Why Economics Is Bullshit And How To Fix It Kate Raworth On Doughnut Economics

TITLE: Why Economics is Bullsh*t – and How to Fix It | Kate Raworth on ‘Doughnut Economics’ CHANNEL: Michael Mezzatesta DATE: 2026-06-04 ---TRANSCRIPT--- When I went back and looked at the economics I’ve been taught, I thought, who have we been told we are? And it’s this character called rational economic man. He’s got money in his hand, ego in his heart, a calculator in his head, he has nature at his feet, and he can never get enough. And what I just reeled off are the very traits that are written into the equations,

right? We’re told that’s human nature. We are told this is a good enough model of who we are. Economists did studies on the students and found that from year one to year two to year three of their studies, the more the students learn about this character of Russian economic man, the more they value and want to mimic his traits, they become they become him. So who we tell ourselves we are shapes who we become. I mean that’s monumental for any discipline that claims to tell us who we are because it’s going to change us. The models remake us, right? So if we’re going to thrive 8 plus billion people on this planet this century and we carry on telling ourselves we’re like this. I mean, I just think we stand zero chance. We really, really need to re understand and tell new stories about our pro-social nature, our reciprocity. Otherwise, we literally block out the very skills and traits and values that we need to learn again if we’re going to thrive together. I am so excited about this episode because today I’m speaking with someone who has had a profound impact on me and my own professional journey. My guest is Kate Rayworth, renegade economist and author of Donut Economics. And I’m not kidding when I say that when I read donut economics for the first time, it changed the way that I saw the world. Because by then, I had an economics degree from Stanford. But it always felt like something was missing. As if the frameworks I’d learned about business and the economy were blind to the fact that businesses were actually partially responsible for a lot of social harm, from inequality to climate change to biodiversity loss. And it seemed like this was just missing from the economics curriculum. And then donut economics synthesized economics and ecology and well-being in a way I’d never seen before. And it pointed towards something better, a better way of thinking about what an economy could be. So it was a great honor to sit down with Kate in her home and dive into her work. Not just what’s in her book, but also how it interacts with our current political moment. How she’s bringing donut economics to cities and countries around the world and how a new creative outlet for her work has taken her down a path she never could have imagined. All right, let’s get into it. Kate, hi. Thank you so much for being with me today. My pleasure. Welcome to my kitchen. Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be in your home. I’m excited to speak about your work, about the state of the world, what we can do to fix it. You’ve worked a lot on explaining the economy and how it could change and how the whole social economic system could change. And I think people are particularly curious about that right now because people’s experience of the economy isn’t so great. Things keep getting more expensive. Life feels like it’s getting harder. People are squeezed. Mhm. And so I think people are sort of losing faith in economics in general. So I’m wondering if if you feel we should even trust economists at all. Well, it depends which kinds of economists we want to talk to. I for many many years actually refused to ever call myself an economist. When once I’d done my university education and realized how much I hadn’t been taught to see and how much was excluded from the mindset that I’ve been taught, I never wanted to stick my hand out and say, “Hello, I’m an economist because it just felt it felt really bad.” So I never called myself an economist. And it was only when somebody said, “Oh, you’re a renegade economist.” That I thought, “Oh, I I can be.” Yeah. Woo. I can be that actually. That’s nice. So for many years, I said, “I’m a renegade economist.” Okay. Because I can’t escape from economics. I can’t escape from this mindset that was none of us can taught to me and I think none of us can whether or not we studied it economics studied us and it shaped the world we live in. So I think the first and best thing we can do is realize there are many different kind of economics and there are ecological economists there are neocclassical economists there are feminist economists there are complexity economists there are Marxist economists oh there’s many different ways of seeing the world so when you say should we trust economists let’s make sure we’re aware there’s many schools of thought there’s many ways of understanding the world and therefore what’s happening in the world let’s make sure that economic students are empowered to know that and to choose the way of looking at the world that most serves them and serves us. Yeah. And that’s a great introduction to your work because what you have attempted to do is sort of come up with a new framework for economic thinking. And this this resonated so much with me when I found your book donor economics because I studied economics undergraduate degree from Stanford econ. Okay. And during this uh 4 years of studying econ, the word ecology wasn’t mentioned. Inequality was barely mentioned except as something we could grow our way out of. And when I found donut economics, which he framed as a, you know, 21st century vision for for economics, I was like, “Oh, this is something completely different.” And so it really resonated with me, which is one of the reasons I’m so excited to talk to you today because it really sort of changed my world in terms of how I saw not only the world, but like the degree I got and how it made it feel so incomplete, right? Because I was just taught the what you would call neocclassical type of economics. How do you think about your work as an attempt to like redefine economic thinking? And just for people who aren’t as familiar as I am with donor economics, what’s the basic thrust of what you’re trying to do with that with that new model you came up with? So, let me start with what I was reacting against and it sounds like we it sounds like we had the same economic education. Okay. I’m sorry. I studied here in the UK. I studied in Oxford. Uh went to university in 1990. So, I’m 55 now. And when I went to university to study economics, I wanted to learn the mother tongue of public policy. I thought this is going to equip me to help change the world and tackle things like climate change and the hole in the ozone layer and global inequalities and injustice. And I was really frustrated as I gradually realized that the things I cared most about were marginalized in the curriculum. No mention of ecology. I couldn’t even study the environment. There was no paper in that inequalities. We often said well taking distribution as given like you just kind of took inequality as a starting point. No mention of human rights. So I was really frustrated and I didn’t want to go on and be an economist when I gradually realized everything that had been missing from my degree. But then I went and worked in many different contexts in the world with villages in Zanzibar for three years. I worked at the UN on the human development report. I became a mother of twins. So I was immersed in the unpaid caring economy of the household. And I was sitting on the sofa in my living room with these twin babies under my arms watching the global financial crash in 2007 2008. And the economists came on screen and they said, “Yes, we realize it’s time to rewrite economics so that it reflects financial realities.” Oh, that sounds great. I just remember thinking these these babies in my arms and the you know climate meltdown and extraordinary scales of inequality and I thought I’ll be damned if we are only going to rewrite economics for that. Yeah. And it really galvanized me to want to be part of a very big team of amazing people around the world who I knew were already working on so many different kinds of economics. It drove me at that point, this is in my late 30s now, drove me to start reading all economics that I had never been taught. I read feminist economics and I read ecological economics. I’d never heard of it. I read complexity thinking, systems thinking, flipped my mind. I read Marxist economics. I read institutional economics. What happens if we take the insights from all of those and make them dance together on the same page? That’s what I wanted to do. And so I started to write a book and I called it donut economics after a diagram I drew of of the vision of well what kind of economy do we want? Cuz we never even had that conversation in my undergraduate degree. No, we did not. It was like growth as long as the you know the economy is growing. It was a sort of implicit well tick you know things are going well. And we didn’t even talk about whether that was possible or desirable, sustainable or feasible or necessary. So I wanted to write a book that set out a 21st century way of thinking and it’s not here are the policies here’s what to do because I wanted to be relevant in lots of different countries in different times. So it was more like saying hey there’s amazing ideas in different ways of thinking if these become part of our mindset wherever we are in the world what kinds of policies would people then come up with that were relevant to their place in their times and that’s what I set out to do and to celebrate these amazing ideas that have been around for many many decades but that have been marginalized I wanted to put them front and center of donut economics right yeah cuz that I’m glad you mentioned that cuz it’s not like you’ve never claimed that you came up with a completely new thing. You’re just you just have a new way of expressing visually in a very I think incredible way that you synthesize so many ideas, but it’s a visual explanation of a lot of ideas that have been in the works for some decades, in some cases generations, millennia. Some of these are very old old concepts of regeneration and, you know, protecting the living environment. Yes. And the visual, if I can jump in there, the visual is really important to me. Uh I stumbled across it. I’m one of those people. Many people like just doodling, drawing things, drawing a picture of what they’re seeing. So I have obviously have a very kind of visual way of thinking. But when I first drew this diagram known as the donut, it created a real stir. It had a lot of traction instantly. And I was fascinated because if I had just written down a list of words, I don’t think anybody would have blinked. But when I drew it, it did something. So I started looking into visual cultures and different ways of representing. And I I just realized that our vision is central to the way many