The Most Sustainable Economy in the World | Kate Raworth

hello and welcome to Planet critical the podcast for a world in crisis my name is Rachel Donald I'm a climate corruption journalist and your host every week I interview experts who are battling to save our planet my guests are scientists politicians academics journalists and activists they explain the complexities of the energy economic ecological and political crises that we face today revealing what's really going on and what they think needs to be done this is a critical time for our planet it demands critical thinking hit the Subscribe button now and go to planetcritical.com to learn more

my guest this week is none other than Kate rayworth Kate is an economist she's an author and a senior research associate at Oxford University and most importantly she is the creator of donut economics donut economics reimagines the world economy and local economies in a way that is in keeping with the planetary boundaries so ecological Health but also that puts social health front and center I.E that people have access to education housing Health Care well-being social Equity I'm trying to think about how I can describe this visual image I would highly suggest you go and Google

it it has this amazing diagram that is just so explanatory but essentially it is a way of creating a balanced and regenerative and distributive economy that ditches our focus on growth and ditches our focused on the private sector and ditches are focused on profit maximization to create an economy that is about well-being not just human well-being but the well-being of the species that we share this planet with and of course the planet itself Kates like many of the other guests on this podcast has a vision for where we could be and what we could be

what we could achieve together that's not to say getting there will be easy it will be difficult but the point is keeping our eyes fixed firmly on that Vision firmly on a world that prioritizes the health and happiness of people and the healthy longevity of our planet and if any listener hasn't come across donor economics before I'm so excited to be able to present it to you now I hope you all enjoy this episode if you do please share it far and white and leave a little review on whatever app you're listening to this episode

on if you're loving the show support Planet Critical with a paid subscription at planetcritical.com or on patreon the link is in the description box below as ever a huge thank you to the planet critical Community who choose to support the show and keep this project going every week Kate thank you so much for making time for Planet Crisco it is such a pleasure to have you on the show a big pleasure to join you so just a little anecdote to begin um you are actually the reason that I am on this climate journey I listened

to your episode of Freakonomics uh when you were interviewed uh by the economics I can't remember the name of his name off the top of my head and I remember I was on a bus going through Holland and I just had my head in my hands and she's like oh my God everything starts to make sense it was the first time I'd encountered a sort of systems thinking perspective and I came home Googled you and your work for hours and then started to sort of try and fill in the gaps of other people that were

doing this thing um and I think it from that first step it was about a year later that I launched this podcast just through increasing interest and research and concern about the way that we were going but it was all thanks to that interview with you on Freakonomics wow that's a big news to start with um I'm amazed and on it um it's amazing isn't it when when each of us is triggered into thinking differently and what what unlocks uh that opening up of Worlds and discovering of ideas and I'm I'm thrilled if that podcast

was part of your journey thank you it absolutely was it was the the Cornerstone the first development of it and I would love to know yours um before we get into donut economics and introduce that model you are an economist at what point in your training did you start to get a sense that you the neoclassical Economist was just not fit for the 21st century well that's a great question uh so when I went to University to study economics I had never studied it before so I turned up surrounded by lots of students who had

and so my first uh jump into it was scrambling to catch up right I wasn't questioning I was trying to learn I was trying to catch up trying to understand it took me a long time to start asking the questions and it was actually my my professor professor Francis Stewart when I studied development economics it's called develop economics as if I don't know what the rest of it is then uh and the first essay she gave me to ask was what is human development and how should we measure it and it was the first time

that anybody within the field of Economics had asked me sorry what is it we're trying to do here how would we know if we were getting there and it was just so struck me that this was the first time this question had come up and that took me down a whole different route of thinking and rejecting the metrics and the analysis that I'd inherited but I have to say that I'm a real visual thinker I love pictures I love simple ones and I was showing this diagram by a futurist called Hazel Henderson who sadly died

