Written by Jason Hickel and published via Project Muse in their Winter 2019 issue.
The original piece can be accessed here.
Introduction
We live in a world characterized by extreme economic inequality. The world’s forty-two richest people hold more wealth than the poorest half of the human population.1 Meanwhile, the real per-capita income gap between the Global North and the Global South has more than tripled since 1960. 2 While inequality is now widely recognized as a problem, legal scholars worry that our existing human rights framework offers little leverage against it. Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, drew this conclusion in his 2015 report to the UN General Assembly: “At present, there is no explicitly stated right to equality, as such, under international human rights law.”3 He notes that the value of distributive equality—which would place some kind of cap on the wealth or income gap between rich and poor—is absent from the human rights regime. Of course, certain dimensions of human rights nonetheless carry implications for income inequality—even if in a limited sense. For example, Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees status equality, noting, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”4 Alston points out that the capacity of the poor to exercise or realize their rights “diminishes relatively, if not absolutely, as others become wealthier and gain greater political and economic power.”5 If income inequality compromises the principle of equality in dignity and rights, then we might say that Article 1 requires attention to income inequality. We can also find implications for inequality in socioeconomic rights. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration recognizes that “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family [sic].”6 Because billions of people around the world lack the resources they need to realize an adequate standard of living, Article 25 technically requires redistributing a portion of national or global income downward to the poorest. But neither of these provisions requires reductions of income inequality, or any kind of limit on the gap between rich and poor. As soon as the basic status rights and socioeconomic rights of the poor are satisfied, there is nothing to stop the rich from accumulating more, widening the income gap yet further. As Samuel Moyn observes: “One could imagine one man owning everything—an absolute overlord—and he would not violate the current scheme of human rights, so long as everyone had their basic rights fulfilled. Even perfectly realized human rights are compatible with radical inequality.”7 We can see this issue at play in international development. The dominant model of poverty .................19411$ $CH7 01-06-20 11:48:49 PS reduction—supported, for example, by the World Bank—is to generate economic growth. While the majority of new income produced by growth is captured by the richest (the richest 1 percent captured 27 percent of new income from 1980 to 2016),8 the hope is that a sufficient amount will “trickle down” to the poor. In other words, the dominant model seeks to improve the well-being of the poor (toward satisfying Article 25) precisely in the act of increasing the incomes of the rich—in other words, precisely in the act of producing inequality. I argue, however, that evidence about the relationship between economic growth and ecological breakdown calls this model into question, and challenges the notion that human rights offer no leverage against global inequality. Indeed, the evidence points strongly toward the opposite conclusion. Recent research on planetary boundaries shows that human economic activity has transgressed critical thresholds in terms of biodiversity loss, chemical loading, land-use change, and global warming. Ocean acidification and freshwater use are two thirds of the way toward the planetary boundaries, relative to pre-industrial levels.9 This overshoot is caused primarily by consumption in high-income countries and has a disproportionate impact on the world’s poorest people.10 Climate change presents the most obvious example: while high-income nations have contributed 70 percent of historical emissions, the Global South suffers the brunt of the consequences. According to data from the Climate Vulnerability Monitor, the South bears around 82 percent of the total monetary costs of climate change, and suffers 98 percent of climate change–related deaths.11 Given this effect, some have argued that ecological breakdown poses a threat to the human rights of the poor,12 which is particularly apparent as climate change is projected to cause hunger to rise 20 percent by 2050, with crop yields declining across the Global South.13 As we will see, given the tight coupling of economic growth and environmental impact, aggregate global growth is not an adequate strategy for ending poverty. If we want to increase the incomes of the poor in order to satisfy their socioeconomic human rights as outlined in Article 25 (which I will focus on here), and want to do so without further violating their human rights with poverty-inducing climate change and ecological breakdown, then this effort will require shifting existing global income from the rich to the poor. In other words, approaching the problem through the lens of ecology makes clear that the existing human rights framework implies a challenge to global income inequality, requiring significant