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

61 " The possibility of shaking off old mental models is enticing, but the quest for new ones comes with caveats. First, always remember that ‘the map is not the territory’, as the philosopher Alfred Korzybski put it: every model can only ever be a model, a necessary simplification of the world, and one that should never be mistaken for the real thing. Second, there is no correct pre-analytic vision, true paradigm or perfect frame out there to be discovered. In the deft words of the statistician George Box, ‘All models are wrong, but some are useful.’39 Rethinking economics is not about finding the correct one (because it doesn’t exist); it’s about choosing or creating one that best serves our purpose—reflecting the context we face, the values we hold, and the aims we have. As humanity’s context, values and aims continually evolve, so too should the way that we envision the economy. "

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

62 " 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. "

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

63 " Instead of immediately focusing on making markets work more efficiently, we can start by considering: when is each of the four realms of provisioning—household, commons, market and state—best suited to delivering humanity’s diverse wants and needs? What changes in technology, culture and social norms might alter that? How can these four realms most effectively work together—such as the market with the commons, the commons with the state, or the state with the household? Likewise, rather than focusing by default on how to increase economic activity, ask how the content and structure of that activity might be shaping society, politics and power. And just how big can the economy become, given Earth’s ecological capacity? "

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

64 " 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. "

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

65 " 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 "

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

66 " 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—and she didn’t mince her words. ‘Growth is one of the stupidest purposes ever invented by any culture,’ she declared in the late 1990s; ‘we’ve got to have an enough.’ In response to the constant call for more growth, she argued, we should always ask: ‘growth of what, and why, and for whom, and who pays the cost, and how long can it last, and what’s the cost to the planet, and how much is enough? "

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

67 " Life on Earth has the chance of another five billion years in its favour, at which point our star, the sun, will start to die. Earth’s Holocene-like conditions could continue for another 50,000 years—as Chapter 1 described—if we humans learn to navigate the Anthropocene without pushing our planet into a far hotter, drier, and more hostile state. The economies that we create could keep on thriving—not growing, but thriving—for millennia too, if we manage them wisely. "

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

68 " 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. "

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

69 " 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. "

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

70 " With sufficient international support, these countries can seize the opportunity to leapfrog the wasteful and polluting technologies of the past. And if they channel GDP growth into creating economies that are distributive and regenerative by design, they will start bringing all of their inhabitants above the Doughnut’s social foundation without overshooting its ecological ceiling. "

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

71 " what determines whether or not we can actually move into its safe and just space? Five factors certainly play key roles: population, distribution, aspiration, technology and governance. "

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

72 " Meanwhile the sluggish GDP growth of recent decades in many high-income countries has infamously been accompanied by widening income inequalities. At the same time, all of these countries’ global ecological footprints already far exceed Earth’s capacity: "

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

73 " Meanwhile the sluggish GDP growth of recent decades in many high-income countries has infamously been accompanied by widening income inequalities. At the same time, all of these countries’ global ecological footprints already far exceed Earth’s capacity: it would take four planets for everyone in the world to live as they do in Sweden, Canada and the United States, and five planets for all to live like an Australian or Kuwaiti. "

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

74 " In the twentieth century, one simple curve—the Kuznets Curve—whispered a powerful message on inequality: it has to get worse before it can get better, and growth will (eventually) even it up. But inequality, it turns out, is not an economic necessity: it is a design failure. Twenty-first-century economists will recognise that there are many ways to design economies to be far more distributive of the value that they generate—an idea best represented as a network of flows. It means going beyond redistributing income to exploring ways of redistributing wealth, particularly the wealth that lies in controlling land, enterprise, technology, knowledge and the power to create money. "

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

75 " One diagram in economic theory is so dangerous that it is never actually drawn: the long-term path of GDP growth. Mainstream economics views endless economic growth as a must, but nothing in nature grows forever, and the attempt to buck that trend is raising tough questions in high-income but low-growth countries. It may not be hard to give up having GDP growth as an economic goal, but it is going to be far harder to overcome our addiction to it. Today we have economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive; what we need are economies that make us thrive, whether or not they grow. That radical flip in perspective invites us to become agnostic about growth and to explore how economies that are currently financially, politically and socially addicted to growth could learn to live with or without it. "

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

76 " drop the economist’s beloved notion of ‘externalities’, those incidental effects felt by people who were not involved in the transactions that produced them—such as toxic effluent that affects communities living downstream of a river-polluting factory, or the exhaust fumes inhaled by cyclists biking through city traffic. Such negative externalities, remarks the ecological economist Herman Daly, are those things that ‘we classify as “external” costs for no better reason than because we have made no provision for them in our economic theories’.21 The systems dynamics expert John Sterman concurs. ‘There are no side effects—just effects,’ he says, pointing out that the very notion of side effects is just ‘a sign that the boundaries of our mental models are too narrow, our time horizons too short’. "

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

77 " What kind of currency, then, could be aligned with the living world so that it promoted regenerative investments rather than pursuing endless accumulation? One possibility is a currency bearing demurrage, a small fee incurred for holding money, so that it tends to lose rather than gain in value the longer it is held. The fact that demurrage is an unfamiliar term shows how accustomed we are to the ever-rising financial escalator that we ride – like knowing the idea of ‘up’ but not ‘down’, ‘more’ but not ‘less’. But demurrage is a word worth knowing because it could just feature in the financial future. "

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

78 " If growth were to be abandoned as an objective of policy,’ wrote the economist Wilfred Beckerman in 1974, ‘democracy too would have to be abandoned . . . the costs of deliberate non-growth, in terms of the political and social transformation that would be required in society, are astronomical.’26 Beckerman’s influential book In Defense of Economic Growth was a scathing response to the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report and it became an instant pro-growth classic. "

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

79 " growth is on the way, argue technology optimists such as Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee: thanks to the exponential growth in digital processing power, we are entering the ‘second machine age’ in which the fast-rising productivity of robots will drive a new wave of GDP growth. "

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

80 " The most comprehensive survey yet of research into the impacts of payments to promote ecological conservation—whether to collect more litter and plant more trees or harvest less timber and catch fewer fish—finds that most of the schemes studied were unintentionally crowding out, rather than crowding in, people’s intrinsic motivation to act.57 Instead of engaging existing intrinsic commitments, such as pride in cultural heritage, respect for the living world, and trust in the community, some schemes inadvertently serve to erode those very values and replace them with financial motivation. ‘Using money to motivate people can throw up surprising results,’ says Erik Gómez-Baggethun, one of the study’s authors. ‘We often don’t understand the complex interplay of human values and motivations well enough to anticipate what will happen, and so that calls for caution’. "

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