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 It's a bunch of outdated garbage from the Cold War that was really just a thinly veiled dogwhistle for 'white/the good Asians' and 'not white'.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.
Their criticism is "they didn't engage with conventional capitalist theories like comparative advantage," which they insist explains away the whole exploitation framing ("some countries are just better at producing certain goods"), though you'll notice in their comment they kinda completely gloss over the wage comparison that shows southern workers consistently get paid way tf less than their northern counterparts for the same work, which they are generally also doing more of.
They also complain that the paper references sources with titles about imperialism, exploitation, colonization, etc., and that this is a sign of bias. "Talk about the problem without using words I don't like." Capitalists chose not to engage with these issue in any way but to dismiss them or re-frame them as positive, so of course the literature is dirty pinko stuff.
Really funny to see them waving comparative advantage around like it's a magic wand that solves all problems and stopping a hair short of alleging that Nature is a paper mill. Deeply unserious.
this is just classical racism repackaged. boo. get new material!
well they certainly didn't check in with their econ 101 professor before they pumped this article out and made fools of themselves according to Fubby2