Kate Raworth Quotes

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.

Below the Doughnut’s social foundation lie shortfalls in human well-being, faced by those who lack life’s essentials such as food, education and housing. Beyond the ecological ceiling lies an overshoot of pressure on Earth’s life-giving systems, such as through climate change, ocean acidification and chemical pollution. But between these two sets of boundaries lies a sweet spot — shaped unmistakably like a doughnut — that is both an ecologically safe and socially just space for humanity. The twenty-first-century task is an unprecedented one: to bring all of humanity into that safe and just space.

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.

In the words of the systems thinker John Sterman, ‘The most important assumptions of a model are not in the equations, but what’s not in them; not in the documentation, but unstated; not in the variables on the computer screen, but in the blank spaces around them’.

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.

…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.

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.

First, invest in human ingenuity by teaching social entrepreneurship, problem-solving and collaboration in schools and universities worldwide: such skills will equip the next generation to innovate in open-source networks like no generation before them. Second, ensure that all publicly funded research becomes public knowledge by contractually requiring it to be licensed in the knowledge commons, rather than permitting it to be locked away under patents and copyright for private commercial gain. Third, roll back the excessive reach of corporate intellectual property claims in order to prevent spurious patent and copyright applications from encroaching on the knowledge commons.

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.

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.

Economics (...) is not a matter of discovering laws: it is essentially a question of design.

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.

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

Economics is the mother tongue of public policy,

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.