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

by Kate Raworth

‘What we need is not just better technology, bigger bureaucracy and stricter laws … but risk-savvy citizens.’ And he has demonstrated that we can indeed learn to become more risk-savvy, by successfully teaching everyday statistical-reasoning skills to German doctors, American judges and Chinese schoolchildren alike. Rather than be passively nudged into acting wisely, he believes, we can learn to be risk-savvy with the rule of thumb and so choose to act wisely ourselves.39 It’s an appealing and empowering approach, but one problem with relying upon heuristics won’t go away: they work best in the context for which they evolved. Humanity’s context, however, has changed over the past 10,000 years and particularly dramatically in the last 200 years. Take the devastating effects of climate change, for example: at first they tend to be invisible, delayed, gradual and distant: four characteristics that our heuristic decision tools are infamously bad at handling well.