earlier this year so it's nice to bring her back in the room she draw this picture of a cake a cake on a little cake stand of lots of different layers you know the bottom slice the middle slice and the tears of a cake and she said this was the layer cake of the industrial economy and on the bottom the bottom slice was called Mother Nature on which everything sits and then there was the love economy she was from the west coast of universe right love economy into the unpaid care economy the cooking washing sweeping

raising the kids caring for each other no money passing hands but foundational to life then on top of that was the public sector providing health and education and Roads and then there was right on the very top of the icing just the icing on the top it was the private sector and I just thought this is brilliant visually showing that what we think of the economy business is dependent upon sits upon this invisible but essential world and I was so struck that why is it that the best diagram of the economy that I've ever seen

looks like a cake I was never in my textbooks and I pinned it on the wall next to my desk for ages just it just was making me think this shows something that's left invisible in everything I was taught and it helped me just recognize the importance of pictures because what we put on the page the lines we draw they determine what we see and what we don't see they decide what's Central and what's peripheral and if we leave it invisible we won't measure it we probably won't talk about it we certainly won't manage it

and care for it so it was her work actually and I didn't realize it at the time I just thought well I love that diagram but I you know like I ended up drawing a donut I'm sure the donut was inspired by the cake and the power of pictures to reframe so we can talk about you know power invested interest in institutions I'm really interested in the power of framing the way we think and it happens sometimes in the very first diagrams we encounter and the power therefore in the pencil to redraw the world and

to change the way our minds encounter the world beautiful power in the pencil to redraw the world I think what is so beautiful as well about that example is the inclusivity of um of pictures of of drawings um the what we know Academia sort of struggling with its own Ivory Tower and Things are Written in certain languages we develop these extra languages um that make everything seem sort of so inaccessible and I am sure is has been sort of part of a deliberate um bid to keep expertise withheld to a small part of the population

otherwise why would we pay experts so much um and so I love that as part of the kind of you know donate economics is also sort of about redistribution as as far as I understand it and you will of course explain it but also this redistribution of of knowledge and accessibility and including people in the capacity to redraw the world and reimagine the world which has been left to just such a small select uh group of people for so long which I'm sure is why we're in this mess now yeah and actually when I uh

graduated from University and when I was I I first of all I didn't ever want to call myself an economist because I had come to see the deficits in what I'd been taught then lack of conversation about power the living world was practically absent in fact it was only referred to as an externality which is in yourself insane and I never ever wanted to hold out my hand say hello I'm an economist and in fact years later when I was writing the book donor economics and I was a mom of two young kids and I

would be chatting to other parents at the school gate and they say what do you do and if I ever said well I'm writing a book about rethink economics you know the first thing people do is they step back they they immediately say oh I I wasn't very good at maths at school and I think wow what is it about economics that most people think it's too hard for me I'm not a mathematician so I can't get involved in spin it's actually massively determined each of our lives and should be an utterly accessible conversation so

sticking the word donut in there and call it donut economics it's a it's a little flag waving saying this is fun this is accessible this invites your humor and your play this is for everyone and I've been really thrilled by the way so many Community organizations and teachers have brought it into Community conversation into the classroom and made it irresistible playful and made everybody realize actually I could be part of this conversation and this makes sense this version of Economics makes sense to me now I'm empowered and actually I have a lot to say I

can't really answer more than that I think what's so funny about um this sort of neoclassical economics is maybe it had to be couched in such opaque and obscure and um inaccessible language because when you do explain it to somebody who is any shred of Common Sense they go well that's not gonna make sense that doesn't work that's how the real world works so there has to be the sense of reimagining it but I mean yeah the feelings of it are so evident and we talk about it a lot on planet critical so could you

walk us through what is donor economics and and explain it to us why it's taking the World by storm because it really has well I'm very happy to tell you what Don economic is so so economics means if you take it back to the ancient Greek Roots it means the art of household management and we could not need anything more than that right now right this is a critical thing and I really like to go back to the roots of the meaning of the word let's reclaim this word and its ambition and its intention so