people think, right? We are pattern seekers. We’re continually looking for faces in the clouds and ghosts in the shadows to make sense of the world. What goes into our eyes goes straight into the back of our heads and sits in our visual cortex and it can sit there for decades which is why you can pass somebody you were at school with in the primary schools like suddenly see them and recognize in the street. I think economists when they write their textbooks the the presumption is that the equations are primary, the text is explanatory and the diagrams are mere illustration. But actually if you speak to people decades on the thing they remember are the pictures. The diagrams are actually foundational. They tell us what’s central and what’s periphery. They tell us what’s made visible, what’s left invisible, what matters and what can be just forgotten. And so they deeply shape our world views. And when I realized that, I then went back through the textbooks I’ve been taught from. And I just was gobsmacked by the images and and seeing jumping out at me, this is the worldview you’ve been taught. So I thought, it’s like intellectual graffiti, right? It’s really hard to scrub out graffiti. Far better to paint over it with something you do want to see. So instead of trying to negate what was there, I thought, I want to be propositional about a new way of thinking. And so I intentionally told the story of Don economics through very simple iconic little diagrams that anybody could reproduce. Yeah, this is like painting over with a beautiful mural over that intellectual graffiti that’s been marked on our brains so we can reclaim nice our vision and our way of thinking. So we’re going to get into what this means, how it works, you know, how it’s being applied, how it can help us build towards a better future. For folks who aren’t familiar with your diagram and are now probably very curious what what the heck did she draw? Stop talking about donuts. Do you want to show us the the diagram? Yeah, I have one right here. This is the donut. Beautiful. So, it’s two concentric circles. And if you think of humanity’s use of Earth’s resources radiating out from the center of the picture, then the hole in the middle of the inside circle, that’s a place where people are left falling short on the essentials of life. Right? That’s where people don’t have enough resources to meet everybody’s human rights. Our our claim upon a life of dignity and opportunity and community. So in the circle here are the resources we need for water, food, housing, energy, equality, education, income, political voice and these there are 12 parts of this social foundation and I crowdsourced them from the sustainable development goals. Not because that was the truth and the right thing, but because that’s what’s the world’s governments have already agreed that every person has a right not to be left falling short. So this was incontrovertible to have a good life, you need you need these things. Yeah. Everybody has a claim. Yeah. On having sufficient resourcing to have a bare minimum of thriving on these things. So leave nobody falling behind this inside circle which is the social foundation where each person has enough resources to get them over that social foundation out of deprivation into this green ring between the two the donut shaped space. That’s half the story and I think it was a very 20th century half of the story. And if we just grow our economies and we have labor intensive industries then growing economy means more employment, more workers getting wages and they and their families can pay for the things they need. We can have enough of a state to provide public goods. Sounds good. It worked well enough, right? Growth means a better life. It worked well enough for you could say much of the 20th century. Yeah. But we are not in the 20th century and we know far too much now. We know that if we keep on expanding our use of Earth’s resources, we are going to hit the outer ring here which is called the ecological ceiling beyond which we start to put so much pressure on the life supporting systems of our planetary home that we start kicking our planet out of balance. And so outside of this ecological ceiling are what’s known as the nine planetary boundaries which were first recognized by earth system scientists led by Yoan Rostrom and Will Stefen in 2009. They said we think there are nine critical life supporting systems that are holding this planet earth in a stable state. The holysine era of the last 10 to 12,000 years where earth has been slightly warmer and quite stable. a really benevolent, stable climate for humanity. Regular seasons, we can trust that the rain will come. We can plant seeds. We can grow our food. This is like, as Yan Rostrom sometimes says, it’s like a kind of Garden of Eden. Why on earth would we kick ourselves outside of this if we push ourselves beyond them? Like if we start causing climate change or the breakdown of biodiversity or create a hole in the ozone layer or withdraw too much water from lakes and rivers or apply too much fertilizer, we start pushing on the stability of this system and it might tip. So we’ve got a lot going on here. On the inside it says leave no one in the hole falling short on the essentials of life. But on the outside it says don’t overshoot the life supporting systems of this living planet. So we need to meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet. And the goal is to get into the green donut-shaped space between the social foundation and the ecological ceiling. So there’s a lot going on here. And I’ll just add, you know, this is really different from saying let’s grow GDP which is a single metric measured in dollars. We add add up the value of everything that’s bought and sold in the economy and there’s your just make sure it’s getting bigger year on year. This is taking us away from that metric and saying we actually want to measure life. We’re still measuring life. We’re still measuring success, right? There are metrics, but they’re human metrics. Do people have enough food? Do they have decent housing? Do they have connectivity? Do they have equality? Do they have political voice? Do they have education, healthcare? Measuring it in human terms? And then we’re measuring it in ecological terms. So ecology was missing in your degree. It’s central in day one of the measuring of success in this vision. First of all, thank you for this explanation. Beautiful. Beautifully done. This is what’s so I think different from neocclassical economics and what we were taught in our undergraduate degrees is that the economy in this articulation is actually part of the earth system. Yes. I think what I learned is that the environment is an externality. Right? So if a company’s polluting when we say it’s an externality that means that doesn’t factor into the way a business makes decisions. That’s something outside of the business’s mindset for profit optimization and supply and demand and revenue. The environment is something outside that it just creates this social harm and we have to correct for that through some sort of taxation or some other market intervention which is I think a silly way of of managing the planet. But this says no the economy is within the earth system. Therefore, if the system is compromised by the economy, then that actually means the economy is now compromised and it’s not going to be able to keep continuing on forever. So, I think this is this is something again one of those old ideas of like, you know, we are we should be stewards of the planet that’s been around for thousands. Yeah. Way more than thousands of years. Um, that is just missing. And so I think this does such a good job of grounding the grounding economic thinking in the world. And so this insists that we have a conversation right up front about what success looks like because if we don’t know what success looks like, how on earth will we judge a policy? Yeah. And again, I think in my degree and yours, we never had that conversation. It was like growth. It was just taken as a given. We never talked about it. And whether okay, maybe there’s a phase of growth, but then is there a time when you’ve ever grown enough that no, there was never any idea of that. For me too, you just talked about environmental externalities. For me too, that was the kind of clinching moment when I thought I can’t go forward with this way of thinking. Like if we’re going to talk about the breakdown of the life support systems of our planetary home as an environmental externality. Again, the framing that’s the framing of words this time, not just pictures, but the framing of that there is no chance we’re going to do justice to life on this planet. And I, you know, I really, I’m only half joking if I say if aliens wanted to take down humanity, they don’t need to arrive here with little green laser guns. They just need to persuade us that the best way to think about our impacts on the planet are to call them environmental externalities. And we will do the rest ourselves cuz we just got no chance of doing justice to Earth. And then the point you made about this diagram and the framing you’ve done at economics starts by saying the economy is a subsystem of society, right? It’s a human construct which is quite empowering because it means oh we can reconstruct it right and human society is a subsystem of the living world. We are part of nature but just one part of it and we have many kin here on this earth. When you go economy within society within the living world now you know you’re in the terrain of what’s called ecological economics as opposed to neocclassical economics that has a little environmental angle that says there are externalities. So just again these foundational framings change everything that follows. And so I’m most interested in what’s called ECOM 101. What are the first diagrams that students are shown? What are the foundational ideas? Professors sometimes get cross with me about that and say well you know this is just the basic stuff and you know when we do masters and PhDs it generally like well they often don’t actually suddenly start talking about ecology at masters level but the most basic stuff matters most in the US particularly many many students as you know study a little bit of econ because it’s handy and then they go on and become the law makers or the politicians or the business leaders or the journalists so that little bit of econ goes a very long way in framing how everybody body else will get required to talk about the economy. It’s what matters most. So donor economics for me focuses on the foundational concept. Yeah. This also has implications for how we understand ourselves as people. And one of the most compelling things that you tried to redefine in your thinking about this is the way we think about human nature because I think that we’re taught in this culture if you can call it a culture of you know modern capitalism liberalism kind of the in the west you could say that we are individuals and our role in the world is to uh optimize