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

by Kate Raworth

In 2000, economics students in Paris sent an open letter to their professors, rejecting the dogmatic teaching of mainstream theory. ‘We wish to escape from imaginary worlds!’ they wrote, ‘Call to teachers: wake up before it is too late!’1 A decade later, a group of Harvard students staged a mass walk-out of a lecture by Professor Gregory Mankiw—author of the world’s most widely taught economics textbooks—in protest against the narrow and biased ideological perspective that they believed his course espoused. They were, they said, ‘deeply concerned that this bias affects students, the University, and our greater society’.2

‘You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.’

The word ‘economics’ was coined by the philosopher Xenophon in Ancient Greece. Combining oikos meaning household with nomos meaning rules or norms, he invented the art of household management,