economic history. He criticises the extreme poverty measure as being beneath human dignity when that’s the point. This is the natural inheritance of man, wretched poverty for almost everyone and what we would regard as poverty for the tiny elite. Hickel also ignores the other indicators that show enormous progress, education, literacy, lifespan, healthy lifespan and the fact that with population growth as rapid as it the decline in absolute poverty ex-Africa is a substantial achievement. Finally, neoliberalism delivered China from poverty. If it’s brought to the rest of the poor areas of the world it’ll do it there too. To neoliberalism! To the end of extreme poverty! https://pseudoerasmus.com/2016/06/16/eoc/ https://pseudoerasmus.com/2016/06/16/eoc/ > Note: the following are NOT my thoughts. It’s my summary of Beckert’s book. > {Summary begins} > The West got rich by impoverishing the Rest. > “War capitalism” was the violent exploitation of the non-West through piracy, enslavement, theft of natural resources, and the physical seizure of markets. It was not caused by superior technology or organisation. Nor did it rest on “offering superior goods at good prices”, such as you find in the la-la-land of economics textbooks, but on the “military subjugation of competitors and a coercive European mercantile presence in many regions of the world”.