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

by Jason Hickel

Rich countries have expensive labour because of a long history of unions and strong labour laws, and have abundant capital because of long-standing tariff protections that allowed them to develop their industries. Poor countries, on the other hand, have cheap labour and no capital because of a long history of colonisation, dispossession, unequal treaties and structural adjustment. Comparative advantage isn’t given, it is created.5 To suggest that the global South should focus on exporting raw material while the North should focus on capital-intensive industry is the equivalent of saying that black people are just naturally better at working in the cotton fields while white people are just naturally better at being overseers, and that investing in educating a black person to become anything other than a common labourer is a ‘distortion’ that runs against their natural abilities. It takes an inequitable social relationship and gives it the aura of the natural, of the unquestionable.