I doubt it will be a fringe view on this forum that Western colonialism tended to cripple poor countries' economies, or that certain European and US interventions (like the Iraq War) led to huge devastation.

You're right that this is not a fringe view, and it is probably one of the more mainstream views Hickel has. However, I do not think that it is obviously true. Poor countries suffered many disadvantages from colonialism, but also gained many advantages, like education, infrastructure, and more advanced legal systems. The earliest western colonialism seemed quite brutal and destructive, like the Spanish in South America, but the later kinds were much more benign, ultimately culminating in extremely beneficial British rule over Hong Kong. There are clearly some parts of the world that have ended up very rich as a direct result of colonial rule, like the US, Canada, Australia or Hong Kong. Within sub-Saharan Africa, the area that was colonized the longest (South Africa) is also the richest, and the only part of Africa that wasn't colonized (Ethiopia) is no richer than most other sub-Saharan African countries. Whether this colonization was beneficial on net is an empirical question; the only paper I have seen with an even vaguely credible methodology is this one on shipping islands:

Using a new database of islands throughout the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans we examine whether colonial origins affect modern economic outcomes. We argue that the nature of discovery and colonization of islands provides random variation in the length and type of colonial experience. We instrument for length of colonization using wind direction and wind speed. Wind patterns which mattered a great deal during the age of sail do not have a direct effect on GDP today, but do affect GDP via their historical impact on colonization. The number of years spent as a European colony is strongly positively related to the island's GDP per capita and negatively related to infant mortality. This basic relationship is also found to hold for a standard dataset of developing countries. ... The timing of the colonial experience seems to matter. Time spent as a colony after 1700 is more beneficial to modern income than years before 1700, consistent with a change in the nature of colonial relationships over time.

You're definitely right that condemning the Iraq war is far from a fringe view, but honesty compels again me to object. While I think the Iraq war was a mistake, it must be noted that as late as 2006 it seems the majority of Iraqis actually thought the war was a good idea, even after seeing 3 years of poorly-administered aftermath:

A majority of Iraqis (61%) still believe that ousting Saddam Hussein was worth the hardships they might have suffered, but this is down from the 77 percent who said this in January.

I haven't checked this, but it seems quite plausible to me that in 2006 the war was actually more popular in Iraq than it was in the west!

Additionally, it's also important to note that Iraq's GDP has grown dramatically since the war. In 2002 it was around $19bn; by 2012 it was apparently almost 10x higher at around $218 (and has remained around this level since). They benefited from a rise in the oil price, of course, but I don't think that can explain everything, and oil prices have fallen again now anyway. Their unemployment rate also apparently fell from around 9-10% pre-war to around 8% now.

More pertinently from your case, the invasion of Iraq was clearly quite an unusual situation. In the 17 years since we have not seen another similar invasion by western powers, partly because western governments have little desire to repeat the expensive war + subsequent nation-building process. Most poor countries have not seen a conflict similar to the Iraq war, and probably will not (if nothing else they rarely pretend to have WMDs!); civil wars are much more common. As such I don't think the Iraq war experience has much read-through to your ultimate question how how effective farm equipment rental programs in sub-Saharan Africa will be.

A different scenario to contrast the Iraq experience with would be the English invasion of Sierra Leone in 2000. Unlike Iraq, Sierre Leone is the sort of extremely poor country that EAs typically consider health and poverty interventions in, and the military intervention was extremely successful:

The rebel forces were scared away from the city, the UN got off its knees and the government army was revitalised. Eighteen months later, Sierra Leone's 11-year civil war was brought to an end. In the streets of Freetown at the time the graffiti read: "Queen Elizabeth for king!" and "Return to us our colonial mother!" Tony Blair remains more popular here than anywhere else on the planet. He still visits the country every couple of years, and officials from his office are seconded into the finance and health ministries. Several Sierra Leoneans said they would personally campaign for Blair to be the country's president. A young Freetown documentary-maker, Arthur Pratt, told me: "We think we are to him as a favourite child."

Now, the intervention in Sierra Leone was unusual in how well it went. But I don't think you can consider unusually bad interventions like Iraq without also considering unusually good interventions as well.