reductions in the income gap. My argument proceeds by establishing three key premises, which provide grounds for this conclusion. Premise 1. Estimating the Poverty Gap The first step is to determine what it will take, in terms of income, for everyone in the world to have secure access to the resources required to realize the rights laid out in Article 25. To get there, we need to have a clear sense of the extent of global poverty. The conventional view on this issue begins with the international poverty line (IPL), which is set by the World Bank at $1.90 per day, at 2011 Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). At this level, 897 million people were living in poverty as of 2012, the most recent year of reliable data.14 That is about 13 percent of the world’s population. The “poverty gap” is about $181.7 billion per year; in other words, that is how much it would require to bring all of the poor above the $1.90 poverty line. From this perspective, the poverty problem— intractable though it may seem—appears to be solvable with relatively modest amounts of PAGE 417 Hickel: The Imperative of Redistribution in an Age of Ecological Overshoot 417 .................19411$ $CH7 01-06-20 11:48:50 PS PAGE 418 418 Humanity Winter 2019 foreign aid, rather than requiring a serious challenge to the status quo of global income distribution. This is the level of poverty that most have become accustomed to thinking about—and the level that informs the existing international development agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (Goal 1). But the IPL has no empirical grounding, in terms of the income required to meet actual human needs, and scholars hold that it significantly underestimates the extent of the problem. The IPL is based on the national poverty lines of the world’s lowest income countries. Yet it is difficult to assess how accurate these lines are, as many of them have been set using poor data, and, what is more, they tell us little about what poverty is like in even slightly better-off countries. In most developing countries, the IPL underestimates poverty when compared to national lines. In India, for example, national data show that the poverty rate is twice as high as the IPL suggests.15 In Mexico and Sri Lanka, the figure is about ten times as high.16 Recent research shows that, in many countries, $1.90 is not sufficient for basic human health, or even survival. In India, a child living at this level has a 60 percent risk of being malnourished. In Niger, babies born at this level face an infant mortality risk of nearly 16 percent, which is five times higher than the world average.17
If $1.90 is not sufficient to guarantee basic nutrition or infant survival, then we cannot claim that lifting people above this line means bringing them out of poverty. After all, the World Bank itself is careful to point out that the $1.90 line is “deliberately conservative” and “too low to inform policy.”18 Rahul Lahoti and Sanjay Reddy argue that people need about $5.04 per day in order to achieve minimum basic nutrition alone, aside from other requirements.19 The New Economics Foundation shows that people need about $7.20 per day to reduce infant mortality down to the world average of 30/1,000, which is still five times higher than in developed countries.20 Research by Peter Edward shows that in order to achieve normal human life expectancy of just over seventy years, people need between 2.7 and 3.9 times more than the IPL, or about $7.40 per day,21 what he calls the “ethical poverty line.” If we take these concerns seriously, and measure global poverty at the ethical poverty line of $7.40 per day, we find that the poverty headcount is 4.2 billion people as of 2012, 22 more than 60 percent of the world’s population. In other words, global poverty is a much more serious issue than we tend to assume. Even the $7.40 poverty line is conservative for our purposes here, however, as it is likely inadequate for people to achieve the full spectrum of basic human rights to food, water, shelter, health, education, and child survival as laid out in Article 25. Longitudinal studies demonstrate that a permanent escape from poverty can only be achieved with at least $10 per day.23 This conclusion is in keeping with arguments by Charles Kenny and Lant Pritchett, who suggest that the global poverty line should be as high as $12.50 or even $15 per day.24 At the $10 per day line, the global poverty headcount reaches just over 4.7 billion people, or roughly 67 percent of the world’s population. If we accept $10 per day as a reasonable proxy for the fulfillment of Article 25, then we can conclude that the rights of 67 percent of humanity are being violated within the existing arrangement of the global economic system. What is more, the poverty gap at $10 per day is roughly $10.4 trillion per year—which is how much it would be required to satisfy Article 25. 