our own income and wealth utility utility we call it in econ And I think this this talk about trickle down economics. I mean it’s a myth, but what does trickle down is the culture of economics, which is the belief that we are all separate, that we aren’t part of this living system, that we aren’t really in this together, that we’re all competing with each other. Well, the result of this is that people say it’s human nature to be greedy and individualistic. How would you respond? So this question of who do we tell ourselves we are? Yes. is a really big one at the heart of the economics we’re taught because any discipline that claims to tell us who we are uh has a real responsibility because it shapes who we become. So when I went back and looked at the economics I’ve been taught I thought you know who are who have we been told we are and it’s this character called rational economic man and he has very distinct traits that get written literally into the economic models that that because they want to be able to predict what people will do. So you need to make something very predictable and in fact the character of rational economic man got shaped not by evidence from what humans actually do but from the requirements to make this a narrow predictable character and I decided that he deserved his own little portrait cuz I think the more like I said you know when things are visible we remember them. Yeah. So here we are here’s a rational economic man in his own little portrait. So he’s got me on his chest because he’s got ego in his heart. He’s got a dollar in his hand, money in his hand, ego in his heart, a calculator in his head. He has nature at his feet. He hates work. He loves luxury. He knows the price of everything. And he can never get enough. And what I just reeled off are the very traits that are written into the equations, right? We’re told that’s human nature. We are told this is a good enough model of who we are. Mhm. So several important things about that. If you look at the history of how that model came about, it’s fascinating. And it was actually John Stuart Mill the philosopher who did a lot of work really amazing philosopher thinking about utilitarianism. Uh Mill did some you know something quite unhelpful. He wanted to distinguish between political economy which we would now call economics and moral philosophy. He was kind they were trying it was in those days they were trying to make these separate fields. So in order to kind of clarify between morality which people who knows how someone’s going to behave it’s not very predictable. He wanted to make something narrower. So he said political economy does not deal in the whole of man’s nature nor of his conduct in society. It sees him as a being who desires to possess wealth. Yeah. Do you see what he did there? He took away half of our nature at least like our moral sensibility, our care for others, our sense of duty, our our sense of public spirit. He said, “No, no, no. That that’s just too broad. Who who’s going to know what this person’s going to do? just going to take that bit of humanity that desires to possess wealth and we’re going to put that at the center of our economic man. And I think that’s when they began to caricature humanity. And then other economists after him started adding in all these traits. Oh yes, he knows all prices over time. Otherwise, how will we be able to choose the best price? You know, he’s has insatiable wants. Alfred Marshall said his wants just keep on growing. So there is no point of satiation, which means more is always better. So we end up with this character who’s then taught to students in university and we’re told like this is a good enough model of us. This is you. Hey, we’re told this is this is us. This is a good enough model of who we are. So Robert Frank and other economists did studies on the students and found that from year one to year two to year three of their studies, the more that students learn about this character of rational economic man, the more they value and want to mimic his traits, they become they become him. So they value competition over collaboration. selfinterest altruism in terms of these are good traits who we are shapes who we discipline that claims to tell us who we are because it’s going to change us it’s performative upon us the models we make us right so we really need to you know if we’re going to thrive eight plus billion people on this planet this century and we carry on telling ourselves we’re like this I mean I just think we stand zero chance we really really need to re understand through actually observing what people actually do rather than theorizing a caricature and tell new stories about our pro-social nature, our reciprocity. We are the most social of all mammals. We’re even more social than the naked mulat when it comes to socializing with members beyond our immediate kin. We are the most social mammal. We have to build on that rather than tell ourselves with this incredibly mean-spirited creature. Otherwise, we literally block out the very skills and traits and values that we need to learn again to bring back into our awareness and our practice if we’re going to thrive together. So, what traits would you want to highlight to push back on that narrative? What traits jump out to you as being missed from the classical definition of human nature? So, no, no human being stands alone. We are social. We are raised by each other or wolves, right? That’s the best case other scenario for a human. the occasional one who’s raised by the wolves. We are utterly dependent upon our social relations. So we live in relationship to one another. Um and so people who excluded from that and who excluded, you know, it’s at deep mental distress to not have family and friends. We are also deeply sensitive to each other’s views and judgments. That’s what fashion is, right? That’s what a music that takes off kind of trend is. We love being part of the crowd. It’s culture. So that’s one. We’re also not dominant over nature. We are deeply embedded in the web of life and better wake up a little bit more quickly about this because otherwise we are undermining the very life support systems we depend upon. This character has been given insatiable wants and many other cultures that aren’t trapped in this western mindset would chuckle deeply and wisely about that the toddler character that we’ve been created. This this need the need for greed. Yeah, because there are other cultures that live demonstrating absolutely there’s there’s no need to think we have insatiable ones there. And I think it’s beautiful that even within the west cultures are beginning to seek out and bring to the four words that help us with that in France or lom in Sweden these words that say I have plenty and it’s enough. So moving away from um insatiability and also the idea that we we interact only through markets with the dollar right price and behavior. We actually interact in the household through unpaid care in the commons. We are commoners and the work of Ellena Ostramm bringing back our awareness of the commons where we collaborate without money often changing hands but we steward something that we collectively care about whether it’s Wikipedia on the worldwide web or a garden on our blog community garden people show up and they contribute and they want to do it because they’re joining as a community member. Yeah. And I think what’s so important about this vision is not only that we’re filling in the gaps that classical economists missed, but that actually we’re pointing the way towards a happier and more fulfilled life. Right? Because I think often times these reframings of the system and the economy are meant as a critique of the of the current system. And you know, hey, capitalism is creating all of these issues. there’s this this western culture is creating all of these these planetary issues, which is absolutely true. But at the same time, we’re not just trying to avoid a harmful thing. We’re actually trying to give people a vision for a better life where they’re more happy and more fulfilled than they are now. Getting back to the, you know, the first question of like, why do people feel so squeezed right now even though the stock market’s the highest it’s ever been? It’s like, oh, it’s because this goal that we’re chasing towards, this myth of endless wealth and growth, it actually doesn’t serve us. It we’re not happy as a result of it. A few people are very comfortable. A few people have yachts and private jets and they’re very happy with the way the system works and they want to keep it the way it is. But the vast majority of people will benefit immensely from an economy that is designed in a more regenerative way, in a more collective way, in a way that in a way that actually benefits the the planet and other species because that means that we can all thrive. Yes. So more distributive I I often talk about a more regenerative economy that works with and within the cycles of the living world but also a distributive economy that shares the value that’s created with everybody who co-creates it rather than through power hoarding it into the hands of those who own capital and control the profitm process. What would that look like a more distributive economy? What do you mean by that? The question that takes me to the source of it is to ask who owns the sources of wealth creation? How is wealth generated? uh it generated through the ownership of land and property as rent. So who owns the land and who owns the buildings and and can that be owned in a more equitable way rather than private landlord and a private land owner? We’re here in the UK. I mean there is incredibly uh high percentage of British land is owned in very few private land hands. How could we have land ownership that is more community land trust for example? So we see the beginnings of community land trusts where land is owned by the community. Um in other places it’s continues to be held by the state and you can only rent the land for a long term. So very different underlying contractual models of ownership really shape whether you get a centralized and concentrated ownership of wealth or distributed who owns the housing. Is it owned by private landlords who come in and buy up all the apartments and then rent it out so everybody else is forced to be a tenant forever? Is it owned as a cooperative? Is it owned by the city? The city of Vienna. Over 60% of people live in social housing. Because the city decided over 100 years ago that housing is not an investment asset for the wealthy. It’s a human right for all. So they wanted to own the housing stock in a way that could make sure it remained in that service. Who owns the companies? We’ve come from the 20th century. Companies are owned by corporations, shareholder owned, quarterly reporting, profit maximizing corporations that are running the company. whatever that company produces goods or services can’t doesn’t really matter. The point is to maximize the returns to those who own the shares. Well, there’s very very different designs