Doughnut Economics
Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
Kate Raworth · 2017 · Politics & Society
13 min · 11 chaptersNarrated in your voice
What it's about
Kate Raworth argues that economics has mistaken an old goal, endless GDP growth, for a substitute for human thriving, and that this mistake now drives both deep inequality and ecological breakdown. She proposes a new compass: the Doughnut, a space between a social foundation everyone should reach and an ecological ceiling humanity should not breach. The book mattered because it gave policymakers, from Oxfam to the city of Amsterdam, a usable image for redesigning economic goals rather than just critiquing the old ones.
Reading plan
Pick a finish date and Genius lays out the days — the plan shows today's target and keeps you honest.
Read together
Start a circle and share the code — everyone sees everyone's honest place in the book. Accountability, not leaderboards.
Who it's for
- A city or national policymaker looking for an alternative to GDP as a success measure - An economics student uneasy with textbook models of rational actors and self-balancing markets - A sustainability-minded manager or investor trying to think past shareholder growth targets
What’s inside
- 1Retiring GDP as the Measure of Success1 min
Treating economic growth as an end in itself, rather than a means to human wellbeing, has led societies to optimize for the wrong outcome.
- 2Drawing the Doughnut1 min
A thriving economy should be defined as one that gets every person above a social foundation without pushing humanity past the planet's ecological ceiling.
- 3Seeing the Economy in Its Full Context1 min
The standard textbook picture of the economy as a closed loop of households and firms trading through markets hides the unpaid labor, social norms, and living planet that make markets possible at all.
- 4Rethinking the Human at the Center of the Model1 min
Homo economicus, the rational, self-interested individual who maximizes personal gain in isolation from others, is a thin caricature that, when built into policy, tends to make people behave more selfishly than they otherwise would.
- 5Getting Savvy with Systems Instead of Equilibrium1 min
Economies do not self-correct toward stable equilibrium the way supply-and-demand diagrams suggest; they behave as dynamic systems full of feedback loops, delays, and tipping points that can produce sudden instability.
- 6Designing an Economy to Distribute1 min
Inequality is not a natural byproduct of growth that eventually trickles down to everyone, but the predictable result of specific choices about who owns land, capital, technology, and market power.
- 7Designing an Economy to Regenerate1 min
An economy built on a linear take-make-use-discard model powered by fossil fuels cannot be made sustainable simply by growing greener technology within that same model; the design itself must become circular and regenerative.
- 8Becoming Agnostic About Growth1 min
Economies should be designed to enable human thriving whether or not GDP keeps growing, rather than remaining structurally dependent on perpetual growth just to stay stable.
About Kate Raworth
Kate Raworth is a British economist, senior associate at Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute and professor of practice at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. She worked for the UN Development Programme in Zanzibar and spent a decade at Oxfam researching global poverty and inequality before developing the Doughnut framework, which she calls a tool for 'renegade' economists.