Thanks for this write-up, it's nice to have an opportunity to discuss Hickel's book. I haven't yet finished the book (I've yet to read the recommendations section) but here are a few thoughts I had so far:

1) The number of people around the world in absolute poverty is increasing, not decreasing

Overall, what I learnt from this section (my charitable takeaway) is:

• 1a) and 1b) are a reminder that organisations like the World Bank and IMF have strong incentives to make themselves look good by changing the goalposts. We should be consistent about dates & metrics when discussing longitudinal changes in poverty
• 1c) is a reminder that the IPL is not the bar for a decent quality of life, and that we should be more demanding of poverty eradication efforts.
• We should probably look at poverty rates over time by region, or at the very least exclude China. OurWorldInData's history of poverty charts on this it contains data on multiple poverty lines. Here is my summary of the extreme poverty line ($1.90 per day):
• Subsaharan Africa (1 billion in 2015): A drop in relative poverty from ~60% to ~40% from 1990s to 2015. An increase in absolute extreme poverty from ~280 to ~412 million people.
• South Asia (1.7 billion in 2013): Absolute improvements in extreme poverty from 513 to 274 million people from 1981 to 2013, and relative improvements of 55% to 16%.
• East Asia & Pacific (2 billion in 2015): An extreme drop in relative poverty from ~80% to ~2%, and a drop in absolute poverty from 1.1 billion to 47 million people.
• Latin America & the Caribbean (620 million in 2015): An drop in relative poverty from ~13% to ~4%, and 49 to 24 million people.
• Proxy for South East Asia - Philippines and Indonesia (101 million in 2015, 263 million in 2017): A drop in relative poverty in Indonesia from ~70% to ~6%, and 115 to 15 million people. A drop in relative poverty in the Philippines from ~28% to ~8%, and 15 to 8 million people.

With the exception of Subsaharan Africa, all other regions have seen decreases in absolute poverty, and all regions have seen drops in relative poverty. Even if you look at higher poverty lines that are there in the chart, there is a similar (but less extreme) positive growth trajectory.

And this is my major issue with his choice to use absolute poverty rather than relative poverty, which he justifies using because this was the original goalpost, and the way he presents the situation, which I think is a bit misleading. I don't think this is a very strong reason to use that numbers, I think that consider. The decrease in extreme poverty in Asia (specifically South Asia, if we are to exclude China) has been a real improvement, even if many are still living in poverty.

There is this chart which shows the world decrease in extreme poverty split up by regions and a projection of stagnation in extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa if those economies stagnate.

What are the implications of this?

• It makes me wary of Hickel's overall argument, and makes me concerned his narrative doesn't fully make sense (although individual parts of his arguments may be true). I don't think that the second part of his argument is actually invalidated by the above if we just change the argument to be more accurate:
• Hickel's claim: Neocolonialisms has prevented the absolute decrease in extreme poverty for countries that experienced it.
• (in my opinion) The more defensible claim: Neocolonialism has slowed down the rate of relative decrease in extreme poverty for countries that experienced it.
• Thus, in both cases neocolonialism is the cause for a counterfactual where the world is much better, my claim is less extreme than Hickel's. I haven't spent too much time on the claims he makes in the neocolonialism section yet, although I also was shocked by the number of coups, and agree with your comment that he may have overlooked the negative aspects of some of the regimes.

I'd be curious to know what you find out from your research!

Great post! I'm impressed by how carefully you consider your career options, and appreciate the summary of 'The Divide'.

I'm afraid I can't comment on your main questions as I don't have a great sense of careers in the global poverty space. But I thought you might be interested in this list of links on the debate between Hickel and people who favor a more optimistic narrative.

Hi, 

I am not at all sure whether you still follow this thread, but in case you do, I'd like to somewhat push back about what you said about coups.

I became interested in this topic a while ago and I tried to find out as much as possible about events like the 1973 coup in Chile or the 1965 crisis in Indonesia etc., and about Western involvement. I found out that the coups were usually homegrown affairs driven by domestic actors (such as disgruntled conservative military officers) and often even supported by a wide section of the public (which was for example angry about economic mismanagement by the previous regime), while the West played at best a minor role. Usually, you find many vague accusations about Western "backing" for the coup, but there is rarely good evidence of any major or crucial external intervention.

For example, I read a lot of comments about a "US-backed coup" in Honduras in 2009. I try to Google it and the best thing I found about US involvement was the fact that the US recognized the new regime and didn't attempt to reinstate the overthrown leader. 

I would argue that in many of the coups which the West supported, it most important contribution was to signal, even implicitly, that it wouldn't be too unhappy if the leftist leader of the country in question was overthrown. Now this is definitely bad, but it seems to me a far cry from the West having orchestrated the whole thing.