that are possible. You can have steward owned companies, employee owned companies, cooperatives, communityowned companies. Again, redesigning it. So, the ownership is a much broader membership. And I would call all of these far more distributive options. Who owns the utilities? Who owns the water? In the UK, it all got sold off and privatized under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. And we are my god, we’re paying the cost of that now. sewage being spewed out into our lakes and rivers and companies peeling off massive profits and destroying the quality of water here. Who owns the electricity supply? Who owns the transport systems? Again, so many many choices about the sources where wealth and value is generated. Are you going to allow it to be held in private hands and accumulated or are you going to keep it in a larger pool whether it’s the state or the commons so that many people can benefit from that? I think a lot of people listening to this will hear that and say that sounds like some sort of revolution that overthrows capitalism and returns the ownership of the means of production to the workers which may be one way to get to this sort of future. But I think what you also described is a lot of innovative work on the design of corporations, the design of housing systems, the design of utility systems. And so I wonder if you can help ground that vision in a political economy of like what the next steps are to get that way for people who are more familiar with maybe like capitalism versus communism versus socialism and kind of those different buckets for understanding how society works. How does your work like interface with with that model and do you actually think of it in a in a different framework? Yeah. So the trouble with those buckets is they can very quickly pull us back into very 20th century thinking big polar polarities. I mean what I was just describing about who owns the land, who owns the housing, who owns utilities. Let me just even talk within Europe across Europe. There are many many different ways this is done. The UK since we’re here is at one extreme of privatization because that was a vision of Margaret Thatcher being put into practice in the 1980s and we are really really living out the consequences of that. We’re now one of the most unequal countries. We have terrible polluted water supply, really depleted biodiversity, you know, not the thriving local economies that we could have. Other countries in Europe didn’t do that. Vienna, right, and and cities within them. Vienna retained this the control of the stock of housing. Amsterdam, the city owns all the land. Other countries have been really good about encouraging small and local business and preventing, for example, supermarkets from opening up near wet markets where people are selling vegetables. If you go to Paris or somewhere that full of lots and lots of little street markets and selling food, we’ve lost that here. So there are many many design choices you can make that protect from the encroachment of the market always the privatization of thing the held in private equity or in shareholding. It doesn’t have to be this way and it doesn’t only have to be the state as the alternative. Right? So you’re saying kind of capitalism and socialism but there’s also the commons. So community and I I think Ellen Elstrom’s work on the commons has really helped us see there’s also that form of organizing community land trusts community housing associations cooperatives and employee ownership and so different ways of a group of people benefiting together many many different designs of business of housing ownership that to me I think is really important that we open our minds up to that possibility that fits neither is this capitalism is this communism is this socialism It’s a far more democratic economy and I think the beauty of it, the value of it is seeing there are many ways of doing things rather than dogmatically saying it has to be done this way. Many different designs are possible. They’re going to work differently in different countries and for different sectors. So just bringing in the different ways of contracting and relating to one another so that we can co-own co-develop entities that share the value far more equitably. And I think it’s a really exciting time for looking at the array across those. Yeah, I appreciate that answer because I think a lot of what the inquiry of this entire podcast project is about is when I say better future, I don’t necessarily mean this one path that I have chosen to be the right one. I think a lot of what you’re doing is saying, okay, this path we’re on is not leading towards a better future. It is leading towards ecological overshoot, the inability to eradicate poverty, the breakdown of our of our social systems, and the breakdown of our ability to cooperate with each other and to lead dignified lives. Here’s a lot of ideas of how society could go in a better direction. And that will depend on the city, the country, the continent, the culture that you’re living in in terms of what how to apply these ideas. Yes. And I do think that like you know in some cases you know a more I I spoke to Jason Hickle on the podcast and he has a lot of work on ecos transitions with a little bit more prescriptive path towards the future and I appreciate that cuz we do need to get into the details and in some cases that is what we need to do but in other cases it might be like okay this thing is working we’ve been actually building out the commons like in Austria the public housing system how do we expand on that and make that apply to more industries and more sectors. And you mentioned Margaret Thatcher. I thought it was a little bit of a bad omen when I got off the train here to Oxford and the first thing I saw was the Margaret Thatcher building at the business school. I was like, “Oh, no.” Yeah. Like it carved in stone. But I think in in many ways it is a a movement away from that path of privatization of the corporate ownership of everything. Yeah. Rebalancing. So again, for me, it’s important to recognize and it should be a 101 move in teaching economics that there are different ways we can provision for our needs and wants. Yes, there’s the market, but and it it’s incredibly powerful, right? Let’s recognize why the market they are they they are an incredible coordinating mechanism for buyers and sellers who may never need meat to trade millions of transactions every day. Incredible. Adam Smith was definitely on to something, but there are huge caveats. Markets only serve those who can pay and the rest they ignore. That’s massive. And they only value what’s priced and the rest they exploit. That’s massive. So you would never want an economy that was only driven by the market. The counter to that, the kind of classic counter is the state that provides public goods despite or whether or not somebody can afford it. It’s their available health for all, education for all. It’s a really strong counter to well, we only provide for you if you can pay through the market. But there’s also the commons where people come together through the commons and it’s supercharged by digital commons which mean the organizing collaborating is now so much easier. And there’s the household where we wake up every day and care for ourselves and our partners and our parents and our children and all the unpaid cooking, washing, cleaning, sweeping of reproducing of daily life. All of these four ways are essential I think to a thriving economy. And I invite anybody to imagine just taking one of them away. I wouldn’t want to live in an economy that lacked either the market mechanism or the state provisioning or the household or the commons. I think they’re valuable, but they need to be in balance. And I think we’ve lived through a neoliberal economic era in which the market was given unlimited domain. It it rolled back the state, right? Ronald Reagan said, you know, he sort of pushed back government and made government seem incompetent, inefficient. So roll back the state. the market has dominated the commons and privatized many common um intellectual properties and kind of patented things that have been known in the commons for many many centuries and so really stolen things from the commons and the market has also squeezed the household you know in some countries if you have a child the mother is required back at work within what 6 weeks or I mean less insane yeah and in the United States where I’m from they have to pay like tens of thousands of dollars for the hospital visit just to have the baby put into the market. Yeah, it makes no sense. So, there are many choices we can make between these. I personally wouldn’t say it this is the way it should be. I I’m interested one step back in making sure that anybody involved in these kinds of decisions is aware that there are alternative arrangements possible. Alternative arrangements already happen in many many different countries. It’s not some extreme revolution. It’s like well no that’s daily normality in other countries of many different kinds of income level. You can make choices around this and there are huge consequences in people’s lives. I think we’re living in a time where we’ve had a push of market fundamentalism. The idea that the market is the first and the best. Well, now we’re living the consequences in the obvious nature that it really is not and we actually need to rebalance that. So bring back state provisioning where the state can do that best. Bring through the commons where the commons has a new capacity and protect and recognize the importance of the household for caring for our daily well-being. So rebalancing there I think is is is really essential as how we redesign the possibilities of what an economy is. Absolutely. And we’re going to get into some of the details of that and how it’s working now and your work to implement some of these ideas. But before we go there I want to briefly touch on growth because you mentioned it in your overview of donor economics. But I want to talk explicitly about it because I think this is part of the cultural story that we’re trying to push back against which is that growth is innovation and growth is progress. And so if you have a vision of the economy like this where growth is constrained in any way by this annoying thing like you know this the health of the planetary ecosystems but uh yeah that’s going to slow down innovation. And I can hear the US tech billionaire class saying, “Oh, these people are just decelerationists. They don’t want to advance society. They don’t want to see humans on other planets.” Um, I don’t agree with any of those views, but I do want to talk about it because one, um, we want to push back against that culture narrative. And two, I think something very interesting from your work is the way that you’ve exposed the fact that we as a society, even if we’re not benefiting from growth, we’re addicted to it. And so, how are we addicted to growth? And what can we do about that? Wow. Yeah. Okay. So, the first step is, as you’ve