25 This figure is much larger than we are accustomed to considering. To get a sense of the scale, consider that it is roughly 11 percent of global GDP, or 21.5 percent .................19411$ $CH7 01-06-20 11:48:51 PS of OECD GDP.26 At this level, it is clear that the problem cannot be solved simply with a bit of aid. It requires a significant restructuring of the world economy. Premise 2. Establishing Responsibility Having determined the resources necessary to satisfying Article 25, the next step is to establish responsibility for supplying these resources. The usual answer is that this responsibility falls primarily on national governments. Rich countries may give aid, but this support is out of benevolence rather than responsibility, and does not amount to an admission of culpability. Global South countries do have the capacity to reduce poverty to a certain extent on their own. Hoy and Sumner calculate that, at the level of $1.90 per day, three quarters of the global poverty gap could theoretically be eliminated by redistributing existing national resources (through progressive taxation of those earning above $10 or $15 per day, and by reallocating public finances from fossil fuel subsidies and surplus military spending toward direct cash transfers to the poor).27 The problem with this approach is that it relies in part on redistributing income from the relatively poor (i.e., those earning, say, $11 or $16 per day) to the very poor. What is more, even the most dramatic approach to national redistribution that Hoy and Sumner identify (i.e., with taxes on incomes over $10 per day) would only generate enough revenue to cover at most 17 percent of the global poverty gap. One response is to conclude that, in light of this capacity deficit, the rights enshrined in Article 25 are nothing more than “manifesto” rights—ideals that cannot be feasibly fulfilled. This conclusion makes sense if we assume that (a) poverty is a purely endogenous problem, having to do with local or national policies, and that therefore the governments of poor nations bear sole responsibility for solving it; and (b) rich nations accumulated their wealth through purely endogenous processes, and therefore have no obligation to share it. In other words, the “manifesto rights” argument assumes that nations are bounded economic units, cut off from the rest of the world. This assumption has little validity given more than five hundred years of global economic integration, from the onset of colonialism to the trade system of today. We cannot hope to understand why 67 percent of humanity remains in poverty at a time of unprecedented global wealth without examining the broader geopolitical order. If we do, it becomes clear that the causes of poverty have more to do with the structure of the global economy than with domestic policies in poor countries. While space does not permit a comprehensive argument here, I will offer a few welldocumented points that compel us to reconsider the question of responsibility. I have outlined the argument in greater detail elsewhere, and would direct readers to that more extensive research.28 1. Colonialism. The process of European colonialization effectively organized the world economy in a manner that facilitated the enrichment of the core nations of Western Europe while simultaneously impoverishing the global periphery.29 This process was most prominent in two forms. First, enclosure: colonizers enclosed common lands and in many cases destroyed subsistence farming systems in order to establish cash crops for export to Europe. This policy left millions without access to land and livelihood. In India, to cite one example, thirty million people died of famine in the late nineteenth century because of British interventions in agricultural systems.30 Second, unequal trade treaties: Europeans PAGE 419 Hickel: The Imperative of Redistribution in an Age of Ecological Overshoot 419 .................19411$ $CH7 01-06-20 11:48:52 PS PAGE 420 420 Humanity Winter 2019 used asymmetrical tariffs to undermine the domestic industries of their colonies and thus ensured that the latter would remain for the most part exporters of primary commodities and consumers of imported manufactures. This arrangement assisted the Industrial Revolution in Europe by securing Europe’s access to raw materials and export markets, but made it very difficult for Global South countries to develop their own industrial economies.31 2. Regime change. After the end of colonialism, many newly independent nations in the Global South began to develop their economies using protective tariffs, import substitution, capital controls, and nationalization. In many cases, Western powers reacted to this development by intervening to end to such policies, which threatened their assets and restricted their ability to access raw materials, exploit cheap labor, and repatriate profits.32 We can see this pattern most clearly in the Western-backed coups that deposed progressive, pro-poor leaders like Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, Patrice Lumumba in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Salvadore Allende in Chile, Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso, and dozens of others, most of whom were replaced by dictatorships friendly to Western economics interests (such as Mobutu Sese Seko, Augusto Pinochet, etc.). Such interventions were most common from the 1950s through the 1980s, but the pattern continues today, as evidenced by the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the 2009 coup in Honduras, and the intervention in Libya in 2011. 