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 t… - Kate Raworth

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

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.

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.