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 It's a bunch of outdated garbage from the Cold War that was really just a thinly veiled dogwhistle for 'white/the good Asians' and 'not white'.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.
What's funny is if you ever talk to wealthy people they will admit to basically all this shit as long as you pretend like you don't have a problem with it. Like I had the misfortune recently of being around some yuppie types who talked like an LLM trained on Financial Times articles and I literally made a statement about how the US controls the world's financial system and it funnels resources from "poorer" countries and their response was essentially "That's exactly right!" with a chuckle. They just don't like when you point out that what they are doing by participating in the system is fucking evil.
I know it's fun to dunk on these people and it helps us build our own knowledge and understanding but never forget that these people know exactly what they are doing, this is all defensive posturing, and if you schmoozed them up at hotel bar all of their real thoughts and feelings would come pouring out. Don't get too mad or frustrated about this shit because it's all a performance. Yes I'm saying this mostly for myself.