3. Structural adjustment. Structural adjustment programs imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank—which forced developing countries to liberalize their economies and privatize public assets—caused per-capita income growth rates in the Global South to collapse. During the 1960s and 1970s, average per-capita income growth was 3.2 percent per year. During the structural adjustment period of the 1980s and 1990s, it was 0.7 percent per year. Robert Pollin calculates that Global South countries lost an average of $480 billion in potential GDP each year as a result of structural adjustment.33 During this period, some 1.4 billion people were added to the ranks of the poor.34 Western banks and multinational companies, meanwhile, benefitted from access to new markets and new investment opportunities.35 The imposition of structural adjustment was possible because rich countries control a commanding share of the voting power in the World Bank and the IMF, and the United States holds veto power over all major decisions. The Global South, despite having 80 percent of the world’s population, has less than half of the vote. 4. Trade. The international trade system established in the 1990s tends to favor the interests of rich countries over poor ones. The United Nations estimates that tariff imbalances in the World Trade Organization cause Global South countries to lose more than $700 billion each year in potential export revenues for industrial goods, and even more for agricultural goods.36 New patent restrictions imposed by the TRIPS agreement cost poor countries another $60 billion per year in extra licensing fees, and price many essential technologies and pharmaceuticals out of reach.37 And then there is the issue of illicit financial flows—largely a consequence of trade liberalization. Global Financial Integrity estimates that $1.1 trillion flows out of developing countries each year, mostly through fraudulent trade transactions by multinational corporations, often for the purposes of tax evasion.38 Finally, there is the matter of “unequal exchange,” whereby the wages paid to Global South workers for goods produced for export abroad are artificially low compared to the real value of their labor on international markets, corrected for .................19411$ $CH7 01-06-20 11:48:53 PS productivity. Zak Cope calculates that Global South countries lose between $2.8 and $4.9 trillion per year due to unequal exchange.39
5. Climate change. When it comes to damages caused by climate change, the calculus of responsibility is clear. As mentioned, high-income nations are responsible for about 70 percent of the greenhouse gases that have been emitted since the beginning of the industrial revolution (about half of which comes from the United States), yet they bear only 12 percent of the total costs of climate change. According to the Climate Vulnerability Monitor, in 2010 the Global South lost $571 billion due to drought, floods, landslides, storms, and wildfires. In the same year, the South suffered 400,000 deaths due to climate change, mostly related to hunger and communicable disease; 83 percent of these deaths happened in the countries that have the lowest carbon emissions in the world.40 While no one would deny that endogenous problems contribute to poverty in Global South countries, the structure of the global economy is a much more significant causal factor. Indeed, the imbalances inherent in the global economy become clear when we consider the distribution of global GDP growth. The World Inequality Report calculates that the poorest 60 percent of the world’s population received only 18 percent of new income from growth from 1980 to 2016, while the richest 1 percent captured 27 percent of it.41 In light of the foregoing, it seems reasonable to conclude that the governments of the world’s rich countries, which created and sustain this order in their own interests, are actively violating the human rights of the poor. Building on an institutional view of human rights, we might argue—as Thomas Pogge has—that these countries have a responsibility to use their power to reorganize the economic order to ensure that as many people as possible have secure access to the resources necessary for achieving basic health and wellbeing as laid out in Article 25. 42
Recognizing the Ecological Limits to Growth
Over the past forty years, the dominant approach for ending poverty—for example, that promoted by the World Bank and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (see Goal 8) —has been to rely on economic growth. The idea is that the yields of growth will trickle down to improve the lives of the world’s poorest people. This strategy is popular in that it provides a politically palatable alternative to distributing existing resources more fairly. But the growth approach begins to appear questionable if we look at it through an ecological lens. David Woodward calculates that, given the existing distribution of income from GDP growth, it will take 207 years to end poverty at $7.40 per day. Achieving this would require growing the global economy to 175 times its present size—extracting, producing, and consuming 175 times more commodities than we presently do. It is worth pausing to consider what this means. Even if such growth were possible, what would the consequences look like? In Woodward’s words, “There is simply no way this can be achieved without triggering truly catastrophic climate change—which, apart from anything else, would obliterate any potential gains from poverty reduction.”43 If we use the $10 per day poverty line, the figures look even more extreme. Clearly growth is not an adequate poverty-reduction strategy without a considerable degree of redistribution. Slightly more progressive approaches call for growth that is skewed toward the world’s poorest