donut economics was my response to being really frustrated by what I was taught and years after in fact it was after the global financial crisis right when I heard economists start saying well we need to rewrite the economics textbooks direct to to reflect Financial realities and I thought I'll be damned if we're only going to rewrite economics textbooks to reflect Financial realities we need to reflect the crisis of social inequalities within and between the work Nations we need to reflect climate ecological breakdown we need to rewrite economics for all of this so what I did

was go to read all the economic theories that I had never been taught and they're amazing feminist economics ecological economics and complexity economics there were some phenomenal ideas there and I wanted to ask myself what happens if we don't leave them as all of the disparate schools of thinking and you have to choose which direction are you going to go in bring them together make them dance on the same page and that was my goal with download economics and and at the heart of this as of course this word I keep saying the donut soap

the donut it's a picture and you can think of it as a the kind of donut that has a hole in the middle so it's a ring and I offer this as a compass for human flourishing in the 21st century and if you think of Humanity's use about resources radiating out from the center then the hole in the middle of the donut that's a place where people are left falling short on the essentials of life that's where people don't have the resources they need to thrive without decent food and housing Education Health Care income Community

political participation social equity the world's governments have already agreed to this because these come from the sustainable development goals so leave no one in the hole but it's a very big butt as we collectively use Earth's resources to meet our essential needs and wants we cut timber from the forest we draw minerals and metals from the from the land convert land to create food we make carbon emissions we draw water from lakes and rivers as we use Earth's resources we start putting pressure on the life supporting systems of our planetary home and that's the outer

crust of the donut it's like an ecological ceiling Beyond which we should not go because there we risk breaking down the delicately balanced living planet that is life on Earth so we need to live in the ring itself in in essence I can say leave no one in the hole but don't overshoot Earth's limits so we need to thrive in that ring-shaped space in between the two and already this is Transforming Our deep sense of progress and success because neoclassical 20th century economics told us it's growth in fact that's what politicians are saying again and

again growth growth growth and it's this idea of endless increase no matter how rich a nation already is it's the solution to its problems lie in yet more growth there's something insane about that that there's no limit to this so instead of pursuing endoscope the donut says no we need to learn to thrive in Balance it's it's this delicate balance between meeting the needs of all but doing it within the means of the living planet that is the the North Star the target the goal the vision of what success looks like it's utterly different from

saying a growing GDP and therefore it changes everything and when I first drew the donut ten years ago I was just blown away by how how strongly people responded to it had no idea and Oxfam had published it we had no idea that people would use it immediately in conversation to to make visible their love for social justice and their love for The Living Planet and that these things need to be made visible together and discussed together it doesn't work to say are you working on social justice or are you working on Environmental Protection they

have to happen together so I was blown away by people's response to that and then I thought okay the goal is the donut then what kind of economic mindset gives us even half a chance of getting there and that's when I went back and read all the different kinds of Economics what are the very best ideas that we can draw on without being weighed down by what's already in the textbook what's already on the syllabus what's normal for politicians to talk about let's go for the Long View so I called it Seven Ways to Think

Like A 21st century economist not worrying about what today's politicians would think and Drew up a series of principles so it's not full of policies it'd be crazy to try and prescribe policies it's principles about thinking in complex terms rather than um mechanical Simplicity it's about recognizing we can nurture the best of human nature rather than assume that we're rational self-interested and individualistic it's about moving from a degenerative industrial design to a regenerative one from a divisive economic system to a Distributive one and it calls into question the future of growth there's something I want

to ask here because this is um this is a conversation that I'm having quite a bit with my community at the moment which is for those of us who are already on this side together and already working on all of this um perhaps from different angles but with the goal of making the world a better place for everybody or attempting to how do we use our ideas to tr to translate into slogans or stories or policies or principles that can attract people that are for the moment aren't sure and suppose I suppose the question that