(Similarly, in the former Czechoslovakia where I am from, there was a communist coup in 1948. People, especially foreigners, will often point out that the coup was "backed by the Soviets", and while that is definitely true in the sense that they badly wanted the coup to succeed and had strong intelligence ties in the country, it doesn't seem they did anything decisive and you don't need to mention them in order to explain what happened.)

There were some coups, like Guatemala in 1954, where the US did in fact intervened to overthrow a popular government (by training an army of thugs who invaded the country), but as far as I can tell, the reality was usually closer to what I described above. Iran in 1953 might also fall into this category, I don't know enough about it to be able to tell.

I therefore overall think that many leftwing authors, such as Hickel, or for example Chomsky, tend to wildly exaggerate the West's role in most of these coups by making sweeping statements about how the US orchestrated this coup or overthrew that government, but that they usually don't have strong evidence and yet their case often sails through strangely uncontested.

I would also argue that the idea that the West can (or could in the past) overthrow foreign governments at will by covert intelligence operations portrays the West/US/CIA as these almighty diabolical masterminds who can subtly direct events in faraway countries without leaving evidence and that this view totally ignores the agency of the people in the countries in question. (Also, if the West had this ability, you would expect that they would have done a coups in places like Cuba, North Korea, Syria or Iran a long time ago.)

Lastly, I would say that Hickel misunderstands the motivation for Cold war era US policy in the Third World. As far as I can tell, the US didn't care much about countries internal economic policies, and in fact many pro-US right wing regimes like the junta in Brazil in Chiang's regime on Taiwan or Suharto in Indonesia had strongly interventionist and very non-neoliberal policies and the US never complained about it. What they disliked was an ideological affiliation with Marxism and a pro-USSR foreign policy, as long as a country refrained from that, the West was happy with almost anything. (Again, Guatemala seems to me like an exception here, possibly Iran too.)

Anyway, I hope this is a helpful response, take care :-)

A while back I read this article by Hickel, which was based on the book. See this EA forum post which I made after reading it, and also the comments which I wrote down at the time:

• The article was much better than I thought it would be based on the first few paragraphs.
• Still a few dodgy bits though - e.g. it quotes FAO numbers on how many people are hungry, but neglects to mention that this is good progress (quote from FAO): "The proportion of undernourished people in the developing regions has fallen by almost half. One in in seven children worldwide are underweight, down from one in four in 1990."
• I also tried to factcheck the claim that the specific number $1.90 is a bad metric to use, by reading the report he said was a "trenchant critique" of it. There was a lot of stuff about how a single summary statistic can be highly uncertain, but not much about why any other poverty line would be better.
• Overall I do think it's fairly valuable to point out that there's been almost no movement of people above $7.40 if you exclude China. But the achievement of moving a lot of people above the $1.90 number shouldn't be understated.
• This graph seems like the most important summary of the claims in the article. So basically, the history of poverty reduction was almost entirely Asia, the future of it (or lack thereof) will be almost entirely about Africa.
• Note that the graph displays absolute numbers of people. The population of Africa went from 600M in 1990 to 1.2B today to 1.6B in 2030, apparently. So according to this graph there’s been a reduction in percentage of extreme poverty in Africa, and that’s projected to continue, but it’s at a far lower rate than Asia.

You may be interested in Max Roser's perspective on his interactions with Hickel.

Hi, let me try and give some feedback on your career plan:

Your career plan sounds great!

• I think the thing the world is missing right now is a good understanding of how to create sustainable systemic change. I think an econ qualification with the aim of producing really high value research on issues that are pertinent to how to bring countries out of poverty would be a really high value action, and doing this kind of work is near the top of my to do list too.

However I would caution:

• Explore whilst you are young. The path sounds like it would be good for impact but I think it is important to work in the area where your strengths match. And you should think about ways to explore your strengths. This could be by getting a job and doing a Masters course part time or doing internships over the summer or doing something else for a year etc.

• Similarly, many of the academics I think are best at creating really useful research have some experience outside of academia in creating change. Eg: taken time out from academia to run for a political position or work in politics. You can get experience in a field that is pertinent to how change is created then you might be better able to address the problems. Also at some point in the future when you have a clearer idea to solutions you might want to pivot from academia to starting a campaign or a social enterprise etc so other experience is useful.

Hope that helps

Hey !

Fascinating write up. Congratulations for taking so much perspective on yourself ! This is prime time for you to consider such important life choices, so don't hesitate to take all the time you need to be sure of your decisions.

