Kate Raworth Quotes

Calling all economic rebels: humanity's future depends on you. Yes, really. Because, unless we transform the economic and public debate, we stand very little chance indeed of thriving in this century.

Likewise, rather than focusing by default on how to increase economic activity, ask how the content and structure of that activity might be shaping society, politics and power. And just how big can the economy become, given Earth’s ecological capacity?

…environmental quality is higher where income is more equitably distributed, where more people are literate, and civil and political rights are better respected. It’s people power, not economic growth persay, that protects local air and water quality. Likewise, it is citizen pressure on government and companies for more stringent standards, not the mere increase in revenue that compels industries to switch to cleaner technologies.

More extraordinarily, scientists suggest that, if undisturbed, the Holocene’s benevolent conditions would be likely to continue for another 50,000 years due to the unusually circular orbit that Earth is currently making of the sun

Whether you consider yourself an economic veteran or novice, now is the time to uncover the economic graffiti that lingers in all of our minds and, if you don’t like what you find, scrub it out; or, better still, paint it over with new images that far better serve our needs and times. The rest of this book proposes seven ways to think like a twenty-first-century economist, revealing for each of those seven ways the spurious image that has occupied our minds, how it came to be so powerful, and the damaging influence it has had. But the time for mere critique is past, which is why the focus here is on creating new images that capture the essential principles to guide us now. The diagrams in this book aim to summarise that leap from old to new economic thinking. Taken together they set out – quite literally – a new big picture for the twenty-first-century economist. So here is a whirlwind tour of the ideas and images at the heart of Doughnut Economics. First, change the goal. For over 70 years economics has been fixated on GDP, or national output, as its primary measure of progress. That fixation has been used to justify extreme inequalities of income and wealth coupled with unprecedented destruction of the living world. For the twenty-first century a far bigger goal is needed: meeting the human rights of every person within the means of our life-giving planet. And that goal is encapsulated in the concept of the Doughnut. The challenge now is to create economies – local to global – that help to bring all of humanity into the Doughnut’s safe and just space. Instead of pursuing ever-increasing GDP, it is time to discover how to thrive in balance.

Life on Earth has the chance of another five billion years in its favour, at which point our star, the sun, will start to die. Earth’s Holocene-like conditions could continue for another 50,000 years — as Chapter 1 described — if we humans learn to navigate the Anthropocene without pushing our planet into a far hotter, drier, and more hostile state. The economies that we create could keep on thriving — not growing, but thriving — for millennia too, if we manage them wisely.

argues the evolutionary psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer: we have survived and thrived not despite our cognitive biases but because of them. These so-called biases are the underpinnings of our heuristics, the unconscious mental shortcuts we take every time we use a ‘rule of thumb’ to make decisions. Over millennia, the human brain has evolved to rely on quick decision-making tools in a fast-moving and uncertain world, and in many contexts those heuristics lead us to make better decisions than exact calculations would do.

Today we have economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive. What we need are economies that make us thrive, whether or not they grow.

The search for gain — which drives shareholder returns, speculative trading and interest-bearing loans — lodges dependency upon continual GDP growth deep within the financial system.

The pressure for shareholder returns is, however, just one manifestation of how financial gain drives growth. Indeed this expectation of gain is so ingrained that we hardly notice its most unusual feature: it runs counter to the fundamental dynamic of our world.

Around 40 percent of the world’s agricultural land is now seriously degraded, and by 2025 two out of three people worldwide will live in water-stressed regions.

What kind of currency, then, could be aligned with the living world so that it promoted regenerative investments rather than pursuing endless accumulation? One possibility is a currency bearing demurrage, a small fee incurred for holding money, so that it tends to lose rather than gain in value the longer it is held. The fact that demurrage is an unfamiliar term shows how accustomed we are to the ever-rising financial escalator that we ride – like knowing the idea of ‘up’ but not ‘down’, ‘more’ but not ‘less’. But demurrage is a word worth knowing because it could just feature in the financial future.

If growth were to be abandoned as an objective of policy,’ wrote the economist Wilfred Beckerman in 1974, ‘democracy too would have to be abandoned . . . the costs of deliberate non-growth, in terms of the political and social transformation that would be required in society, are astronomical.’26 Beckerman’s influential book In Defense of Economic Growth was a scathing response to the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report and it became an instant pro-growth classic.

As a result, we are born pattern-spotters, seeing faces in the clouds, ghosts in the shadows, and mythical beasts in the stars.

What if every company strategised around a Doughnut table, asking itself: is our brand a Doughnut brand, whose core business helps to bring humanity into that safe and just space? Imagine if the G20 finance ministers — representing the world’s most powerful economies — met around a Doughnut-shaped conference table to discuss how to design a global financial system that served to bring humanity into that sweet spot. These would be world-changing conversations.