described, it’s it’s placed as a narrative. Growth is good. It just sounds right in an economic conversation. Just sounds good. Oh, it’s growing. The economy is growing. Things are growing. Yeah. Uh we like that business is growing. Yeah. I mean and I like doing a little bit of host pipe, right? Let’s again make let’s make visible. Yeah. The underlying picture that’s underneath this. So it’s kind of a growth curve like this. And it’s exponential growth which means it increases by let’s say three or 5% year on year which it goes. Yeah. Just everything is getting all getting bigger all the time. So it very rapidly will go up through the ceiling and it ultimately goes vertical. This looks great. Right. And it’s it’s embedded in our language. The work of George Loff, cognitive linguist, uh did some work in the 1980s around the the metaphors we live by. And so forward and up is good. It’s progress. They call it is progress, right? And and when you’ve got a tiny baby that’s learning to crawl and then stand. Oh my god. As a parent, it’s like, yes, come on. Like forward and up is good. all the pictures we draw of ourselves as a as a species, you know, we stand up on our legs and we march forward and we it’s in our language of, you know, come on, let’s we’ve got to really move forwards and know we had a setback and so we use it metaphorically from within our own bodies. I think it’s important to tap into other narratives of growth that also make sense to us beyond economics, the living world. The place I think we can really learn the most is going into our own bodies. Because just as the world is a delicately balanced, complex, balanced system, so is each of our own little bodies. And in the human body, growth is wonderful in a child. It means the child is growing. They, you know, you haven’t seen some kids for a while. Wow, haven’t you grown? Right? It’s a compliment. It’s wonderful. Growth is wonderful. So I have twins and for the first 15 years of their life, we we did what every family does and mark on the wall every year. They literally got 2 in higher every year. Thank god they’ve stopped. I mean, they’re both taller than me, but they’ve stopped now because if they kept growing at that rate, they literally would not be able to sit at this table, they would not belong in their home. So anything in nature that wants to belong and if you look at things in nature that thrive they they go from this endless growth we have a little flick of the wrist they grow up and this so this is the exponential growth curve this is the logistic growth curve or the scurve things grow and then they mature and they level off if you look at things in nature that last and survive and thrive that’s what they do and we understand this in deeply in our bodies if I told you My friend had gone to the doctor and he said she had a growth. We go quiet. It’s not good. We go quiet because we also understand the other end of this metaphor that if something is trying to grow endlessly within a delicately balanced living system that is a threat to the health of the whole that’s cancer. We deeply understand it. We move in to do everything we can to stop it to protect the health of the whole. So it’s not true that you know people often say to me oh you know but growth is good. No no no no you you already know in a living system that you deeply care about you already know growth is not always good. So can we take what we know from our own bodies that actually growth is a wonderful healthy phase of life but things that last and thrive and survive they grow up and then they move to thriving. Indeed when young people go to college or university or out into the world people stop saying haven’t you grown they start saying aren’t they thriving? M oh it’s wonderful they’re thriving which means they’re alive. Something that’s thriving is alive but it’s not necessarily getting bigger. So that’s why for me the word thrive is a really important word. It’s got the dynamism that we like in something that’s growing but it’s not getting bigger. It’s developing and that I think is what we need to land in economics. So some people call it postgrowth economics and I I agree with that. I mean I I believe that donut economics is part of the postgrowth economic movement. But rather than saying we’re we’re postgrowth or beyond GDP like I’m kind of not that then what what are we for? Let’s find the language. Let’s find the images that say that what we’re for. Sometimes the best form of protest is to propose something new. So let’s be for a thriving economy which is dynamically imbalanced. And the thing about the donut, if I bring it back here, right? The opposite of that endless growth curve, the shape of success here is this thriving imbalance between the social foundation, the ecological ceiling. It’s dynamic, but it’s about balance. Just as we find every day in our bodies, have some food, but not too much. Have some water, have some tea, but not too much. Have some oxygen. My god, we need oxygen, but not too much because too much will kill you, too. We thrive and survive because we’re in balance. So, we understand it in our own bodies. Can we take what we deeply know in the human body and bring that sense to the planetary body? Can we now move beyond economies that have grown, especially here in the high income, the richest part of the world that’s already amassed so much through so much violence and many centuries of exploitation of others? The growth is done. Can we now turn towards thriving, which means a far more distributive economy? Because there is so much inequity here. We need to make things far more distributive. And that means asking who owns the sources of wealth creation. That means redesigning the foundations of our businesses, of our land use, of our ownership of properties so that we can all thrive. Beautiful. Thank you. this is maybe a good time to switch to pragmatism and and what to do about this because I think just starting with the growth point and then moving into some of the work you’re doing with the donut economics action lab there’s a challenge to shifting to a thriving economy which is that growth is required for our financial systems to keep working baked into the models I mean I’m just curious how we get past that because we’ve talked a bit about this we had an episode about postgrowth with Donnie Mcccluren and you know he explained the ways the financial system uh creates debt which means we need more growth to pay back that interest. Yeah. And I don’t I don’t know if you know I don’t expect you to have all of the answers for the the future. But I also just want some would love some quick reflections on if our financial systems require growth in order to avoid collapses economically and recessions, then it feels like we’re locked into this system that isn’t serving us anymore. And so how do you think about unpacking those lockins that keep us on this path and to just enable us to even try something different? Yeah. So I think the first step is to identify the ways in which we are locked in and addicted as you said to endless growth. Again when I go back to reflect on my economics degree we never talked about that because because growth wasn’t seen as problematic. In fact it was seen as desirable. We never asked how are we actually structurally dependent upon endless growth. So that was something I got into much later and I think there are many ways it happens. One is for example through the creation of money as as a debt interest well then it needs to be repaid with more. Another way is that we are all got structured into saving pensions on the belief that if I put away a little bit of money today it will grow and grow and grow and then there’ll be enough for me to retire on. So, we all depend upon it to save for the future. Exactly. And it’s a it’s a curious design. I often think, well, a squirrel doesn’t collect up nuts in the autumn and bury them and doesn’t come back in January expecting to find 15% more nuts. But we do because we’ve created money that actually counter in its design to life. Things in nature rot and break down and return to the earth. But money has been designed with the expectation of growth significant percentage year on year on year. So it’s actually unnatural in that sense. It’s counter to everything else on earth. But we need growth. Um for example, and I know I really empathize with today’s governments. It’s tough. It’s really tough because you are coming into power in a system that is has been for many many decades, centuries geared into the expectation of growth because it always came and I think it’s been fueled by fossil fuels. So sort of 125 years of growth fueled by fossil fuels, it seems like this escalator just keeps on going up. It always goes up. So we can presume it’s going to keep going up. So we can write into our institutions, of course things will keep rising. We can write that expectation in and now that we’re finding we really don’t have the capacity for this to keep rising or maybe it’s not even going to rise. Some countries have across Europe like very very low growth rates no matter how they try. So it’s not only you’re not allowed to grow because you’re damaging the ecology of the planet. It’s it just ain’t coming. What are you going to do? Now, another way we’ve got locked into growth is is companies are so driven to maximize labor productivity to make the same number of things with fewer people that they’re continually shedding workers. So, if the economy is not growing, who’s going to pick up that queue of unemployed workers? So, for the government, growth is a requisite to prevent unemployment. If governments want more tax, more tax revenue, much easier to grow the economy than to increase the tax rate. So again, it’s in the favor. Governments know, people are calling out about the vast inequalities in society if we promise that a rising tide will lift all boats. It’s easier than actually taking on the thorny question of redistribution. Yeah. Cuz who’s going to vote you in now if you’re actually supported by the wealthy? So these are some of the many ways we’re locked in. We’ve had a a century of consumerist propaganda telling us that we can transform ourselves every time we buy something new. So at the weekend, you should go shopping again. So our own mentality is locked in. The belief that my children will be better off if they have a bigger house and they travel further for their holidays. That’s what their success will be. Yeah, there’s a lot of unraveling and unpacking an institution we design here. I certainly don’t claim to to know the answers. But for me, it was really important in the book to set out, look, here are some of the ways we locked in. We need a new generation of young economists who say, I want to take these on. I want to actually start looking at the redesign of money, the redesign of finance. Maybe it shouldn’t be gen uh put in the hands of private banks to create money because they’re doing it for their own interest, not for a wider public interest. Can we create alternative forms of employment or part-time employment that the jobs are shared more equitably? Can we get governments to stop taxing companies for hiring people so they try and hire fewer people? And you shift that labor tax onto a resource tax so that companies are actually far more smart around using resources and they’ll employ people to use those resources more effectively. So again, there’s redesigns that can help to shift us away from the structural dependency on endless growth that we are living within right now. Yeah. So in the spirit of talking about ways this is being applied and change that’s actually happening. You’ve been working with some cities to get donut economics actually applied as policy um and figuring out what that even looks like. So are there any examples of places where donut economics is being applied that give you hope for this future that’s emerging that’s more sustainable, more equitable, more distributive? So this gives me a lot of hope because when I wrote the book, I was writing it really thinking about students in university and saying, “Hey, we need a different mindset. I want to change the curriculum.” But actually what happened is that practitioners, people working in businesses, in cities, in communities, in sectors of industry, they started getting in touch and saying, “I want to put these ideas into practice. I’m going to do it. I’m starting to do this. Can I can I do it in my town, in my city, in my county?” And it really took off in in amongst counselors and mayors in in cities. So starting with Amsterdam in 2019, they put it at the heart of circularity strategy. And once Amsterdam had done it, then six weeks later, Copenhagen voted to say, “Well, we’re going to explore what the donut looks like here.” And then there’s Brussels and then there’s Barcelona. So, first we learned the power of peer-to-peer inspiration. Right? I think there are many, many more people wanting to make change happen who gain so much inspiration and courage when they see other people just like them starting to do that thing that looked impossible, but there it is. They’re they’re they’re going for it, so they start. I get so much uh energy back from this because these are folks who if you’re working in a city, you’re not going to be able to go all the way because your city’s embedded in your nation and national regulation. You’re invite embedded for example in in Europe if you’re one of the cities I just named. You’re embedded in the global capitalist financial system, right? It’s going to push back at you and yet people start they get going. So today there are over 50 towns and cities and counties and districts around the world where the local government have picked up the tools and concepts of donor economics and said we’re going to put this at the heart of our strategy and it’s gone far beyond Europe like there’s EPO in Malaysia the city of EPO have have taken it and say we want to be a regenerative city can we use the concepts of donor economics to to guide us to become far more regenerative and distributive as we go in Chile and El Monte um places all around the world have picked it out and are starting to put into practice. Konob in France I think have taken the concepts and then said how can we turn this concept let us first of all measure a donut for our city can we actually scale it down and just look at how are people here thriving what’s our local ecology what’s our impact on planetary boundaries and what’s our impact on people worldwide so asking complex questions about the place but those questions don’t go away if you ignore them they just get untended and then they’re going to lash back at you later they’ve started developing tools as policym working together across cities and counties across countries. How can we generate tools that take us away from the very standard costbenefit analysis and actually look at what really matters here is like Cornwall in the UK. If we’re going to invest in infrastructural project, they’ve made a wheel that looks just like the donut. How would this project impact on the social foundation and people’s ability to live well? Is it going to help people? How does it impact on our our pressure on planetary boundaries? So instead of saying what’s the financial return we’re going to get from this over time, asking in human and and natural metrics, what’s the impact of this? So we’re bringing ourselves back to sense and back to metrics that really matter in a place. So there’s lots of ways in which they’re also using the seven ways to think, thinking about how can we use systems thinking in our policym, how can we nurture the best of human nature? How can we become regenerative and bring a a circular regenerative economy into being how distributive is our local economy? Can we change the way that we use land that we use that we enable small businesses to thrive through community wealth building? So, it brings together a whole umbrella of many practices that are already in play and these towns and cities are starting to put into practice demonstrating that even within the systems that we’re in, you can get started and that gives me a lot of energy and hope. Yeah. Seeing seeing that practice build and seeing them get together every year we bring bring a bunch of them together. the learning that’s happening there and the courage that’s gained from knowing that others are pioneering this too is massive. That’s very hopeinducing. So, thank you for those stories. And I wonder just like briefly how how it’s going. I think there’s a growing consensus in the states that lifestyle is probably better and more relaxed and more grounded and more calm over here in Europe. I wonder if that’s because donut economics is being applied in more European cities or if you’re partly to blame for this split or if there’s any kind of successes that you’ve seen that have like really shown that oh the people in these cities are actually happier. So first of all it takes a long time to bring about these changes and sometimes when the work gets serious within a town council it goes internal right it’s not visible like where where is in the streets it’s it’s changing the ways of working and thinking but what I do think is interesting is why is it taken off in cities and towns and districts it’s not it’s it’s some a little village a town in Sweden right so it’s not only in cities but why is it taken off at the city level rather than the national level and I think part of the reason is going back to what we were talking about before which is nation are drawn into this structural dependence on endless growth. The kind of grow grow mentality whereas towns and cities they want to be good places to live. They want people to move there because they want right. So what’s it mean to be a place there’s this green space. Uh it’s not growing endlessly. There’s not this endless crush. Uh it’s actually clean air. Maybe you can swim in the river. There are good schools for kids to go to. There is community. There’s actually a decent level of equality. Highly unequal places aren’t good places to live for anybody. Yeah. Living behind a gated, even if you have your yacht, living in a gated community is not fun if you feel that there’s a threat at the door. Right. So far more equitable spaces. So I think cities thrive when they are actually more in balance. They’re more resilient. They’re going to be more if if you invest in bringing nature back into the city, you’re going to be more resilient when there’s a drought or a heat wave. So actually the the principles of the donut very strongly align with a place that you think you know it feels good to live here. Yeah. And the politicians look great when they implement some of these things and they get popular support as a result. And I think what you pointed at is a is an important point too is like the geopolitical pressure of these nation states who are in this constant competition. At least they’re telling each other they’re telling themselves that story. In the States, we’re obsessed with our exceptionalism and our military dominance. I don’t love using the word are because I don’t really represent the military-industrial complex of the United States, but we do think that, oh, we’re at this like constant struggle with China and Russia and all of these other empires that are going to knock us off of our throne if we slow down and we surrender any sort of military dominance. So, if that’s the narrative, this donut thing, this idea of slowing down and thriving is like sounds nice, but we got to win this competition that apparently never ends and apparently uh, you know, is just going to enrich arms manufacturers and impoverish the people, but they don’t seem to care about that. So, sorry to go on that tangent, but I do think to stick with that tangent. You were asking earlier, you know, what do I think of the the the structural lockins of addiction to endless growth? That for me actually is the one that keeps me awake at night because the ones around the design of our pension or the design of finance. I mean I can see that there are different financial systems that okay you’ve got a big power struggle with the existing financial system but you could redesign it but that’s a collective action problem and I look at the photograph of the G20 leaders when they meet every year and I I call it the G20 family photo, right? No leader wants to lose their place in that photo. But if one country said, “Oh, we’ve seen the light. We actually need to thrive not grow. we’re going to stop pursuing national GDP growth. That might make a better life in that nation, but they might lose their place at the geopolitical table. And especially in this era that is so becoming militarized and the geopolitical tussling, as you said, between China and the US and Russia and Europe. It’s putting a new pressure on we’ve got to grow to remain powerful to buy our armaments. And so it is a lock in that I find deeply worrying because it’s antithetical to moving towards a planet that thrives. And I don’t have an answer for that one. That’s a tough one. And it does keep me up at night. It does make me worried about the state of the future. And we got to get someone on the podcast who can take that question. Yeah, that’s a big one. I do think that, you know, the answers that have started to come out of these conversations is that we need some sort of political movements in these these empires that actually are willing to confront that issue and and disarm and disengage from this international competition. The the problem being the game theoretical piece of it, which is if one country does it, do they get do they get rolled over by one of the other countries who becomes more militarized, which is what the United States is doing right now. So it’s complex and I definitely need to find someone who can answer those questions. And just to tap in there, so what we have seen is some smaller countries that aren’t at the forefront of that geopolitical tussle. Some smaller countries like New Zealand and Wales and Scotland and Costa Rica saying actually let’s go