Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist QUOTES

1 " *THE COMMONS, which are creative - so unleash their potential*

The commons are shareable resources of society or nature that people choose to use and govern through self-organising, instead of relying on the state or market for doing so. Think of how a village community might manage its only freshwater well and its nearby forest, or how Internet users worldwide collaboratively curate Wikipedia. Natural commons have traditionally emerged in communities seeking to steward Earth's 'common pool' resources, such as grazing land, fisheries, watersheds and forests. Cultural commons serve to keep alive a community's language, heritage and rituals, myths and music, traditional knowledge and practice. And the fast-growing digital commons are stewarded collaboratively online, co-creating open-source software, social networks, information and knowledge.
...In the 1970s, the little-known political scientist Elinor Ostrom started seeking out real-life examples of natural commons to find out what made them work - and she went on to win a Nobel-Memorial prize for what she discovered. Rather than being left 'open access', those successful commons were governed by clearly defined communities with collectively agreed rules and punitive sanctions for those who broke them...she realised, the commons can turn out to be a triumph, outperforming both state and market in sustainably stewarding and equitably harvesting Earth's resources...
The triumph of the commons is certainly evident in the digital commons, which are fast turning into one of the most dynamic areas of the global economy.
(p.82-3) "

― Kate Raworth , Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

2 " …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. "

― Kate Raworth , Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

3 " ...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. "

― Kate Raworth , Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

4 " Economics (...) is not a matter of discovering laws: it is essentially a question of design. "

― Kate Raworth , Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

5 " Depicting rational economic man as an isolated individual – unaffected by the choices of others – proved highly convenient for modelling the economy, but it was long questioned even from within the discipline. At the end of the nineteenth century, the sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen berated economic theory for depicting man as a ‘self-contained globule of desire’, while the French polymath Henri Poincaré pointed out that it overlooked ‘people’s tendency to act like sheep’.31 He was right: we are not so different from herds as we might like to imagine. We follow social norms, typically preferring to do what we expect others will do and, especially if filled with fear or doubt, we tend to go with the crowd. One "

― Kate Raworth , Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

6 " 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. "

― Kate Raworth , Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

7 " 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. "

― Kate Raworth , Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

8 " Economics is the mother tongue of public policy, "

― Kate Raworth , Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

9 " 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. "

― Kate Raworth , Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

10 " 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. "

― Kate Raworth , Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

11 " 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’. "

― Kate Raworth , Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

12 " 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. "

― Kate Raworth , Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

13 " 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. "

― Kate Raworth , Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

14 " When Adam Smith, extolling the power of the market, noted that, ‘it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner’, he forgot to mention the benevolence of his mother, Margaret Douglas, who had raised her boy alone from birth. Smith never married so had no wife to rely upon (nor children of his own to raise). At the age of 43, as he began to write his opus, The Wealth of Nations, he moved back in with his cherished old mum, from whom he could expect his dinner every day. But her role in it all never got a mention in his economic theory, and it subsequently remained invisible for centuries. "

― Kate Raworth , Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

15 " 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. "

― Kate Raworth , Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

16 " 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’. "

― Kate Raworth , Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

17 " This ubiquitous industrial model has delivered strong profits to many businesses and has financially enriched many nations in the process. But its design is fundamentally flawed because it runs counter to the living world, which thrives by continually recycling life’s building blocks such as carbon, oxygen, water, nitrogen and phosphorus "

― Kate Raworth , Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

18 " The East Asian ‘miracle’—from the mid 1960s to 1990—saw countries such as Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and Malaysia combine rapid economic growth with low inequality and falling poverty rates. "

― Kate Raworth , Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

19 " the returns to capital have tended to grow faster than the economy as a whole, leading wealth to become ever more concentrated. That dynamic is then reinforced through political influence—from corporate lobbying to campaign financing—that further promotes the interests of the already wealthy. In Piketty’s words, ‘Capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based. "

― Kate Raworth , Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

20 " 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 "

― Kate Raworth , Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist