More money flows from poor nations to rich nations every year than the other way around. The Global South is a net creditor to the Global North, which is a mind-blowing fact that reverses the way that we think about how development industry works. For $1 in aid that the South receives, they actually lose $24 in net outflows. We need to stop thinking of aid as a solution - it makes the takers in the system, rich countries, appear like givers and gives them a moral high ground that obscures the way the global economic system actually works.

Anthropologist Jason Hickel examines the creation of mass poverty in the Global South - from the exploitation built into the structures of global trade, development programs and aid policies, to the echoes of colonialism in the structural adjustment programs of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

Jason is author of The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets from Norton Books.