and do something more interesting. Let’s be well-being economies, right? And there was a time where there were five or six interestingly female prime ministers in these countries who all just ad in New Zealand saying we’re going to go for well-being, right? So smaller countries can often go off and do something more interesting because they’re not vying for that top dog position. So I think that’s where the leadership towards this comes from and countries like Bhutan or Costa Rica can show actually there are other ways or other visions of what a being a successful nation looks like. So I think they’re really important to bring to the four because many lower income and middle- inome countries are you know looking for what what does our success look like? Are we going to try and go for those that are now the richest in the world or actually we’re going to go off after something much wiser? And I hope that donut economics aligns with that kind of vision. It speaks to not only the importance of having more women leaders in these important positions of of power at the state level. Yeah. Because they do tend to actually change systems much more effectively. But also the stories we tell ourselves, right? Because if you just tell a different story and say, “Oh, we don’t need to buy into that whole empire building thing,” Costa Rica is fine. They’re investing much more of their uh resources into ecological preservation than the military now, and it’s going great. So, if we can shine a light on those stories and say, “Hey, there’s a different story happening here that’s emerging, that’s working, it will hopefully help people wake up from this fever dream of imperial competition.” And just to say, so some colleagues of mine, Andrew Fanning and Dan O’Neal did uh national donuts. They took the concept and they scaled it down to nations. And the country that’s closer than any other to meeting the needs of its people within the means of the planet. It’s not there, but it’s closer than any other is Costa Rica. So we’re using metrics, right? A new way of thinking about what success looks like. It’s not GDP. It’s thriving in the donut. Wow. We bring together the metrics. Costa Rica comes to the top of the story. It’s really valuable to bring those metrics together with the national story of what’s going on. They’re protecting the forest. They’re investing in health and education. It makes sense. There are different visions. And again, so working with governments and I’ve got an amazing team at Donard Economics Action Lab who are documenting these stories and policies and showing the coherence of regenerative and distributive policies leading to better futures for countries at very very different levels of income. Beautiful. And I’ll be sure to link to some of that work in the description of this episode. One thing that has come up a couple times in this conversation is your kids. Yeah. And the fact that you have kids. Yeah. And I think in this movement of people who are concerned about the future, who really want it to be better, there’s a lot of anxiety around having children because the future is not looking good right now in terms of the the direction of things, the momentum of things that we’ve been talking about, right? So, what would you say to people who don’t want to have kids because the future looks so bleak? Hm. So, it was in the early 2000s that my partner and I were thinking about whether or not we would have kids. And we both read a book called The End of Nature by Bill McKibben, which was an alarm call to the fact that we entered the anthroposine that humanity is disrupting the earth system that we can’t say, “Oh, isn’t it a beautiful day? Wow, how unusual for a warm day in F.” He’s like, “This isn’t nature. This is humanity has done this.” And towards the end of the book I think he argues that uh he talks about this question about you know what’s our impact on the planet. One of our biggest impacts on the planet is the number of kids we have. So if you want to reduce your footprint think about how many kids you have. So it was from that point of view actually I was thinking about it and I remember thinking well maybe we maybe one child. we could have one child because I think also we are a species who belong on earth and we are an incredibly creative species who can garden on earth as many cultures have shown and garden beautifully and we can be part of this future. So we thought let’s have one kid. So nature decided against that and uh when I went for a scan it’s like there’s two in there. So we have twins. Funny. But I have to say my kids are both now 17 years old. Both they’re like poly crisis is their mother tongue. They’re born into this I mean they’re born in this household but they were born into this era. I I I find it extraordinary that to think of young people growing up surrounded by such a level of crisis. What is that like? Yeah. But I’ll also say that that the younger generation, the the Fridays for Future, the the the Sunrise Movement, like the incredible clarity that’s come from and now I’m 55 and I’ve got that lovely thing like, oh, I am older because there’s, you know, I kind of think in my head I’m 30ome. No, no, I’m

55. And there’s these young young teenagers so powerful. So this rising generation speaking for the earth and with very cleareyed seeing the world they’re born into and bringing something to it in a way I think my generation are just part of an inertia many of us.

So we need like every species and we need turnover of the generations we need the energy and it’s going to sometimes come with anger and it’s going to come with rebellion but that it’s going to be part of a renewal that we need and everybody has to make their own choices. I know many people who live without having children, have incredibly fulfilling lives. And by the way, everybody else has plenty of kids for you to have a rich time in their lives. So, no one can, you know, advise anybody else what else to do, but I my life definitely I think many people’s awareness of the future sometimes only wakes up when they have kids and but that’s right. There’s also a generation that are super awake already and aware and don’t need don’t need that long-term awareness on having children. The human story will go on and let’s fill the future with wise humans who understand our role on the planet who we train them away from rational economic man. We we raise them with the rest of the human nature. We raise children to be pro-social to understand that we’re part of the living world to know that we have enough. And that’s hard too because every day you pop them out at school and then they get immersed in that other culture, right? So this is about a long shift. But I think it’s a deep part of human connection to be intergeneration. We are relational animals. We are relational beings. Thank you for that. That was beautiful. And I’m not a parent, so I can’t speak to it with such, you know, embodied wisdom and authority and experience. But I want to echo your point that the the future needs good people. And I’m not saying everyone should have kids, absolutely not. Make that decision for yourself. But I do like to say if your reason for not having them is fear of the future, I do think that the future will be brighter if there are people who are good and who are raised with these values of of care and well-being and you know community. And so being a part of that is going to be an incredible opportunity. Yeah. It will be scary. Every generation is scary. We’re scared now. Yeah. Yeah. And I think our if my grandparents were here looking at the way we live now with these phones and just the technology, I mean, I think it’s scary for any generation because we don’t know how to navigate that. So, we look at the future and think, I wouldn’t know how to navigate that. But people born into that era, this is this is the water I’m born into and I swim in it. And I think we can be much more scared of the future than generations who actually are born into it. Okay. Speaking of your current life a little bit, one more important question because you have started doing something completely different. You started with nonprofits and NOS’s and then you went academic and you wrote a book and you’ve been a you’ve been a professor. You’ve been a public figure, a public intellectual and more recently you’ve been putting on a circus. Yeah. Which is just an amazing creative shift for you that I’m totally here for and this a fan of. Can you tell us a little bit about why you’re what is your circus and why you’re doing a circus? Yeah. So, I drew the donut in 2012. So, it’s now 14 years old, right? It’s a teenager. And I’ve been talking about it um since then quite happily because I I I’m very happy to keep conveying that message. And I usually do it in, you know, I mean, I’ve got it here today, but it’ll usually be on a screen and I’m pointing to the donut and I’m showing images and I I love pointing to images because I’m very image based. Look at this. I can show you this and here’s another version. Look at here. National Donuts and just telling that story, doing it time and time again. So, I was invited to a festival. My partner had a book coming out and he was giving a talk about his book and he said, “Why do you, you know, why don’t you give a talk half an hour while we’re there?” And I said, “Okay, I’m going to give a talk about we need to talk about growth.” And I got there, I thought, I’ll take some hose pipe and I’ll, you know, just I’ll just riff. And I got there the night before and I went and looked at where I was going to be speaking and it was like a circus tent. Oh, cool. People sitting around in hay bales. It was literally I thought, my god, I can’t I can’t just stand here and kind of give a normal talk. I’ve got to be as playful as this space. I’ve got to live up to the potential of this space. So, I was much more fun and joking with people and riffing backwards and forwards and I found people laughing and I was laughing and it was it was funny. And I came off the stage after that and I thought, what just happened there? What was that? Yeah. And people came up to me that was that was my six-year-old was there. She didn’t understand everything you were talking about, but she she was with you. So, it just made me think, I want to I want to explore this. Yeah. And I went to a a vintage shop nearby where I live to see if they had a little red bag that I could use to represent the chancellor’s briefcase. So in Britain, the the Minister of Finance, we call the Chancellor, and they had this uh red bag they hold up every year to say, “This is the budget.” And so I wanted somebody to come on stage. We were talking about actually addictions to growth. And one of the reasons we’re addicted to growth is the chancellor wants tax. And so I said, “Do you have a little red bag?” And they went off behind the scenes. And I was standing there and there was a a red top hat on a stand. And I was I just flipped it on my head. It fit me, which was unusual in the first place. And I saw myself in