Despite their current rhetoric of ‘free trade’, when it comes to trade negotiations almost all of today’s high-income countries — including the UK an… - Kate Raworth

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.

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?

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.