people. This approach is enshrined in the Sustainable Development Goals. Goal 10, the goal on inequality, states: “By 2030, progressively achieve PAGE 421 Hickel: The Imperative of Redistribution in an Age of Ecological Overshoot 421 .................19411$ $CH7 01-06-20 11:48:54 PS PAGE 422 422 Humanity Winter 2019 and sustain income growth of the bottom 40 per cent of the population at a rate higher than the national average.”44 This approach makes more sense, but it still has a flaw at its center.45 It calls for ratcheting up the incomes of the poor through growth, but without placing any corresponding limits on the growth of the incomes of the rich. The assumption here, once again, is that we can increase aggregate global economic activity indefinitely. This assumption is not valid, however, given the existing overshoot of planetary boundaries and what we know about the tight coupling between GDP and ecological impact (and the limited potential for severing this link). We can see this most clearly by looking at trends in material footprint and CO2 emissions.46 Material Footprint Global extraction and consumption of material resources has been rising steadily since the Industrial Revolution. Resource use, as measured by “material footprint” (a unit that captures the total weight of all material extraction and consumption, from fish to forests, minerals to metals), increased by a factor of eight during the twentieth century, growing at an average rate of 2 percent per year.47 Since 2000, the rate of resource use has accelerated, averaging 3.4 percent per year.48 Today, we are extracting and consuming eighty-five billion tons per year, and by 2030 we are projected to breach 100 billion tons per year.49 To put these figures into perspective, ecologists say that a sustainable level of material use is about fifty billion tons per year.50 Material footprint is regarded as a useful proxy for ecological impact; research by Van der Voet et al. finds that, at an aggregate level, a high degree of correlation (0.73) exists between the two.51 We can see the consequences of excess resource use in a number of key registers. Over the past sixty years, more than half of our planet’s tropical forests have been destroyed. Forty percent of agricultural soil is seriously degraded, mostly as a result of intensive industrial farming practices.52 Around 85 percent of global fish stocks are over-exploited or depleted, and the same pattern can be seen across the living world: up to 140,000 species of plants and animals are disappearing each year due to our over-exploitation of the Earth’s ecosystems.53 This rate of extinction is one hundred to one thousand times faster than before the Industrial Revolution—so fast that scientists have classed this as the sixth mass extinction event in the planet’s history, with the last one having occurred sixty-six million years ago.54 A direct relationship exists between GDP and resource use: the two rise together. During the twentieth century, resource use grew at a slightly slower rate than GDP, but since 2000 it has grown at a rate that outstrips GDP. Of course, some hope that strong policy measures might encourage investments in more efficient technologies and allow us to sever this relationship, so that GDP rises while resource use declines to sustainable levels—a process known as “absolute decoupling.” This assumption features in the “green growth” narrative of institutions like the World Bank, and sits at the center of the SDGs (Goal 8.4) as the dominant mechanism of “sustainable development.”55 Unfortunately, however, there is no empirical evidence that absolute decoupling is possible on a global scale with existing rates of GDP growth (2–3 percent per year). Three models have been published to examine this question—including one by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP)—and all find that while high-efficiency measures (such as a global carbon tax and rapid technological innovation) can achieve .................19411$ $CH7 01-06-20 11:48:56 PS some relative decoupling of GDP from resource use (by at most 1 percent per year, according to UNEP), absolute decoupling remains out of reach. Even in best-case scenario conditions, the models show that continuing existing rates of GDP growth drives resource use up to between ninety-three and 132 billion tons by 2050. 56 Part of this is because of the “rebound effect,” whereby efficiency improvements make resource use cheaper, thus triggering increased demand and wiping out some of the gains from efficiency. But it is also because efficiency improvements are bounded by physical limits. While technological innovation can improve resource efficiency in the short term, the rate of improvements tapers off over time so that continued GDP growth in the longer term drives total resource use back up. A recent study by Ward et al. examining this tendency concluded: Decoupling of GDP growth from resource use, whether relative or absolute, is at best only temporary. Permanent decoupling (absolute or relative) is impossible for essential, non-substitutable resources because the efficiency gains are ultimately governed by physical limits. Growth in GDP ultimately cannot plausibly be decoupled from growth in material and energy use, demonstrating categorically that GDP growth cannot be sustained indefinitely. It is therefore misleading to develop growth-oriented policy around the expectation that decoupling is possible.57