Some genius takes:
The whole Global North/South split is a pet peeve of mine as a social scientist working in development policy. It’s a bunch of outdated garbage from the Cold War that was really just a thinly veiled dogwhistle for ‘white/the good Asians’ and ‘not white’. It doesn’t hold up to any rational examination. South Africa was part of the Global North until white rule under Apartheid ended, and now they’re in the Global South. southern nations.
Real educated economist chimes in:
Jason Hickel is an anthropologist (read: not economist) and degrowther. Despite having no background and seemingly almost no understanding of economics as a field, he somehow continues to get ‘economics’ papers published in reputable journals despite their obvious low quality. But to anyone with a cursory understanding of economics, it should be entirely unsurprising that exports from developing nations to developed are more labor intensive than vice-versa. This is not a novel conclusion and is not ‘appropriation’, but is entirely explained by a concept in economics called comparative advantage.
Another genius owns the article epic style
This paper is a demonstration of why input-output (IO) models are bad for economic research. IO models were used by the soviet central planners to allocate resources. IO models are bad for research for the same reason the are bad for planning. The authors look at “embodied labor” (adjusted for human capital), the idea being that any two things produced by an hour of (human capital adjusted) labor must have the same value (btw, this “labor theory of value” goes back to Adam Smith, and was later promulgated by Marx).
Other facts that the authors’ framework will struggle to explain: why is it that the poor countries that most integrated with global trade networks became rich (s korea, Japan, Singapore) or are otherwise growing quickly (china, Panama, Vietnam)? Why is it that countries with severe barriers to trade with the global north struggle to grow (n Korea, India for second half of 20th century)? That’s very hard to explain if trade with the global north is fundamentally exploitative.
Okay but even if we operate within the constraints of this framework, we have to ask some questions. Firstly, why does India not simply mechanise their agriculture while continuing to pay comparatively low wages, as such would result in higher profit than continuing to use non mechanised agriculture? Secondly, in such a case as illustrated in the first question, wouldn’t a ton of agricultural production move to India to maximise profits? Lastly, given that neither of the above has happened, with the distribution of agricultural technology being what it is, and the division of labour that results from that, we have to ask if this is compatible with equal exchange?
The wages are often too low to make it cost effective to mechanize. Also, you have to keep in mind that India is not a rationally planned economy. India as a whole would enormously benefit from mechanization of agriculture, but capitalists and landowners have different interests.
I agree that intellectual property law is creating unequal exchanges, but I suspect that this is still quite a small effect relative to the total global economy. I welcome an investigation into that.
From a review of a recent book on copyright law
That is a lower bound though, since they also make enormous amounts of money from using the intellectual property to not have competitors. Still is pretty small in the scale of the whole economy, I would expect.
I seem to recall a similar situation occurring with the pre Mao landlords. They had real interests in keeping productivity gains suppressed. I can’t remember why exactly but filling up a persons time with survival as much as possible is a powerful counter revolutionary tool