this little mirror. It was a really strong moment because I saw myself and it was like I’m not a man or woman. I’m not young or old. I’m not a 55year-old woman in the I’m the ring master. Yes. And suddenly I thought I I can be this character. Yeah. I’m going to be the ring master of the circus. And then my mind was going economics and circus. So circuses have jugglers and acrobats and clowns and playfulness and audience participation and what if you put those worlds together and what stories can I tell in a really playful way without slides and clickers and powerpoints but just using objects on the stage. So then I’ve done a circus and the circus I’m doing at the moment is called battle for the biosphere nature versus finance. So I bring people up on stage I say who would like to come and play mother nature g all genders welcome. Somebody comes up and I dress them up in this incredible cape. Who wants to come and play finance? Somebody comes up and I dress them up. I will show you. Finance gets uh finance hat. This is rationally economic man on stage and finance comes up with a briefcase with uh this is of course finance’s uh financial extraction machine. Ah yes, sucking the returns of the world. and they come up on stage and we have a showdown between them and people love it. And what I’ve learned, so first of all, what I’ve learned is inviting people from the audience up. If you give somebody a hat, it’s a bit like a mask. And if you give them an object, even better, because they’ve got something to hold and do, people feel actually safe to come up and play. I am blown away that people, one minute they’re sitting in the audience thinking, I’m watching a show, and before they know it, they’ve put their hand up and they’re up on stage with me and they’re playing finance for the rest of the show. And it’s usually somebody who’s worked in the financial industry often is the one that comes up and then it’s cathartic and then they get to say all the things that were said inside the business and the kind of act that character that they were taught to be and I’ll give you an example. So in the middle of the show I say I say to finance you know in this briefcase if this briefcase contains all the financial assets of the world did you know that 85% of what’s in your bag is owned by just the richest 10% of people. 50% of what’s in your bag is owned by the richest 1% of people. They own half of the financial assets in the world. And yet here you are finance extracting and extracting. You want your 15% more and more. You’ve already got it all and you still what’s going on? I say, “Finance, could you open the briefcase?” So the person playing finance opens the briefcase and inside it are three little black masks. And I tell finance, “Do you know what these are? These three little masks are your deepest emotions and motives that are driving you. What are they? And then I ask the audience, audience, you have one minute. Talk among yourselves. What are the three deepest emotions and motives that are driving finance? The audience chatter away. And then we come back and I say, “Okay, what have you got? I want you to shout out what you think these are.” And the thing that amazes me, I’ve done the show about 15 16 times so far, and I don’t, spoiler alert for anybody who wants to come to the show and not know yet, block your ears. Every single time, the first two things that have come out as the emotions and motives driving finance, and you’ve named them already, fear and greed, they get shouted out. Yeah. So we collectively know or at least we have a very strong collective belief that what’s driving endless accumulation especially among those who already are wealthy is fear and greed. And then I say okay what’s the third one? It’s usually ego or separation or power which is all versions of the separateness, right? It’s this the separateness of the self and then I do a little therapy session with them and and start talking to fear. What are you trying to protect and talk fear down or talk greed down so we can go really deep. So this is what I love about doing the circus. If I was doing a PowerPoint presentation about the global financial system, we wouldn’t get to fear, greed, and separation, right? Named by the audience, right? So, suddenly we’re all in this together. It’s like a collective psychoanalysis and emotional kind of unpacking. Yeah. And because it’s done playfully, because we’re doing it with humor, we can go far faster more playfully to really quite profound things that we can talk about. But the thing I love the most about the circus is that willingness of people to come up. Every single time people come up and do incredible things and you can see audience members and FRIENDS LIKE WHAT? I didn’t know you could do that. What? And the beauty of the human capacity to play to dare to dare to come up on the stage to play to be funny on the spot. People are brilliant. It just shows me that we are tapping into only a tiny part of our potential. And I say at the end of every circus, you know, we had all the skills we needed right here in the tent to put on this show. Who knew? So, what else do we have here? Are we waiting? Are we waiting for the professionals? Are we waiting for the people who really know to show up? Or actually, do we already have it all here? That’s the spirit of the circus. And it just in and the next one I’m about to start, it’s going to be called how rich is too much. Ah, beautiful. Working with patriotic millionaires, an organization in the UK and the US and elsewhere to say, you know, if there’s a poverty line, then there’s an extreme wealth line as well. And it’s not good for anybody, but it’s not good for society. If extreme wealth accumulates in few hands, what are the economic impacts? What are the social impacts? What are the political impacts of that? So, taking that analysis and saying, “Right, how do you bring that to life in a funny way on a stage with a few objects and that’s going to be my next circus?” Beautiful. I got to see your your current one back at in Paris. It changed now recently and it was so much fun. So, I encourage anyone listening who gets a chance to see your circus to go check it out. And I think it’s also a great testament to, you know, your creative evolution and your own thriving, right? Like you saw a chance to do something you really wanted to do. It didn’t necessarily mean, you know, more more more for you in terms of the the career you had already started. More books, more public speaking appearances, more podcasts, but just, oh no, there’s this thing I want to do and it’s just going to make me really happy. So, I’m just going to do that thing. And it’s this I can just see you light up when you talk about it. I I know. I not myself. I just get and especially when I start thinking about the next one because oh I’m in that creative process like how are we going to Yeah, it it’s I’ve always loved and it’s all connected. I’ve always loved objects and showing things visually. When my book first came out, my plan was to do a donut economics road show and I started talking actually with the set design and we’re going to make a few things to go in a little van or we could drive around and do a pop-up show. But that got stopped because all these practitioners got in touch was like I want to do this in my town. I want to do some oh my goodness I need to set up an organization like I sort of put that aside and now six seven years later I can see there’s an incredible team running D economics action lab they they’re so brilliantly working on it creates more space for me to say I think I’m going to do a bit of circus now and and you know and this is getting tough right times are really tough the crises are shocking they’re deep they’re accelerating that it can also feel totally overwhelming to engage in these issues I think bringing humor, it’s coming in from another direction and and I’m just experimenting with it. I didn’t sit down strategically and think, right, how can I be as effective as I can? I was like, wow, that was fun. I’m I’m I’m getting fun at this. I see people animated by this. There’s energy here. Let me tap into this. And so, I’m just following it and see what happens. But I also notice I meet people in very senior positions in the United Nations, in companies, in government. And when I mention I’m doing a circus, they sometimes like give me their business card with their phone. I’m like, I would love to be in it because it’s a cathartic release for anyone to get to play a different character and actually talk about these issues playfully with humor and therefore go deep and say quite fullon things but with a with humor so we can say them. It’s another form that I think we need we need on our side. We need as part of the team. Beautiful. Well, thank you so much for your time, for sharing not only your new creative venture with us, but all of all of the work you’ve been doing for for now, I guess, 14 years, you said, since you since you drew the donut. Yeah. Wow. Which is which is incredible. And it’s inspired so many people, including me, to go in a new direction with my career, which is trying to get these ideas to more people. And I want and don’t edit this bit out. I want to say thank you because the way you communicate it, it’s playful, it’s sharp, it’s funny, it’s sassy, it’s witty, it’s bringing so many people to these issues and you are channeling people to see, you know, donor economics and postgrowth economics and all sorts of things. So, thank you. It’s it’s, you know, I think we share a love of communication and a love of figuring out what’s going to make people want to be part of that and want to know more. So, thank you for what you’re doing, not only for Don Economics, but all these issues because we’ve got to communicate it. We’ve got to make it appealing for people to want to get involved. Thank you so much for saying that. It means the world coming from you. Inspired me many years ago. So, it’s it’s a real full circle moment to hear that from you. Thank you. My pleasure. And thanks for your time and for having me into your home. You’re much welcome. To learn more about the efforts to implement donor economics in cities around the world, head to the donut economics action lab website in the episode description, where you can join the community and read tons of resources and case studies. And if you want more stories about the ideas we covered today, like postgrowth, regenerative economies, and the better future emerging around us, head to the better future media substack where you can read at least two new articles per week and support us with a monthly or annual paid subscription. We’d really appreciate your help getting this new media project off the ground. Of course, the easiest free way to support us is to share this episode with someone you think would like it. Maybe someone in your life who knows about traditional economics but hasn’t yet heard about the donut. All right, as always, thank you for being here. Stay curious, stay hopeful, and I’ll see you next time. Ciao.