Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

by Kate Raworth

Other characters not required on stage: THE HOUSEHOLD, which is domestic—so leave it to the women. The household supplies labour and capital to the market, but there’s no need to lift the roof and ask what goes on within its four walls: wives and daughters kindly take care of domestic affairs and they belong in the home, as does this matter. THE COMMONS, which are tragic—so sell them off. In the 1960s, Garrett Hardin described ‘the tragedy of the commons’ in which shared resources—such as grazing land and fish stocks—tend to be over-exploited by individual users and so are depleted for all.12 Managing such resources sustainably therefore calls for government regulation or, better still, private ownership. SOCIETY, which is non-existent—so ignore it. ‘There is no such thing as society,’ Margaret Thatcher famously declared in the 1980s. ‘There are individual men and women, and there are families.’13 And it is the market that connects them, as workers and as consumers. EARTH, which is inexhaustible—so take all you want. There will be no shortage of Earth’s resources, claimed the laissez-faire economist Julian Simon in the 1980s, if markets are permitted to do their job. A shortage of, say, copper or oil will raise its price, spurring people to use it more sparingly, search for new sources and discover substitutes.14 POWER, which is irrelevant—so don’t mention it. The only economic power to be worried about, argued Friedman, is monopoly power granted by the state when it meddl...