These bald summaries do no justice to the writing (Kate writes beautifully – leaving Oxfam seems to have liberated her), or the content (see last week’s posted extracts for a taste). Where does growth fit? Need to move from the current financial, political and social addiction to growth, to allowing GDP to adjust up, down, or oscillate, as the economy transforms.Forget Kuznets II: growth won’t clean up the environmental damage it helps cause – the economy needs to be ‘regenerative by design’.Forget Kuznets: growth won’t lead to falling inequality – the economy must be ‘distributive by design’.Moving from equilibrium economics to complex adaptive systems.A critique of individualist ‘rational economic man’ that redraws the object of economics as social, adaptable humans.‘See the big picture’: seeing the economy as ‘embedded’ in wider social and environmental systems.After all, wasn’t this just a restatement of the idea of sustainable development? But it went viral, especially at the UN, because it allowed activists and policy makers to visualize both the threats and how they were trying to overcome them.
Economix book review full#
When Kate came up with the doughnut in a highly influential 2012 paper for Oxfam, my non-visual mind failed to grasp its full value. The ‘safe and just space’ between the two rings is where our species needs to be if it wants to make poverty history without destroying the planet.
Her breakthrough moment while at Oxfam was coming up with ‘ the doughnut’ – two concentric rings representing the planetary ceiling and minimum standards for all human beings. Her main target is GDP (the standard measure of national economic output), and its assumptions – an open systems approach to economics that ignores planetary boundaries as it promotes economic growth. Think of the way every economist you know starts drawing supply and demand curves at the slightest encouragement. And she’s onto something, because it’s the diagrams that act as visual frames, shaping the way we understand the world and absorb/reject new ideas and fresh evidence. The starting point is drawings – working with Kate was fun, because whereas I think almost entirely in words, she has a highly visual imagination – she was always messing around with mind maps and doodles.
Economix book review how to#
It’s really hard to tell, as a non-economist, just how paradigm-changing it will be, but I loved it, and I want everyone to read it.ĭown to business – what does it say? The subtitle, ‘Seven Ways to Think Like a 21 st Century Economist’, sets out the intention: the book identifies 7 major flaws in traditional economic thinking, and a chapter on each on how to fix them. Not sure just how big, or whether I agree with George Monbiot’s superbly OTT plug comparing it to Keynes’s General Theory. My Exfam colleague Kate Raworth’s book Doughnut Economics is launched today, and I think it’s going to be big.
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