RAMIDO, Angel Mae CLOHS – H141

Explains Hickle’s paradigm of de-develop rich countries, is it possible?

The article entitled “Forget 'developing' poor countries, it's time to 'de-develop' rich
countries” was published in September 2015, after the United Nations renegotiated the new
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in which its main objective is to eliminate poverty by the
year 2030. The author, Jason Hickel, argues that we must stop thinking about growth as a
response to eradicating poverty, but instead try to encourage the richer countries to tone down
their excesses. He explains that growth, although it has always been the main goal of
development for the past 70 years, has not worked because we have grown to the point of
"blowing past planetary boundaries at breakneck speed" so it should no longer be in our
development options. According to him, what we need to do is move some of the growth yields
from the rich segments of the population to the poorer segments to even things out a bit.

An economist Peter Edward proposed that if, instead of pushing developing countries to
catch up with rich ones, why don't rich countries catch down and have more acceptable levels of
development instead. The concept of de-developing into the rich countries that prove to be a
powerful rallying cry in the global south, but selling to Westerners would be troublesome even if
our ecological overshoot is due to their over-consumption almost entirely. They think of the word
de-develop which is synonymous with the words – de-growth and zero growth as a negative
thing; as they feel it will stop them from learning, developing, and growing as a country, but on
the contrary, de-develop is a technically accurate term but off-putting for everyone who is not
already on board. De-develop is in fact well known, compatible with high levels of human
development in which it is entirely possible for developed and developing countries to minimize
resource consumption while growing things that really matter such as human happiness, well-
being, education , health and longevity.

Everybody lives in a single world. We are breathing the same air, seeing the same sun rise
from east and setting in west. Even with those simple but essential things, however, resources
are not distributed equally in different countries. Thus, there are those who belong to the
developed nations while others belong to the developing nations. With this unequal distribution,
I think it's essential to us, a developing country, to begin to call on rich countries to explain their
excessive consumption. In this article, this part "US life expectancy is 79 years, and GDP per capita
is 53,000 dollars. But with a mere fraction of that income many countries have achieved similar
life expectancy Cuba has a comparable life expectancy to the US and one of the world's highest
literacy rates with GDP per capita of only $6,000 and consumption of just 1.9 hectares – right at
the ecological sustainability threshold. Similar arguments can be made of Peru, Ecuador,
Honduras , Nicaragua, and Tunisia shows that some of the excess income and consumption that
we see in the rich world yields changes in quality of life, but it has little to do with their GDP as
only countries that have just a fraction of it can do it. I think it is time to put an end to the Gross
Domestic Product ( GDP) which is a monetary indicator of the market value of all the final goods
and services produced as a measure of human progress and development over a period of time.
We need to reorient ourselves as part of the developing country towards a better future, to a
more concrete kind of development in which we can increase life expectancies and happiness
indicators without anchoring them to our Gross Domestic Product as there are alternative ways
to enhance our lives while reducing consumption and with this kind of mentality. The Sustainable
Development Goals ( SDGs) aimed at reducing poverty would possibly be reached in 2030. So
let's forget poor developing countries, because it is actually the time for us to 'develop' rich
countries.