Quotes from Kate Raworth

For over 70 years economics has been fixated on GDP, or national output, as its primary measure of progress. That fixation has been used to justify extreme inequalities of income and wealth coupled with unprecedented destruction of the living world. For the twenty-first century a far bigger goal is needed: meeting the human rights of every person within the means of our life-giving planet.

Here's the conundrum: No country has ever ended human deprivation without a growing economy. And no country has ever ended ecological degradation with one.

Economics is the mother tongue of public policy,

In the words of the systems thinker John Sterman, 'The most important assumptions of a model are not in the equations, but what's not in them; not in the documentation, but unstated; not in the variables on the computer screen, but in the blank spaces around them'.

Despite their current rhetoric of 'free trade', when it comes to trade negotiations almost all of today's high-income countries—including the UK and the United States—took the opposite route to ensure their own industrial success, opting for tariff protection, industrial subsidies and state-owned enterprises when it was nationally advantageous. And today they still keep tight control over their key traded assets such as intellectual property.

Homo sapiens, it turns out, is the most cooperative species on the planet, outperforming ants, hyenas, and even the naked mole-rat when it comes to living alongside those who are beyond our next of kin.

Nudges and network effects often work because they tap into underlying norms and values—such as duty, respect and care—and those values can be activated directly.

Governments have historically opted to tax what they could, rather than what they should, and it shows.

availability bias—making decisions on the basis of more recent and more accessible information loss aversion—the strong preference to avoid a loss rather than to make an equivalent gain selective cognition—taking on board facts and arguments that fit with our existing frames risk bias—underestimating the likelihood of extreme events, while overestimating our ability to cope with them.

One person who was willing to risk political suicide was the visionary systems thinker Donella Meadows—one of the lead authors of the 1972 Limits to Growth report

global greenhouse gas emissions is highly skewed: the top 10 percent of emitters—think of them as the global carbonistas living on every continent—generate around 45 percent of global emissions, while the bottom 50 percent of people contribute only 13 percent.

For the first time, ending human deprivation is becoming as much a question of tackling national distribution as of international redistribution, argues Andy Sumner, the expert who crunched the data on where the world's poorest people now live.

The essence of that industrial system is the cradle-to-grave manufacturing supply chain of take, make, use, lose: extract Earth's minerals, metals, biomass and fossil fuels; manufacture them into products; sell those on to consumers who—probably sooner rather than later—will throw them 'away'.

This stark picture of humanity and our planetary home at the start of the twenty-first century is a powerful indictment of the path of global economic development that has been pursued to date. Billions of people still fall far short of their most basic needs, but we have already crossed into global ecological danger zones that profoundly risk undermining Earth's benevolent stability

What might we aspire to instead, if not more possessions? 'Wherever and whenever we are excessive in our lives it is the sign of an as yet unknown deprivation,' argues the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. 'Our excesses are the best clue we have to our own poverty, and our best way of concealing it from ourselves.'72 When it comes to consumerism, perhaps the poverty that we aim to conceal lies in our neglected relationships

At this point in human history, the movement that best describes the progress we need is coming into dynamic balance by moving into the Doughnut's safe and just space, eliminating both its shortfall and overshoot at the same time.

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We live now, says Daly, in 'Full World', with an economy that exceeds Earth's regenerative and absorptive capacity by over-harvesting sources such as fish and forests, and over-filling sinks such as the atmosphere and oceans.

From Taoism's yin yang and the M?ori takarangi to Buddhism's endless knot and the Celtic double spiral, each design invokes a continual dynamic dance between complementary forces.

The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits,' said Milton Friedman back in 1970, and the mainstream business world willingly believed him.

In the twentieth century, economics lost the desire to articulate its goals: in their absence, the economic nest got hijacked by the cuckoo goal of GDP growth.

What if every company strategised around a Doughnut table, asking itself: is our brand a Doughnut brand, whose core business helps to bring humanity into that safe and just space? Imagine if the G20 finance ministers—representing the world's most powerful economies—met around a Doughnut-shaped conference table to discuss how to design a global financial system that served to bring humanity into that sweet spot. These would be world-changing conversations.

Back in Ancient Greece, when Xenophon first came up with the term economics, he described the practice of household management as an art. Following his lead, Aristotle distinguished economics from chrematistics, the art of acquiring wealth—in a distinction that seems to have been all but lost today.

over the past couple of centuries, just as Rostow spelled out, capitalist economies have restructured their laws, institutions, policies and values so that they are geared to expect, demand and depend upon continual GDP growth.