Jason Hickel Features On Citations Needed
The latest episode Neoliberal Optimism Industry of the podcast Citations Needed features Jason Hickel, who has done a lot of work to bust the narrative of the World Bank on poverty.
Excerpt:
Jason Hickel: So Gates is sort of the forefront of this aid narrative and the way that I see this as problematic is because it effectively ends up obscuring the real causes of the problems that are at stake. Right? So we’re all concerned about global poverty and human suffering, etcetera. But what’s really causing these problems? So the aid discourse makes it seem as though what’s needed is like little technocratic fixes here and there, some more malaria bed nets here and there, but it distracts our attention away from the fundamental structure of the international economy and you know, the rules that govern international trade and that’s really what needs to be addressed because effectively if you look into the way that that system operates, it’s effectively designed in such a way that facilitates the siphoning of wealth and cheap labor and resources from the South to the North.
I am not a fan of degrowth in the episode but the podcast is for an hour and worth your time. The title is the link to the audio and transcript. You can alternatively find the episode on iTunes.