The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions

by Jason Hickel

It is now widely acknowledged by scholars that structural adjustment was one of the greatest single causes of poverty in the global South, after colonialism. But it proved to be enormously beneficial to the economies of the North.

poor countries pay over $200 billion each year in interest alone to foreign creditors,

Poor countries don’t need our aid; they need us to stop impoverishing them.

The UN finds that cutting global food waste by only a quarter and redirecting it to where it is needed most would solve global hunger in a single stroke.27

Without the ecological windfall from the slave colonies, Europe would not have been able to shift its economic capacity towards industrialisation.

Indeed, without the slave colonies of the New World to consume its goods, Europe’s industrialisation would have been impossible.