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

by Kate Raworth

‘You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.’

Global population stands today at 7.3 billion and is expected to reach almost 10 billion

by 2050, levelling off at around 11 billion by 2100.

The global middle class – those spending between $10 and $100 a day – is set to expand rapidly, from 2 billion today to 5 billion by 2030,

‘Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.’

‘Growth is one of the stupidest purposes ever invented by any culture,’ she declared in the late 1990s; ‘we’ve got to have an enough.’

Worldwide, one person in nine does not have enough to eat. One in four lives on less than $3 a day, and one in eight young people cannot find work. One person in three still has no access to a toilet and one in eleven has no source of safe drinking water. One child in six aged 12–15 is not in school, the vast majority of them girls. Almost 40% of people live in countries in which income is distributed highly unequally. And more than half of the world’s population live in countries in which people severely lack political voice.

The idea of Earth as a spaceship – a self-contained living capsule – gained popularity in the 1960s, prompting the economist Robert Heilbroner to point out that, ‘As in all spaceships, sustained life requires

Friends of the Earth advocated the concept of ‘environmental space’,

Oxfam has published national Doughnut reports, revealing how far each nation is from living within a nationally defined safe and just space.39

The Doughnut provides us with a twenty-first-century compass but what determines whether or not we can actually move into its safe and just space? Five factors certainly play key roles: population, distribution, aspiration, technology and governance.

ensure that every person can lead a life free of deprivation, above the social foundation.

In 2009, humanity went urban, with over half of us living in cities and towns for the first time in history, and 70% of us are expected to be urbanites by 2050.

As economist Tim Jackson deftly put it, we are ‘persuaded to

spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to make impressions that won’t last on people we don’t care about’.

‘The business of business is business’

Earth itself, however, is a closed system because almost no matter leaves or arrives on this planet: energy from the sun may flow through it, but materials can only cycle within it.