The second update from the Anthropic Economic Index
Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015
Unequal exchange theory posits that economic growth in the “advanced economies” of the global North relies on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through price differentials in international trade. Past attempts to estimate the scale and value of this drain have faced a number of conceptual and empirical limitations, and have been unable to capture the upstream resources and labour embodied in traded goods. Here we use environmental input-output data and footprint analysis to quantify the physical scale of net appropriation from the South in terms of embodied resources and labour over the period 1990 to 2015. We then represent the value of appropriated resources in terms of prevailing market prices. Our results show that in 2015 the North net appropriated from the South 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour, worth $10.8 trillion in Northern prices – enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over. Over the whole period, drain from the South totalled $242 trillion (constant 2010 USD). This drain represents a significant windfall for the global North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. For comparison, we also report drain in global average prices. Using this method, we find that the South’s losses due to unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30. Our analysis confirms that unequal exchange is a significant driver of global inequality, uneven development, and ecological breakdown.
Anthropic has surged to a trillion-dollar valuation on secondary markets, overtaking OpenAI.
Buyers are in a race to secure a dwindling supply of shares in Anthropic, driving the AI company's valuation on some platforms to $1 trillion.
Anthropic boasts revenue run rate of $30 billion as the Claude developer expands its partnership with Google and Broadcom
Anthropic’s revenue run rate is higher than the trailing 12-month revenues of all but 129 S&P 500 companies....
IDS Annual Lecture 2026 with Jason Hickel - Institute of Development Studies
Join us for the IDS Annual Lecture 2026 delivered by world-renowned political economist and author Prof Jason Hickel.
013 - Olivier De Schutter on Why the Economy Creates Poverty – and How To Fix It
Why the US government labelled Anthropic a ‘supply chain risk’: A timeline - The Economic Times
The Department of War has demanded that Anthropic’s AI models be made available to it for "any lawful use." Anthropic has, however, refused to cross its strict ethical red lines — no fully autonomous weapons and no mass domestic surveillance.
Anthropic's "Profitability" Swindle
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about how Anthropic is “about to have its first profitable quarter,” specifically an operating profit, or EBITDA profitability: Anthropic’s revenue is set to more than double to $10.9 billion in the second quarter, an explosive rate of growth that will
Economics for the future – Beyond the superorganism
Our environment and economy are at a crossroads. This paper attempts a cohesive narrative on how human evolved behavior, money, energy, economy and th…
The Divide — Jason Hickel
The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions Penguin Random House UK, 2017
The shock of the anthropocene: the earth, history and us
Dissecting the new theoretical buzzword of the "Anthrop…
Regenerative Economics
Regenerative economies strengthen social and ecological systems. It's time for economics education to show us how.
Post-growth: the science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries
There are increasing concerns that continued economic growth in high-income countries might not be environmentally sustainable, socially beneficial, or economically achievable. In this Review, we explore the rapidly advancing field of post-growth research, which has evolved in response to these concerns. The central idea of post-growth is to replace the goal of increasing GDP with the goal of improving human wellbeing within planetary boundaries. Key advances discussed in this Review include: the development of ecological macroeconomic models that test policies for managing without growth; understanding and reducing the growth dependencies that tie social welfare to increasing GDP in the current economy; and characterising the policies and provisioning systems that would allow resource use to be reduced while improving human wellbeing.
The problem of knowledge in the Anthropocene
In the twentieth century, debates about economic planning were largely shaped by arguments concerning knowledge and the acquisition of information. As the century drew to a close, the dispute was a...
When is an economist not an economist?
A fraught question that warrants reflection on who gets to be a member of the influential informal guild
