Kate Raworth Quotes

Over the course of two centuries — from the 1770s to the 1970s, as economic man’s depiction morphed from a nuanced portrait to a crude cartoon — what had started as a model of man had turned into a model for man.

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.

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.

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.

Rostow hinted at his uncertainty of what might lie over that horizon, briefly acknowledging ‘the question beyond, where history offers us only fragments: what to do when the increase in real income itself loses its charm?’4 But he did not follow his own questioning through, and for understandable reasons: it was 1960 — the year of John F. Kennedy’s election bid on a promise of 5 percent growth — and for Rostow, a soon-to-be presidential adviser, it was wise to focus on keeping that plane in the sky, not on pondering when and how it would ever land.