I want to ask then um is how would you apply any of those principles or the principles don't know economics now to the cost of living crisis in the United Kingdom and we'll get into the ecology but right now I mean the whole world seems to be in a cost of living crisis um because of the the the war in Ukraine and how that's driven up and fuel prices or perhaps speculation has um what are the principles that we could say to a British public that would convince them the nonsense that's being spouted by our

leaders about growth not only is that ineffective and will not help you and is destroying the planet but here's just a better option um that could help your communities Thrive not just today and tomorrow but in five years and 10 years and 20 years time so instead of starting in the costly living crisis which makes us all go for a very um emergency Quick Fix which we have to respond to when when a crisis occurs but it can stop us from taking their bigger Long View if we only start from within a moment of Crisis

so I would start with that community that you're talking about and this is happening actually all over the UK and internationally people in communities either led by Community groups or local councilors saying okay what is our vision for our city or Community whether it's Glasgow or Leeds or Devon or Cornwall or Birmingham people are asking these questions what does it mean to thrive here what is our vision of thriving and how do we what would it mean for everybody to have the basics of enough what would it mean to live and respect our local Ecology

of place to bring back nature so that our city and and when we're not exposed to heat waves in the summer right so we can't respond only to one crisis at a time we've got to recognize the vulnerability to multiple crises how do we create cities that have Greenery and resilience so we're not exposed to heat waves and drought how do we reduce our footprint on the whole planet because that's the big planetary question reducing our carbon and material intensity and how do we find a way to live in a way that respects the rights

of people worldwide so we invite people to create a portrait of their their own locality through the lenses of the donut opening up a big Community conversation about what it means to thrive here and the two dynamics that I believe we need to put at the heart of public policy making are moving from divisive policies that drive opportunity and value into the hands of a few and just two distributive ones so investing in what the journalist George mumbio says moving from private luxury public schooler to public luxury and private sufficiency and I think that's just

really beautifully put how do we create public luxury in terms of really great public transport affordable social housing so people aren't suddenly exposed to hiked mortgage prices but they know that they can afford their rents that we can create a locally owned Enterprises that where food is Affordable for all we can create renewable energy that might be a solar Cooperative owned by the local community owned by the school so that removes us from this vulnerability to the geopolitics of fossil fuel prices there are solutions for all of these things one of the reasons why we're

in a crisis now is because we've left it so late to remove ourselves from a dependency on fossil fuels and suddenly you find yourself caught in crisis so redistributing the ownership of the sources of wealth creation how can we have publicly owned collectively owned essential Services what some people call the Social guarantee of health education child care and ensure decent incomes and like living wages for all and to me this is a real rewriting and remaking of the ownership of Enterprise I think there's a lot of innovation around locally owned cooperatively owned fully owned businesses

rather than that we have to depend upon large multinationals to grow to create jobs which actually can be very vulnerable jobs for people so we need to create distributive economies but we also need to create regenerative economies that become part of a circular or cyclical economy so we're reusing and recirculating materials but we're repairing and sharing rather than for example everyone thinking okay I need to get rid of a fossil fuel car do I just buy an electric vehicle instead no that is not going to be a solution that's still incredibly material intensive we need

to move to excellent public transport affordable and to car sharing so it takes and vision of a national system or city scale system to put in place the infrastructures that actually enabled people to lead really resilient decent low carbon affordable lives for all now I'm speaking to a big long vision and and you know I can sense myself that's that's not an immediate solution to the cost of living crisis that we're in right now we will never actually make these scales of transformation if we're only ever try to solve for tomorrow's headline because we get

caught up in the immediacy of it but if we weren't going to deal with the immediacy of it a windfall tax on fossil fuel company profits that are extraordinary right now would be a very sensible way of redistributing unanticipated extreme wealth to those who most need support and you know the numbers of people being forced to go to food banks in this country is extraordinary giving to one of the richest nations in the world so I I don't try to solve the politics for tomorrow's headline but speak to a much longer vision of where we

need to transform to because I do also believe that it's in crises that the most Progressive places and policy makers will pivot towards a new vision right crisis actually opens up an opportunity to leave behind and stop trying to fix incrementally the old system and actually invest in a new um I think your theory that is being proven right now uh we are in the week of protests outside dining Street uh we had all of the campaigns enough is enough and Extinction rebellion and just stop oil into the brain all of these groups come together