Disclaimer: I studied a bit of engineering, a bit of economics in business school, worked in the corporate world and now work in the fight against poverty within a social enterprise. My views are very liberal. I also have a very entrepreneurial character, as reported by my colleagues. I feel our trajectories are not too different - I just have a few more years under my belt I guess.

Reading through your summary of Hickel's points, my immediate reaction was that he is pushing his agenda pretty hard. As others have outlined, both relative and absolute poverty have decreased as a % of the population. Of course the growth of population has outpaced the decrease in poverty, but that's a little dishonest to show only this side of the picture.

Regarding neo-colonialism, it's a mixed bag. Yes, there used to be a lot of foreign interference with coups etc. And it might still be there today - I don't know that there is a good way to quantify this. Nations have no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, only permanent interests. Changing that is a daunting task, but if you believe you are able to make it happen, then by all means, pursue it at all costs.

I would just expand on a couple of points:

• Whether we like it or not, capitalism is the name of the game. I find it more efficient to learn the rules of the game than to try to change it. When you say "For example, farmers in sub-Saharan Africa starve because their produce is undercut by below-cost competition from Europe and the US, where farm subsidies exist in contravention to WTO rules", I think this shows that whoever's idea this is does not understand the game. Sub Saharan African farmers are not connected to global markets in any kind of way. Believing that corn or wheat subsidies in the US are causing corn prices to increase in Botswana is delusional. The cost of bringing that corn to landlocked countries is totally prohibitive, and as a result no ear of corn produced in the US reaches these poor countries. There are cases of African governments importing corn from, say, Mexico once the local production has ran out - to avoid famine !
• I like to raise the example of two countries to compare the impact of different policies: Rwanda and Burundi. Both countries are very similar in agro ecology, natural resources, population & ethnies, social norms, etc. Following the '94 genocide, you could say that both countries emerged with roughly the same situation - with the exception that Rwanda had lost 1M+ population in the genocide, while Burundi's civil war kept going until ~2003. Both countries adopted widely different policies. Rwanda "gave in" to international aid, working with all the traditional donors you can imagine - WB, EU, USAID, etc. Burundi chose self-reliance, and was much more wary of foreign aid. This was reinforced after the 2015 coup attempt - half of foreign aid was pulled out of the country. While the situation is of course more nuanced than what I am describing, Burundi is now the poorest or 2nd poorest country in the world by GDP per capita, with a GDP growth of 2-3% (nominal !), while Rwanda's GDP has consistently grown by 7-8% over the last 10 years. To illustrate the gap more concretely, let's mention the Covid situation: Rwanda was one of the few countries that were allowed to resume flights to Europe recently, while Burundi's president first claimed that "Burundi was favoured by God, and Covid would spare the country", before his wife was evacuated to Nairobi for emergency treatment, and he himself died of cardiac arrest (probably Covid related).

I could go on for days about this - feel free to reach out directly if you'd like to continue the conversation in private - but in short, I think promoting the sovereignty of a developing country might not be the best solution to accelerate its development. Providing fertiliser to farmers so that they can grow enough food to feed their families, on the other hand, that's impactful and there's no question about it.

However, I'm sceptical of charity entrepreneurship's ability to achieve systemic change - I'd probably (correct me if I'm wrong) need a graduate degree in economics to tackle the global economic system.

It might plausibly be helpful to hire staff who had graduate degree in economics, but I think you would not necessarily need a graduate degree in economics yourself in order to start an organization focused on improving economic policy. Of course it's hard to say for sure until it's tried - but there's a lot that goes into running an organization, and it takes many different skills and types of people to make it come together. Domain expertise is only one part of it. A lot of great charities (e.g. GiveWell, AMF) were started by people who didn't enter with domain expertise or related degrees. (None of which is to say that economics isn't a strong option for a variety of paths, only that you shouldn't put the path of starting an organization in the "I need a degree first" box.)

(As for my opinion more generally, I do think that social entrepreneurship would under-perform relative to purely EtG (if you give to the right place), and also under-perform relative to focused non-profit or policy work (if you work on the right thing), because it has to simultaneously turn profit and achieve impact, which really limits the flexibility to work on the higher impact things. But it primarily depends on what specifically you're working on, in every case.)

Thank you for writing up your notes and thoughts on this book! I hadn't heard of it before, and have since read it. A lot to think about and research - I'd be interested in sharing notes and may write some posts looking into specific claims he made in the book.

