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

by Kate Raworth

He talked about promoting GDP growth in high-income countries as if it were an obvious necessity. When I questioned him about it, his answer was simple. ‘We have a deep-seated drive for growth,’ he said. ‘People need something to aspire to.’ I agree: people need something to aspire to. But is an ever-growing income really the best aspiration on offer? It was Alfred Marshall, back in Chapter 3, who endowed rational economic man with insatiable wants and desires. Thanks to Edward Bernays, that particularly seems to be the case among the WEIRD ones today – people in Western, educated, industrial, rich, democratic countries that are now the homelands of consumer society. Yet anthropologists can name both historical and contemporary examples of traditional societies that have lived by a principle of sufficiency instead, such as the Cree in northern Manitoba in the nineteenth century whose response to European traders defied economists’ expectations. In the hope of acquiring more furs, the Europeans offered them higher prices: in response the Cree brought fewer furs to the trading post, since a smaller number were now needed to obtain the goods that they wanted in exchange.71