over the weekend as well uh to block Westminster Bridge there is a seemingly sort of Coalition and uh urgency um that perhaps we haven't seen before I suppose though still I kind of want to stick on this tension between the immediacy and the long-term Vision because for many people all around the world um who are not privileged in the way to be sort of sitting in a studio with equipment having having highfalutin conversations who are thinking instead about where am I going to get fresh water or how am I going to get food or how

am I going to keep shelter above my children's heads what kind of messaging do we use or how do we speak to the genuine emergency of their issues and how do we communicate that the vision that isn't in the long term is equally for them um because I still for me that it feels like if there's a b and c a being the immediency and C being the long-term Vision we haven't quite figured out how to make B manifest itself or how to explain that first all you need to do is move to B and

then C will arrive with us as well so the governments of the day promise growth uh that will somehow trickle down to help solve these crises um and I think for decades it's been proven that that's not how it works we live in a world in which the richest one percent of people own half the world's wealth the goal of the framing of the donut is to put the immediacy of people's needs right center of the picture so if I were to right hold up the donut in front of us right in the middle of

the hole of the donut it says food energy water housing social inequality or kind of ensuring Equity income these are the essentials of people's lives and these are the issues that are in crisis it's interesting to me that uh only a couple of years ago maybe before the covert pandemic many of the world's high income countries when they would look at the donut they would say well you know these things we've sort of got sorted like these aren't these aren't crises for us but they are crises in every country in the world today because we

recognize that food and energy and water are deeply intertwined in the way they're provisioned in the world and so these are very real in people's lives so to to create policies that put front and center how do we ensure that everybody has enough food to eat that everybody has affordable clean energy that they have decent housing the reason why it's hard to suddenly solve in a country especially like the UK is because for decades governments have sold off public housing they have uh privatized many of the utilities which could now be actually purposed and you

see other countries actually ensuring decent prices for protecting people from the prices but when you when you're in a country where so much has been privatized and sold to overseas investors where you've lost control over it so you've commodified many of the basics of life which aren't truly Commodities they are the essentials of Life they're human rights but you've allowed housing to be treated as a commodity energy to be treated as commodity these are Essentials for life and so we find ourselves in this crisis situation so it is that the further you go down that

road the more radically transformative it appears to be try to actually solve these by bringing them away from that commodification sphere and actually treating them as if they are public goods that need to be insured as human rights so it's not easy to bring this language immediately to people until we can talk about the immediate needs of protecting people's access to energy into you know all the things we could have done it should have done already like insulated 27 million homes in this country would already reduce the cost of living crisis moved to renewable energy

far faster would have reduced our dependency on due politics of gas prices we are late and so you can't come up Suddenly with a solution to a crisis that's Arisen because we haven't yet acted yeah I understand that this is sort of an impossible question but why are we so late why is it that those in power seem hell-bent on continuing down a path of destruction and ignoring warnings from scientists from people with the data what what happened and why does it continue today well I don't know um like anybody I don't know why um

I think we're also caught in the its moments perhaps historians will look back in 100 years and they'll see so much better than we can in it why but it seems to me because to propose change requires so much more work than to propose continuity if you want to speak for a different vision of the future you need to propose it it's like the onus is on you to explain how that could possibly work how will everything work how will the last detail of this work and how will that work yeah the onus is on

you to explain how transformation is going to work when those who are running the economy according to a status quo are so rarely asked how on Earth are you going to not destroy The Living Planet which is already well underway I think there's a real difficulty in political narratives to bring in the very very big picture the much slower processes at climate breakdown the lagged effects that are now locked in and to lift people's gaze above the daily headlines and above the immediacy of their own lives to understand that we are part of a far

