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

by Kate Raworth

Where did this infamous character come from? His most intimate early portrait was created by Adam Smith in two major works, his 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments and his 1776 book known as The Wealth of Nations. Today Smith is best remembered for having noted the human propensity to ‘truck, barter and exchange’ and the role of self-interest in making markets work.2 But although he believed self-interest was, ‘of all virtues that which is most helpful to the individual’, Smith also believed it was far from the most admirable of our traits, knocked off that top spot by our ‘humanity, justice, generosity and public spirit … the qualities most useful to others’. Did he consider humankind to be motivated by self-interest alone? Not at all. ‘How selfish soever man may be supposed,’ he wrote, ‘there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.’