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 It's a bunch of outdated garbage from the Cold War that was really just a thinly veiled dogwhistle for 'white/the good Asians' and 'not white'.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've always hated reddit. Like, I used to be Angry Online about the existence of reddit before it was a normie hotspot - i know hexbear is running a similar system, but aglo driven discussion hierarhcy is literally discourse poison and at volume everyone is so stupid that what's popular will inevitably be really dumb - I love that the thread is filled with people throwing "degrowther" out like a slur, because it's really telling in the worst way that they worship Number Go Up and the upside of this is you can assume everything downstream in their book-length post is pure ideology and cope - and if you're smart enough to already know they're the court soothsayers whose main job is justifying American hegemony by exalting the virtue of Number and doing the equivalent of parlor tricks with numbers to categorize sub.Number.x-y in such a way that comports to their worldview and has, if not a moral justification, a "rationalized" one - something that a dumb person or a sociopath can go "hey it sucks but that's just the way It Works"
A traditionally trained Astrologer will literally have a higher predictive hit rate than these people for any matter they ostensibly went to school to "understand"
It would be funny if these people weren't a big part of how this massively unjust thing we all live under justifies itself.
(it's still pretty funny)
Its funny that they don't even or tackle what degrowth is but are completely fine with current system. Nothing is wrong with the system but degrowth that is whoaa its mass famine and bad.