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

by Kate Raworth

But, thanks to the lasting influence of Jevons and Walras, most economics teaching and textbooks still introduce the essence of the economic world as linear, mechanical and predictable, summed up by the market’s equilibrating mechanism. It’s a mindset that will leave future economists deeply ill-equipped to handle the complexity of the contemporary world. In a playful ‘look back from 2050’ the economist David Colander recounts that, by 2020, the majority of scientists – from physicists to biologists – had already realised that complexity thinking was essential for understanding much of the world. Economists, however, were a little slower on the uptake and it was not until 2030 that ‘most economic researchers believed that the economy was a complex system that belonged within complexity science’.