bigger system and I'm going to say actually I think I do think this goes back to the starting point of economics which many people learn a little bit of and even if they don't study it we all learn it through the way it's spoken about in the media in politician you know in Parliament so economic mainstream begins with welcome to economics his supply and demand here is the market it starts with the market it starts in market and and you can hear in the news today you know how will markets react because if this is

the the god that we must follow how will markets the markets haven't responded well to this we don't start by recognizing that we are living beings and part of a living world on the only known living planet in the universe and that this planet has a series of Life supporting systems on which everything that we do utterly depends if we don't start by recognizing the climate cycle the hydrological cycle the nutrient cycle that's not in our fundamental education it's very very hard to bring that in in the midst of a political debate that's caught up

in how will markets respond to this to then invoke but how will the the planet be destabilized by this policy it's very hard to hold the much bigger space the longer space and I think there's a cognitive dissonance in in our mind each one of us and when we're listening to these debates it's so complex you like you know you're thinking in terms of systems and complexity it's so hard to hold it in our minds it's almost easier just to push it away and focus on the much shorter term immediate feedbacks that we see from

the government policy making to the markets to the currencies two impacts on interest rates and two impacts on inflation and to diminish economics as if it were that when actually what's ultimately happening is that we're destroying the life supporting systems of our planetary home so the onus is on those to bring that in and that's why people are demonstrating outside Parliament and outside Downing Street just stop oil and Extinction Rebellion how do you hold voice for a thriving living planet in a policy space that finds it very very hard to let you bring that in

it's an extremely difficult job to do that well and to feel like you've got currency on the immediacy of the news you've got two minutes to explain why why you've got why you got a problem with growth for example how are you going to do that how are you going to come in and actually disrupt this world view so that's why we're down at economics we believe that starting to put it into practice in towns in communities in cities take to the from being an idea on the page that you're trying to justify an idea

and you can actually turn and look at the way places and people are already starting to do this always with constraints because every town is based in a city in a nation in based in a region in the world so it's constrained by the Global Systems of which it's a part and yet transformation begins and tell me about those cities because I when I was living in Holland Amsterdam I believe was the first city uh to publicly declare itself uh donut economic City and they went about remodeling um their systems in order to fit your

model now I haven't exactly kept up with how it's going but I believe they're still using it where else are we seeing uh communities use this and what benefit are they are they reaping from it so Amsterdam wasn't he the first city to say we're going to use the donut model and not not cross the entire city but to say in our ambition to become circular City so to be 100 circular by 2050 and our use of materials be 50 circular by 2030. these are Big Ambitions this is transformative and what what's it clear from

all the different places that are now engaging with these ideas these are places where there are people with ambition and vision to transform that they know that they need to bring about the transformations of our times and a concept like the donut gives a really useful overarching frame to saying we need to transform we need to decarbonize our economy we need to create a circular economy we need to transform Our Food Systems we need a falfer economy you can't have five or six different agendas bring them together under a vision that says that to meet

the needs of all within the means of the planet let's do that in this city the donut offers you a vision to which all of these agendas speak so they what we're seeing is they already have that ambition and they bring in the donut as a concept to explain it to guide it to visualize it and to make it compelling so it's around decarbonisation circularity um and we're seeing more and more cities from Amsterdam than Brussels um now Glasgow Barcelona Nanaimo in Canada IPO in Malaysia Sultana Bay in South Africa and Monte in Chile there's

around 40 local governments and City governments around the world who have themselves said we think these ideas are useful where we are that's a really important principle actually for us at donut economics action lab that we set up to work with these very change makers we've never once pushed or tried to persuade or convince anyone to use these ideas there are so many ideas in the world people in a place facing the complexity of their own local reality those people are best placed to decide does this idea help bring about help motivate and and speed

the very Transformations that we believe we can create it and if so then they bring the ideas in so it's it's an idea that's in the Commons and it's being picked up and put into place in many many cities around the world so they're places that are um decarbonizing the city center removing cars and traffic from the city center they might be aiming to be a circular economy using it as an alternative to the pursuit of endless growth for the success of their place what motivates us here is not to say this but be a

