Kate Raworth Quotes

Rather than overriding our rules of thumb with a nudge, he argues, we should nurture those heuristic abilities while bolstering them with basic skills in assessing risk.

In the Togolese capital of Lomé, architect Sénamé Agbodjinou and colleagues set up Woelab in 2012, a ‘low-high tech’ workshop making its own design of open-source 3D printers using the component parts of defunct computers, printers and scanners that have been dumped in West Africa.

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.

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.

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.

availability bias — making decisions on the basis of more recent and more accessible information loss aversion — the strong preference to avoid a loss rather than to make an equivalent gain selective cognition — taking on board facts and arguments that fit with our existing frames risk bias — underestimating the likelihood of extreme events, while overestimating our ability to cope with them.

The word ‘economics’ was coined by the philosopher Xenophon in Ancient Greece. Combining oikos meaning household with nomos meaning rules or norms, he invented the art of household management, and it could not be more relevant today.

When Adam Smith, extolling the power of the market, noted that, ‘it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner’, he forgot to mention the benevolence of his mother, Margaret Douglas, who had raised her boy alone from birth. Smith never married so had no wife to rely upon (nor children of his own to raise). At the age of 43, as he began to write his opus, The Wealth of Nations, he moved back in with his cherished old mum, from whom he could expect his dinner every day. But her role in it all never got a mention in his economic theory, and it subsequently remained invisible for centuries.

cleaning up a nation’s air and water by shifting from manufacturing to service industries doesn’t eliminate those pollutants: it sends them overseas, letting someone else, somewhere else, feel the burn while those back home can import the neatly packaged finished product.

global greenhouse gas emissions is highly skewed: the top 10 percent of emitters — think of them as the global carbonistas living on every continent — generate around 45 percent of global emissions, while the bottom 50 percent of people contribute only 13 percent.

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.

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.

One person who was willing to risk political suicide was the visionary systems thinker Donella Meadows — one of the lead authors of the 1972 Limits to Growth report

Instead of immediately focusing on making markets work more efficiently, we can start by considering: when is each of the four realms of provisioning — household, commons, market and state — best suited to delivering humanity’s diverse wants and needs? What changes in technology, culture and social norms might alter that? How can these four realms most effectively work together — such as the market with the commons, the commons with the state, or the state with the household? 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?

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.