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

by Kate Raworth

THE HOUSEHOLD, which is core—so value its contribution The Circular Flow diagram depicted labour appearing—hey presto!—fresh and ready for work each day at the office or factory door. So who cooked, cleaned up, and cleared away to make that possible? When Adam Smith, extolling the power of the market, noted that ‘it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner’, he forgot to mention the benevolence of his mother, Margaret Douglas, who had raised her boy alone from birth. Smith never married, so had no wife to rely upon (nor children of his own to raise). At the age of 43, as he began to write his opus, The Wealth of Nations, he moved back in with his cherished old mum, from whom he could expect his dinner every day. But her role in it all never got a mention in his economic theory, and it subsequently remained invisible for centuries.