Kate Raworth Quotes

Governments have historically opted to tax what they could, rather than what they should, and it shows.

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.

true plantsman knows, gardening is far from laissez-faire. In their book The Gardens of Democracy, Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer argue that moving from ‘machinebrain’ to ‘gardenbrain’ thinking calls for a simultaneous shift away from believing that things will self-regulate to realising that things need stewarding. ‘To be a gardener is not to let nature take its course; it is to tend,’ they write. ‘Gardeners don’t make plants grow but they do create conditions where plants can thrive and they do make judgments about what should and shouldn’t be in the garden.’46 That is why economic gardeners must throw themselves in, nurturing, selecting, repotting, grafting, pruning and weeding the plants as they grow and mature.

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.

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.

drop the economist’s beloved notion of ‘externalities’, those incidental effects felt by people who were not involved in the transactions that produced them — such as toxic effluent that affects communities living downstream of a river-polluting factory, or the exhaust fumes inhaled by cyclists biking through city traffic. Such negative externalities, remarks the ecological economist Herman Daly, are those things that ‘we classify as “external” costs for no better reason than because we have made no provision for them in our economic theories’.21 The systems dynamics expert John Sterman concurs. ‘There are no side effects — just effects,’ he says, pointing out that the very notion of side effects is just ‘a sign that the boundaries of our mental models are too narrow, our time horizons too short’.

Out of all of these power relationships, when it comes to the workings of the economy, one in particular demands attention: the power of the wealthy to reshape the economy’s rules in their favour.

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.

in 1767 — just 40 years after Newton’s death — when the Scottish lawyer James Steuart first proposed the concept of ‘political economy’, he defined it no longer as an art but as ‘the science of domestic policy in free nations’. But naming it as a science still didn’t stop him from spelling out its purpose: The principal object of this science is to secure a certain fund of subsistence for all the inhabitants, to obviate every circumstance which may render it precarious; to provide every thing necessary for supplying the wants of the society, and to employ the inhabitants (supposing them to be free-men) in such a manner as naturally to create reciprocal relations and dependencies between them, so as to make their several interests lead them to supply one another with their reciprocal wants.

Economics is the mother tongue of public policy,

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.

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.

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.

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

Depicting rational economic man as an isolated individual – unaffected by the choices of others – proved highly convenient for modelling the economy, but it was long questioned even from within the discipline. At the end of the nineteenth century, the sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen berated economic theory for depicting man as a ‘self-contained globule of desire’, while the French polymath Henri Poincaré pointed out that it overlooked ‘people’s tendency to act like sheep’.31 He was right: we are not so different from herds as we might like to imagine. We follow social norms, typically preferring to do what we expect others will do and, especially if filled with fear or doubt, we tend to go with the crowd.