Jason Hickel

But then I think, for example, like workers' rights, we cannot analyze these questions inside China, like only by looking at China, because China is in a world dominated by a global capitalist imperialist system.

So if you put China in the whole world, you can see that China is firstly a semi-periphery based on the definition of Jason Hickel.

It's a very accurate definition because if you see China's development, if you just go to China, you don't go to Shanghai, you go to Henan or Hunan, those villages, you see that China is a third world country still.

If you put China into this global stage, you see that workers' rights, for example, China has to improve workers' rights not only by setting all the laws or the regulations by regulated capital that is very important you know like anti-corruption or setting all the legislations also the china's labor union all these measures are very important to improve chinese workers rights but that is not enough because you have to understand you you have to firstly solve the global primary contradiction which is China's wage level is still very low compared to European wage level.

And I think those are people like Tamar Piketty.

But I think some of the stuff Jason Hickel also talked about when he talked about degrowth as a movement.

I agree, Lou, with what you were saying.

But there are ideas there.

There is another strand of literature, which I think is really interesting, which considers this question in a rather different way.

This is Jason Hickel and some of his collaborators who have written on this.

And I've seen this reference quite a few times, and it's absolutely worth exploring.

So what Jason Hickel does is essentially, in brief, he calculates what a safe level of global emissions is consistent with some of the scientific literature, which is equivalent to 350 parts per million concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.

And then he assigns that to different countries in proportion to their total populations going back to 1850. and then identifies which countries on a per capita basis have exceeded their carbon budget, as it were, and which countries are below that budget.

And using that method, which is a fundamentally different method, he reaches quite a different conclusion.

It just needs people with the guts to make it happen.

Then we follow Jason Hickel's degrowth process to reach Carrierworth's donut economic model of the economy that acts in service to people and planet regardless of whether it grows.

And we stop aiming for GDP growth as a metric of success on the international stage and instead aim to build that future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.

Woohoo.

Pavlina Tcherneva is the president of the Levi Economics Institute.

Jason Hickel is a professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

And Seyfeddin Amoos is an economist and author of The Bitcoin Standard.

A very warm welcome to the three of you.

I reckon for a podcast that'll say a lot of the things I tried to say much better and more clearly.

About a year ago, Jason Hickel did a podcast with Navara Media in the UK.

So if you search up Jason Hickel, Navara Media, you'll find the podcast.

And one of the things I like about that podcast is it pushes back against some of the slightly more sensationalist climate collapse framings, which you'll actually hear from the host a little bit.

and talks a lot about this kind of what we might broadly call an eco-socialist critique of capitalism and alternative model.

We know data centres are harming the planet in one of the hottest summers on record, and yet we can't seem to resist the allure of influencers on their all-expenses-paid AI vacay.

If capitalism is this unpopular and we're increasingly aware of its harm, how are we still falling for the consumer spin? Are influencers engineering our consumption faster than our conscience can catch up? And what does it mean for democracy if we can't align our values with our spending? Joining me is Jason Hickel, one of the world's premier political economists and a research professor in Barcelona, where he is a co-holder of a landmark 10 million euro European Research Council grant to pioneer post-growth economics.

He's the author of several books, including Less is More, How Degrowth Will Save the World, listed as Book of the Year by the Financial Times and New Scientist.

His work advises both the United Nations and the European Union.

And so my view is that a much better world is possible, and we can achieve that.

We have the technological ability to do so, and what it requires ultimately is a political struggle, and that's what we need to focus our attention on.

Jason Hickel, thank you so much for talking to us today.

Thank you, Miriam.

Some notable signers who have confirmed their involvement are actively promoting the Cuba is not a threat initiative through their verified academic channels.

Our Columbia University's Jeffrey Sachs, author and economic anthropologist Jason Hickel, Argentine sociologist Atila Baran, and the University of Glasgow's Helen Yaffa.

The full letter titled Cale to Academia regarding the situation in Cuba silences complicity can be found here.

LinkedIn doobly-doop.