Wise words from the prophet... er, I mean author Frank Herbert.

#ai #dune #quotes

Jason Hickel's book 'The Divide' - A Review.

A brilliant analysis of global inequality, though it suffers from the imbalance of most books of this type: it spends 250 pages setting out in detail how big and intractable the problems are, then just 50 sketchy pages on possible solutions.

It falls into 4 parts. The first is a detailed deconstruction of how western governments, their international agencies like the World Bank, and their supine media, have created the impression through statistical sleight-of-hand that international aid has been relieving poverty and hunger, when in fact the flow of wealth has been massively in favour of the West, and the truth is that poverty and hunger have been getting worse in most of the 'third world'.

Most blatant of all, they claim successes for capitalism and western aid that in fact have been entirely due to the very real development miracle in... communist China. Take China and its close neighbours out of the statistics, and almost everything has been going backwards fast.

The second part is a summary narrative of the true history of colonialism, revealing the enormous scale of wealth taken by the West from the rest of the world since 1500, and how indeed the West has not only plundered it, but actively prevented the non-white world from developing itself.

The third part describes how the violent exploitation of slavery and colonialism has changed form - into financial instruments and unfair trading terms - but not effect: massive transfers of wealth out of most of the world into the West.

The short final part offers Hickel's solutions. It is largely an appeal to governments to co-operate to better regulate multinational corporations, trade, debt and tax, and to democratise the international bodies for this co-operation: the UN, WTO, etc... All well and good - but Hickel neither deals with the question of how such progressive co-operation can be brought about, nor the structural problem of the publicly-traded share company model - even though this problem, which makes big business investor-driven and therefore largely indifferent to negative impacts on people and planet, is essentially the same as the indifference of 'investors' extracting interest payments from already impoverished people.

Time to make 2025 updates to my annual “opinions about solar” thread. If you like these, you might like the second edition of my book, Solar Power Finance Without The Jargon. A 30% discount code WSQ0437 is valid on publisher website until end of Nov 2025.

It's the book I should have read before trying to get a job in renewable energy. Reviewers describe it as “to the point, important, and taught me a lot” and “surprisingly entertaining, don’t be put off by the title”.

https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/q0437#t=aboutBook