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Why is the West hell-bent on preventing Palestinian liberation? I joined Upstream to talk about Palestine and West Asia in the context of the capitalist world-system. It's available for free here, or anywhere you get your podcasts.
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For people in Europe, one of the most important objectives for political mobilisation now is to remove the US military bases. They are a menace to humanity, they are a threat to popular sovereignty, and every one of them must be closed.
What Israel is doing to Lebanon is obscene, carpet bombing civilians, massacring people in their hundreds, total disregard for human life. Truly plumbing the depths of evil. The single greatest source of violence and instability in the region and it's not even close.
Iran's demands are reasonable and should be implemented. In fact, given the barbarity of the illegal aggression—the assassination of their head of state and civilian leaders, massacre of civilians, destruction of hospitals and schools—the demands are if anything restrained.
NEW EP @jasonhickel.bsky.social joins us to discuss why Palestinian liberation is a threat to global capital accumulation and why the West is hellbent on breaking its resistance—at any cost.
Two years of live-streamed genocide and now this. Just horrifying levels of depravity.
The main thing AI has taught me is a profound new appreciation for human intelligence (and human writing and art!), particularly that which emerges from longstanding experience, expertise and mastery.
Why care about all this? Because every man who was impoverished by these policies is my brother, every mother who died needlessly during childbirth is my sister. Nothing will shake my conviction in that fact.
People don't riot for no reason, they riot because they are desperate. The IMF and WB themselves recognized this, and relaxed some of their more extreme conditions.
In sum, existing research provides valuable information on the social harms related to structural adjustment. And this should not be surprising; after all, we know there were mass protests and riots across much of the South during the adjustment period. They were literally called "IMF riots".
Even removing HIV, there is increasing child mortality after 1986 compared to the pre-SAP trend. Several studies indicate that adjustment was associated with increased child deaths in Sub-Saharan Africa.
We note that some of this is attributable to HIV (and cite research showing that this pathway too is exacerbated by SAPs), but we also know from work by IRD and CERDI researchers that, in Kenya, HIV is responsible for a minor share of the change in the child mortality trend.
Regarding Kenya, we see an increase in infant mortality after 1986, and the same pattern in child mortality.
As for the question of national income, researchers have found liberalization had a negative impact on growth in non-manufacturing regions, which is evident in the case of LatAm and SSA, but this does not apply in regions with higher manufacturing.
While healthcare and some other sectors began to be liberalized earlier, in the 1980s, the BNPL basket was not substantially affected until 1990.
The policies affected food prices, which is why we see an increase in BNPL poverty.
As for China, their agreement with the World Bank was signed in 1988 and implemented in 1990.
As for India's 1981 loan, the IMF insisted on adjustment conditions, the Indian government said they could not accept externally imposed conditions, so it was agreed they would implement "homegrown conditionality", with policies generally aligned with IMF preferences.
Most of the rest first implemented in 1982 and 1983, and of course any assessment of effects should assess interventions on a country-specific basis.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, for the majority of countries that were SAPed, comprising most of regional GDP, 1980 was the year immediately prior to first implementation.
Someone asked about using 1980 as the starting point for liberalization. This is common convention: Chang, Pollin, Weisbrot, Baker, Rosnick and others use 1980 to generally distinguish between the developmentalist and neoliberal periods.
As for the figures, none of them claim to demonstrate causality. They are included purely as illustrations of broad trends in social indicators during the adjustment period - social indicators that are assessed by the studies we cite.
And yes, the piece also cites political economy research that does not rely on statistical analysis, because these are also recognized as valuable contributions to the literature. Along these lines I encourage everyone to read Mike Davis masterpiece "Planet of Slums" which includes a chapter on SAPs
-On child health: academic.oup.com/ije/article/...
-On health system access and neonatal mortality: sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
-And there are many others we were forced to cut for brevity
This literature deserves to be better known. For instance, see:
-On poverty: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
-On poverty and inequality: degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...
-On child and maternal health: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
In other words, it is incorrect to claim there is no evidence on the causal effects of SAPs. There is such evidence, and we cite key examples, including studies that account for endogeneity and selection biases.
Instead, it provides citations to examples of previously published research that has explored the impact of SAPs on various social outcomes, including studies that *do* undertake to assess causal effect.
It is obviously beyond the remit of such a piece to undertake original statistical assessment, and indeed the piece makes no claim to such an undertaking.
Strange, because this is very clearly *not* a research paper. Nor is it a systematic review paper. It is simply a short analysis paper, clearly labelled as such, which is intended to "discuss topical issues" as per BMJ guidelines.
Regarding this piece on the social impacts of structural adjustment (jasonhickel.org/s/e017221ful.... it is quite strange that some people have criticized it by saying it does not implement original statistical assessment to establish causality.