21st century economics needs a better goal than ‘growth’: Kate Raworth
Kate Raworth is Senior Associate at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute. Speaking to Srijana Mitra Das, she discusses why reinventing economics is key to the ecological — and development — crises:
What is the core of your research?
I’m rewriting economics, starting with its foundational concepts. That’s what my book ‘Doughnut Economics’ is about. I drew a picture of the shape of progress. We’re told this shape is ‘growth’ — yet, huge ecological and social damage has been done through the way economies have grown. We need a much better goal for the 21st century. The picture I drew had a hole in the middle, like a doughnut — the aim is to leave nobody in that hole, short of life’s essentials like food, water, health, education, etc. But we need to do this without overshooting the outer ring of Earth’s limits. Returning to the textbooks I was taught, which are still taught today, I found these profoundly misguiding and not giving students the knowledge or orientation to turn things around. My book came out in 2017 and since then, many firms, governments, international institutions, etc., wanted to put these principles into practice. I co-founded the Doughnut Economics Action Lab to work with them.
You write about ‘how to think like a 21st century economist’. What orthodoxies should be shed for this?
I always ask what the first diagram anyone who’s studied economics was —world over, I’m told ‘supply and demand’. We’ve been taught economics is the art of household management where the market is at the