Given your interests in both Entrepreneurship and Public Policy, you might find the books by Mariana Mazzucato, in particular, The Entrepreneurial State, enlightening: https://marianamazzucato.com/entrepreneurial-state/

This was a very enjoyable post! You frequently analysed yourself from a 3rd person viewpoint, and very skeptical of your claims -- which is very healthy :)

Related to poverty eradication / systematic change

1. How exactly do you think we should measure the poverty line? Relative poverty? Absolute poverty? Enough money to buy x bottles of water a day? Enough money to produce x units of happiness?

2. Neo-colonialism has expanded beyond Europe and the US. Apparently, China is also doing this. China gives loans to poorer countries for development of ports, and when those countries default on their debt, China siezes control of the ports. And, what are your opinions on neo-colonialism between different parts of the same country?

3. Would de-growth result in better income equality and also lower total economic growth? If so, could you elaborate on what this tradeoff looks like (preferably in a quantitative sense)?

4. Is the amount of colonialism/neo-colonialism increasing/decreasing/same over the past ~100 years?

5. You mentioned using GPI instead of GDP as a national performance index? What do you think are the chances of GPI gaining widespread acceptance?

Related to personal career plans

1. You expressed a LOT of interest in Economics, and some interest in Law. What are your thoughts on a Master's in Public Policy?

2. Are entrepreneurial skills a rare asset within EA? How does supply-demand of entrepreneurial skills in EA look like?

3. You mentioned that even big tech companies aren't able to achieve large amounts of change. I would a little skeptical of this. One counter-example is that American English is slowly replacing British English, even in countries that used to historically speak British English. I think one of the biggest reasons for this is popular softwares like MS Word, Google docs and Google search having American English as their default language. However, I have a feeling that large changes like this generally happen when a company is REALLY succesful/popular (I'm not sure though).

Hickel has some very interesting ideas, and I really enjoyed your writeup. I find plausible the central claim that neocolonialist foreign and economic policy has put hundreds of millions of people into poverty. I'm a bit unsure of his arguments about the harms of debt and trade terms (hopefully will return later), but the case that foreign-imposed regime change has been harmful seems really strong.

So, question: Might it be highly impactful to prevent governments from harmfully overthrowing foreign regimes?

• Governments overthrow each other all the time. The United States has overthrown dozens of foreign governments over the last century, including recent interventions in Libya, Yemen, Palestine, and Iraq. The Soviet Union did the same, and modern day Russia aggressively interferes in foreign democratic elections, including the 2016 US election. China might do the same, but I can't find great evidence. I don't know about the UK and EU, I can't find obvious recent examples that weren't primarily US-led (e.g. Iraq, Libya). Official histories probably understate the number of overthrows because successful attempts can remain secret, at least for the years immediately following the overthrow.
• Toppling governments can be extremely harmful. After 5 minutes of Googling, it seems foreign imposed regime changes might increase the likelihood of civil wars ("in roughly 40 percent of the cases of covert regime change undertaken during the Cold War, a civil war occurred within 10 years of the operation.") and human rights abuses ("In more than 55 percent of the cases of covert regime-change missions undertaken during the Cold War, the targeted states experienced a government-sponsored mass killing episode within 10 years of the regime-change attempt."). I'd also expect to find strong evidence of increased poverty, decreased economic growth, and worse health and education outcomes.

Clearly there's much more to be discussed here, but I'll post now and come back later. A few questions:

• How tractable is changing the foreign policy of major governments? How does one do it? What are some examples of historical successes or failures?
• Is this "neglected"? The concept doesn't apply super cleanly here, but my hunch might be that few people involved in foreign policy have EA values, meaning EA might have the "competitive edge" of pursuing an uncommon goal.
• What are the risks to EA here? Government is generally contentious and polarized, and regime change is an extremely controversial issue. What specific ways could EA attempts to work on regime change or other foreign policy causes end up backfiring?

Some related conversation:

• Promoting liberal democracy might be a worthwhile EA cause area (80K agrees).
• The longtermist value of reducing poverty by improving institutions

I've cross posted to the EA & Global Development Facebook group if you were interested in the responses there as well.

Have you considered starting a research organization, or economic development think tank or consultancy in which your employees would do the day-to-day advising and 'politicking'. You could still be the entrepreneur who grows the organization and steers it forward.

Really enjoyed this, thanks! I'll have more thoughts soon, but in the meantime here's another post you might enjoy: "Growth and the case against randomista development" by John Halstead and Hauke Hillebrandt.