Growing up watching TV images of oil spills, ozone depletion and famine, Kate Raworth said she was determined to study economics to help end poverty and environmental destruction.
But while earning degrees at Oxford University, she became frustrated that planetary well-being was considered tangential to economic theory, which envisioned progress as an endlessly rising arrow of gross domestic product.
Ms. Raworth likens it to an airplane that can never be allowed to land. To ensure it continuously climbs, we must desperately tap dwindling fuel sources and toss things like environmental protections out the windows.
So Ms. Raworth redrew an economic model that looks like a doughnut. The doughy ring represents a system in which humans and nature thrive. The goal is to let no one fall into the hole, where they lack essentials like food, housing, health care and education.
The system also should not overshoot the limits of the outer crust, damaging the Earth through climate change, biodiversity loss, air pollution and more. Since she published her book “Doughnut Economics” in 2017 and co-founded the Doughnut Economics Action Lab, she said more than 50 cities, municipalities and governments had written this model into their strategies.
Ms. Raworth, 53, discussed her model in a video interview earlier this month. The following conversation has been edited and condensed.
What are the consequences of a system based on endless G.D.P. growth?
We have inherited economies that need to grow, whether or not that makes us thrive. The evidence is clear this is not making us thrive. The scale of inequalities within and between nations is extreme. The climate and ecological breakdown is witnessed daily in wildfires and extraordinary flooding events. This is not working for Earth, her people and all her living beings. We need to create economies that enable us to thrive, whether or not they grow.
What about the model of green or sustainable growth?
The danger of the dream of green growth is that it has run far ahead of the proof that it’s possible. There’s no evidence from any country that it’s able to bring together a growing G.D.P., falling carbon emissions and a falling material footprint anywhere close to the speed and scale that is required. So we need to take that growth dependency out of the economy, because we are far more fundamentally dependent on the health of a stable planet.
What are some principles of Doughnut Economics?
Economies are designed. So if we bring a design mind-set to it and are guided by regenerative and distributive principles, this is an extraordinary moment to be alive and to redesign from the neighborhood to the global scale. In planning our incentives and our economies, we have to bring out the pro-sociality and reciprocal nature of humans. We need to create circular, regenerative economies where resources are used again and again. They’re repaired, maintained, reused and recycled.
There’s a lot of creativity in a regenerative economy. We must create economies that are distributive, that share value and opportunity with everybody who cocreates it. That’s about changing the design of businesses, of who has the power to generate energy, who owns the land and housing, so everybody has access to an equitable share.
Can you give examples of places using Doughnut Economics?
Amsterdam wrote it into their policy for creating a circular city that reuses resources, and they’ve committed to having no fossil fuel vehicles in the city from 2030. The California Doughnut Economics Coalition created a doughnut of California measured with official statistics, and you can see ecological overshoot and social shortfall. They’re using it as a monitoring tool, and it’s a much richer tool than G.D.P. because it measures the well-being of people in the terms of real life.
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