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

by Kate Raworth

Far more secure is for every person to have a stake in owning the robot technology itself. What might that look like? Some advocate a ‘robot dividend’, an idea inspired by the Alaska Permanent Fund, which grants every Alaskan citizen, through a state constitutional amendment, an annual slice of the state’s income arising from the oil and gas industry,

With great irony, the intensive overuse and abuse of intellectual property law today is widely acknowledged to be stifling the very innovation that it was originally created to promote.

in many high-tech industries patents are frequently acquired tactically with the specific aim of blocking or suing competitors.

Mainstream economic theory claims that without intellectual property protection, innovators lack the incentive to bring new products to market because they cannot recoup their costs. But in the collaborative commons, millions of innovators are defying this received wisdom, co-creating and using free open-source software, known as FOSS, as well as free open-source hardware, or FOSH.

Open-source design also promises large social benefits and vast cost savings for state-funded institutions in every country, says Joshua Pearce, a leading academic and engineer in free open-source hardware. His research into the economics of FOSH manufacturing finds that using open-source 3D printers and designs to produce essential scientific equipment – like the precision syringes used widely in labs and hospitals – slashes costs, making such equipment far more affordable and accessible worldwide.

ensure that all publicly funded research becomes public knowledge,

Where high-income countries have broken their promise of financial redistribution, global migrants have stepped in. Out of their earnings, the remittances they send to their families back home are now the single largest source of external finance in many low-income countries,

That makes migration one of the most effective ways of reducing global income inequality.

if anything, people tend to work harder and seize more opportunities when they know they have a secure fallback.

UBI safety net opens up opportunities for risk and innovation

There are now more than 2,000 billionaires living in 20 countries from the USA, China and Russia to Turkey, Thailand and Indonesia.93 An annual wealth tax levied at just 1.5% of their net worth would raise $74 billion each year: that alone would be enough to fill the funding gap to get every child into school and deliver essential health services in all low-income countries.

Match that with a global corporate tax system that treats multinational corporations as single, unified firms, and closes tax loopholes and tax havens, so boosting public revenue for public purposes worldwide.

I pointed out that almost half of India’s land is degraded, the nation’s groundwater levels are falling fast, and air pollution is the worst in the world. A flicker of recognition crossed his face but he just smiled and repeated his words, ‘We still have other priorities.’

Still, they acknowledged that there was no proof of a direct link between economic growth and environmental clean-up, so

The extraction and processing of Earth’s materials within the borders of high-income countries has indeed been falling, leading to triumphant claims across the EU and the OECD of rising resource productivity and the decoupling of GDP growth from resource use – both touted as early evidence of the ‘green growth’ dream. But the celebrations have come too soon. ‘These trends make developed countries look more resource-efficient,’ warns Tommy Wiedmann, one of the experts spearheading the analysis of international resource flows, ‘but they actually remain deeply anchored to a material foundation underneath.’6

From 1990 to 2007, as GDP grew in high-income countries, so did their global material footprints. And not just by a little bit: the US, the UK, New Zealand and Australia all saw their footprints grow by more than 30% over that period; in Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands they grew by over 50%. Japan’s footprint, meanwhile, grew by 14% and Germany’s by 9%: impressively lower than the rest, but still growing.

Janine Benyus knows the frustrations of this challenge at first hand. While collaborating with a large commercial land developer on designs for renovating the suburb of a major city, she proposed constructing buildings whose biomimetic living walls would sequester carbon dioxide, release oxygen, and filter the surrounding air. The developer’s first response? ‘But why should I provide clean air for the rest of the city?’

The glaring gap between the regenerative potential of the circular economy and its narrow efficiency-focused practice by corporations has inspired the launch of an Open Source Circular Economy (OSCE) movement.

That same spirit of building the knowledge commons inspired Janine Benyus to launch the website Asknature.org, which makes the long-held secrets of nature’s materials, structures and processes open-source for all

The long-advocated switch from taxing labour to taxing non-renewable resources can be boosted by subsidies for renewable energy and resource-efficient investments. Such measures would refocus industry’s attention away from raising labour productivity and towards raising resource productivity, dramatically reducing the use of new materials and creating jobs at the same time.

‘It is time to re-examine the pursuit of economic growth at all costs,’ concludes US energy economist David Murphy; ‘we should expect the economic growth rates of the next 100 years to look nothing like those of the last 100 years.’

Attempting to sustain GDP growth in an economy that may actually be close to maturing can drive governments to take desperate and destructive measures. They deregulate – or rather reregulate – finance in the hope of unleashing new productive investment, but end up unleashing speculative bubbles, house price hikes, and debt crises instead. They promise business that they will ‘cut red tape’, but end up dismantling legislation that was put in place to protect workers’ rights, community resources and the living world. They privatise public services – from hospitals to railways – turning public wealth into private revenue streams.

Only money that ‘goes out of date like a newspaper, rots like potatoes, rusts like iron’ would be willingly handed over for objects that similarly decay, argued Gessel: ‘… we must make money worse as a commodity if we wish to make it better as a medium of exchange’.

one of the best ways to preserve the long-term value of stored wealth would be to invest it in long-term regenerative activity such as a reforestation scheme.56 Banks would consider lending to enterprises promising a near-zero return on investment if it were preferable to the cost of holding money:

public spending is often used by those who oppose it to evoke a never-ending outlay. Public investment, on the other hand, focuses on the public goods – such as high-quality schools and effective public transport – that underpin collective well-being.

At least $18.5 trillion is hidden by wealthy individuals in tax havens worldwide, representing an annual loss of more than $156 billion in tax revenue, a sum that could end extreme income poverty twice over.

the New Economics Foundation has distilled the findings down to five simple acts that are proven to promote well-being: connecting to the people around us, being active in our bodies, taking notice of the world, learning new skills, and giving to others.

prestigious ones, such as Harvard and the London School of Economics. ‘The highest-ranked departments don’t want to do anything that would risk losing their place in the league tables,’ Yuan told me. ‘Their high scores come from publishing research in what are known as the “top” journals, but those journals simply maintain the status quo.’