Kate Raworth

To the alarm of governments and financiers, forecasts for GDP growth in many high-income countries are flat-lining, opening up a crisis in growth-based economics. Mainstream economics views endless GDP growth as a must, but nothing in nature grows forever, and the economic attempt to buck that trend is raising tough questions in high-income but low-growth countries. That’s because today we have economies that need to … [ Read more ]

Kate Raworth

In the 20th century economic theory whispered a powerful message when it comes to inequality: it has to get worse before it can get better, and growth will eventually even things up. But extreme inequality, as it turns out, is not an economic law or necessity: it is a design failure. Twenty-first century economists recognize that there are many ways to design economies to be … [ Read more ]

Are We There Yet?

Whether our economic airplane can keep on cruising or is about to stall mid-air, one thing is evident: it is currently heading for a destination that we do not want to reach, one that is degenerative and deeply divisive. If we reorient ourselves to the economic destination that we do want—an economy that is regenerative and distributive by design—then new questions about growth come to … [ Read more ]

Kate Raworth

We sometimes try and justify the most valuable things in life, like health and well-being, in terms of a lost ability to contribute to the economy. We’ve got a situation where human well-being is apparently in service to the economy, where we need to turn that around. The economy, and certainly the financial sector, should be in service to life. We need to reframe it. … [ Read more ]

Kate Raworth

We need to ask ourselves three questions. Growth from what? Is the economy growing because we’re making a huge investment in a transition to renewable energies, like China investing $360 billion by 2020 in solar energy capacity? That’s a great reason for GDP in China’s growth. Or is it growing because we’ve got massive consumer debt spending on mortgages we can’t afford and cars we … [ Read more ]

Kate Raworth, Simon Kuznets

In the 1930s he [Simon Kuznets] was asked by Congress to come up with a measure of national income. He did a fantastic job and came up with this measure, which we now know as GDP. But at the time when he created it, he gave us a caveat. He said, “This measure should in no way be mistaken for the measure of a nation’s … [ Read more ]

Kate Raworth

I think every student should learn there are four fundamental forms of provisioning: through market exchange, through the state providing public goods, through household unpaid care and households and communities, and the self-organizing without market or state in the commons. Almost any good that you care to think of can be provided in any one of those four ways. Then you’ve got a much more … [ Read more ]

Kate Raworth

There are winners and loser in the economy every day, and there are winners and losers from the massive technological shifts that are going on right now. All the time, the economy is evolving. We just need to ask ourselves, what is the purpose of the economy and what direction do we want it to evolve in?

I think there are two principles that we need … [ Read more ]

The Huge Hole in the Standard Economic Model

Kate Raworth, a senior research associate at Oxford University and senior associate at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, wants to challenge the old ways of thinking about economics and develop sustainable new patterns for economic growth. In her book, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, Raworth encourages careful consideration of measurements beyond the standard gross domestic product metric. Thoughtful economic … [ Read more ]