Quotes from Kate Raworth

our beliefs about economic growth are almost religious: personal in nature, political in consequence, privately held and little discussed.

As we will explore, becoming agnostic in this way calls for transforming the financial, political and social structures that have made our economies and societies come to expect, demand and depend upon growth.

There are now more than 2,000 billionaires living in 20 countries from the United States, China and Russia to Turkey, Thailand and Indonesia.93 An annual wealth tax levied at just 1.5 percent 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.

Peter Victor, can we 'go slower by design, not disaster'? Or even—in the name of agnosticism —what would it take to design an economy that can handle GDP growth without hankering after it, deal with it without depending upon it, embrace it without exacting it?

As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson vividly illustrate in their 1980 classic, Metaphors We Live By, orientational metaphors such as 'good is up' and 'good is forward' are deeply embedded in Western culture, shaping the way we think and speak.

As these students quickly discover, our beliefs about economic growth are almost religious: personal in nature, political in consequence, privately held and little discussed.

poet Taylor Mali—that 'changing your mind is one of the best ways of finding out whether or not you still have one'.

It is an economic era that has come to be known as the Great Acceleration, thanks to its extraordinary surge in human activity. Between 1950 and 2010, the global population almost trebled in size, and real World GDP increased sevenfold. Worldwide, freshwater use more than trebled, energy use increased fourfold, and fertiliser use rose over tenfold.

problems of organised complexity, which involve a sizeable number of variables that are 'interrelated in an organic whole' to create a complex but organised system.

Ricardo was right in thinking that very different nations may be able to trade to mutual gain, but comparative advantage is not only what you are blessed with: it is something you can build.

Just as there is no such thing as the free market, it turns out that there is no such thing as free trade: all cross-border flows are set against the backdrop of national history, current institutions and international power relations.

By agnostic, I do not mean simply not caring whether GDP growth is coming or not, nor do I mean refusing to measure whether it is happening or not. I mean agnostic in the sense of designing an economy that promotes human prosperity whether GDP is going up, down, or holding steady.

as the nuclear physicist Al Bartlett warned, 'The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function

Out of all of these power relationships, when it comes to the workings of the economy, one in particular demands attention: the power of the wealthy to reshape the economy's rules in their favour.

W.W. Rostow's Five Stages of Growth (Twentieth-Century Journey) 1. Traditional society 2. Preconditions for take-off 3. Take-off 4. Drive to maturity 5. Age of high mass-consumption

In politics, money talks—when it must in public, but preferably in private, with hidden handshakes, closed-door meetings and under-the-table kickbacks.

In the United States, private and corporate funding for elections has increased more than twentyfold since 1976, and it topped $2.5 billion during the 2012 Obama–Romney presidential race.49 Since 2005, the fossil-fuel industry alone has spent $1.7 billion in the United States on lobbying and campaign contributions, which explains their entrenched political support.

At the heart of systems thinking lie three deceptively simple concepts: stocks and flows, feedback loops, and delay. They sound straightforward enough, but the mind-boggling business begins when they start to interact. Out of their interplay emerge many of the surprising,

full century on, John Maynard Keynes echoed Mill's sentiments, asserting (rather wishfully) that 'the day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems—the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion'.

If stocks and flows are a system's core elements, then feedback loops are their interconnections, and in every system, there are two kinds: reinforcing (or 'positive') feedback loops and balancing (or 'negative') ones. With reinforcing feedback loops, the more you have, the more you get. They amplify what is happening, creating vicious or virtuous circles that will, if unchecked, lead either to explosive growth or to collapse.

There may be no perfect frame waiting to be found, but, argues the cognitive linguist George Lakoff, it is absolutely essential to have a compelling alternative frame if the old one is ever to be debunked. Simply rebutting the dominant frame will, ironically, only serve to reinforce it. And without an alternative to offer, there is little chance of entering, let alone winning, the battle of ideas.

If reinforcing feedbacks are what make a system move, then balancing feedbacks are what stop it from exploding or imploding. They counter and offset what is happening and, so, tend to regulate systems.

echo those of Kuznets, the hallowed creator of national income itself. 'Distinctions must be kept in mind,' he advised back in the 1960s, 'between quantity and quality of growth, between its costs and return, and between the short and the long term . . . Objectives should be explicit: goals for "more" growth should specify more growth of what and for what.

Given that 80 percent of the world's population live in such countries, and the vast majority of their inhabitants are under 25 years old, significant GDP growth is very much needed, and it is very likely coming.