Quotes from Kate Raworth

Open Source Circular Economy (OSCE) movement. Its worldwide network of innovators, designers and activists aims to follow in the footsteps of open-source software by creating the knowledge commons needed to unleash the full potential of circular manufacturing.

In the Togolese capital of Lomé, architect Sénamé Agbodjinou and colleagues set up Woelab in 2012, a 'low-high tech' workshop making its own design of open-source 3D printers using the component parts of defunct computers, printers and scanners that have been dumped in West Africa.

The search for gain—which drives shareholder returns, speculative trading and interest-bearing loans—lodges dependency upon continual GDP growth deep within the financial system.

A business that is built on a living purpose may have strong foundations, but without a source of finance that is aligned with its values it is unlikely to survive and thrive.

tax employees, and you'll head for a jobless economy, as many countries are discovering today. It is happening in part thanks to the twentieth century's legacy of perverse tax policies, which charge firms for hiring humans (through payroll taxes), subsidise them for buying robots (through tax-deductible capital investments), and levy next to nothing on the use of land and non-renewable resources.

a study of all 50 U.S. States found that those states marked out by large inequalities of power in terms of income and ethnicity had weaker environmental policies and suffered greater ecological degradation. Furthermore, one study covering 50 countries found the more unequal a country is, the more likely the biodiversity of its landscape is to be under threat.

the founding fathers of political economy were unabashed to talk of what they thought mattered and to articulate their views on the economy's purpose. But when political economy was split up into political philosophy and economic science in the late nineteenth century, it opened up what the philosopher Michael Sandel has called a 'moral vacancy' at the heart of public policymaking.

environmental quality is higher where income is more equitably distributed, where more people are literate, and civil and political rights are better respected. It's people power, not economic growth persay, that protects local air and water quality. Likewise, it is citizen pressure on government and companies for more stringent standards, not the mere increase in revenue that compels industries to switch to cleaner technologies.

There are clearly many ways to more equitably share the wealth that lies beneath our feet. Ostrom was quick to point out, however, that there is no panacea for managing land and its resources well: neither the market, the commons nor the state alone can provide an infallible blueprint. Approaches to distributive land design must fit the people and the place, and may well work best when they combine all three of these approaches to provisioning.44

What if, instead, central banks tackled such deep recessions by issuing new money directly to every household as windfall cash to be used specifically for paying down debts—an idea that has come to be known as 'People's QE'.52 Rather than inflating the price of bonds, which tends to benefit wealthy asset owners, this approach—which resembles a one-off tax rebate for all—would benefit indebted households.

The Doughnut's inner ring—its social foundation—sets out the basics of life on which no one should be left falling short.

we have to look back over the past 100,000 years of life on Earth. For almost all of that time—as early humans trekked out of Africa and blazed a trail across continents—Earth's average temperature spiked up and down. But during just the last 12,000 years or so, it has been warmer, and far more stable too. This recent period of Earth's history is known as the Holocene.

Regenerative industrial design can only be fully realised if it is underpinned by regenerative economic design.

Reversing consumerism's financial and cultural dominance in public and private life is set to be one of the twenty-first century's most gripping psychological dramas

More extraordinarily, scientists suggest that, if undisturbed, the Holocene's benevolent conditions would be likely to continue for another 50,000 years due to the unusually circular orbit that Earth is currently making of the sun

We would have to be crazy to kick ourselves out of the Holocene's sweet spot, but that is, of course, exactly what we have been doing.

Thanks to the scale of our impact, we have now left behind the Holocene and entered uncharted territory, known as the Anthropocene: the first geological epoch that is shaped by human activity.

Between 1988 and 2008, the majority of countries worldwide saw rising inequality within their borders, resulting in a hollowing out of their middle classes. Over those same 20 years, global inequality fell slightly overall (mostly thanks to falling poverty rates in China), but it increased significantly at the extremes.

Economic externalities are framed—thanks to their very name—as a peripheral concern in mainstream theory.

Around 13% of people worldwide are malnourished. How much food would it take to meet their caloric needs? Just 3% of the global food supply. To put that in context, 30%–50% of the world's food gets lost post-harvest, wasted in global supply chains, or scraped off dinner plates and into kitchen bins.44 Hunger could, in effect, be ended with just 10% of the food that never gets eaten.

If population matters, distribution matters just as much because extremes of inequality push humanity beyond both sides of the Doughnut's boundaries. Thanks to the scale of global income inequality, responsibility for 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.

Around 13 percent of people worldwide are malnourished. How much food would it take to meet their caloric needs? Just 3 percent of the global food supply. To put that in context, 30–50 percent of the world's food gets lost post-harvest, wasted in global supply chains or scraped off dinner plates and into kitchen bins.44 Hunger could, in effect, be ended with just 10 percent of the food that never gets eaten.

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'.

Homo economicus may be the smallest unit of analysis in economic theory—equivalent to the atom in Newton's physics—but, just like an atom, his composition has profound consequences.