local economy is always growing what motivates us is to say that our local people leading good lives and are we doing that within the means of the living planet can we monitor ourselves by these metrics that we Define locally so over time we'll be able to see whether this is becoming a thriving place and for me it's very important to move from the language of growth which is such a 20th century framing to the language of thriving which is also alive which is also healthy but it's not endlessly increasing in size so these towns and

cities they're just getting going and and I just want to reflect on let's let's go back to neoliberalism right it was in 1947 that Milton Friedman and Hayek and others got together in a little village in Switzerland called montpeleran and they said let's create this new economic agenda it's called neoliberalism and they started seeding it right back then now it took three decades until the 1980s when Reagan and Thatcher actually put it into practice in this in on the world stage and above the three years of neoliberalism somebody said well how's it going it apparently

wasn't going anywhere it was seeded for decades now we do not want done economics to be seeded for decks we don't have time for that but what it what I think is happening is it's taking root the ideas are starting up so places are trying to figure out what it what can we change what can we stop doing here what can we start doing within the constraints of our national legislation within the region within the world we're still Poland of global financialized economic systems what can we start to change here how do we change this

local conversation how do we explain to Residents why we need to create a certain economy so we're seeing it mostly be used in context of creating circular economy of we're investing in bringing back nature on decarbonizing and also Community wealth building so building local ownership economic democracy as people say so locally owned Enterprise some cities for example say we have a social entrepreneur Hub we want to get new Innovations and new businesses started to and we want to infuse their their startup with the ideas of download economics so that that Enterprise really does help sequester

carbon it helps build community it helps solve problems in the world through Enterprise and it doesn't get captured and turned into a money-making machine it actually can pursue its purpose how fantastic I think what's so wonderful about it um is that once you kind of take the the filter the Paradigm of neoliberalism away the amount of creativity that is opened up with the idea of circularity and community and Justice and equity and collectivity in intergenerational rights and the planetary well-being um what humans can devote their life to each other and the future and the now

it's just invites were so much more creativity than than profit maximization which is the Cornerstone of neoliberalism and I think that's something that's so exciting about your model I do have a question though that I've been burning to ask you for about a year I'm because I had a mineral scientist on The a material scientist on the show about a year ago and we were talking about circular economy and he went listen great love the idea but the models don't factor in um the materials that we have and it is not possible to endlessly recycle

everything there will have to be some new mining some new there some knew that but essentially we cannot have a circular economy an endless population growth and a balanced Planet because of the the limits to materials that we have he talks about materials blindness could you now I understand I haven't given you any figures there but more of an anecdote but could you speak to that what's do you you put in the endless population growth but but we're not going to have endless population growth right right global population is is still growing but it's growing

towards a plateau right unlike the global economy which seems to intend to grow endlessly right so we have a growing population but and it's incredibly important to stabilize the size of the human population to bring us back into balance with the rest of the living world but yes this material science is at well I I would say I think I'm going to agree with the material scientists that there's not unlimited materials I mean it sounds like what you're saying is this person was saying we're going to have to do new mining there's another side of

that story which is and there's only so much material out there yeah right so the idea that for example everyone to say oh what we need to do is get rid of having fossil fuel cars and everyone buy an electric car there is not enough minerals and rare earth metals and materials to do that in fact there's not enough to create solar panels for the whole world and this goes back to the idea that we always must have expansion it's all right we can have more and more as long as it's renewable no we need

to reduce demand and a lot of circularity is about not recycling all the time it's about preventing the need for recycling in the first place by refurbishing repairing re-sharing and reducing so it goes much deeper to redesigning the ways that we live and uh much more Collective ownership for example not owning a car at all that would then be recycled but having a car share so one car shared amongst 10 15 households massively reduces our footprint and and that car needs to be made modular by Design so that it can be assembled and disassembled so

you're only replacing the one piece that needs replacing so there's a lot of design interventions you can make to massively reduce but of course there's no such thing as a circular I would say circular or cyclical right there are Cycles because we live on a planet subject to the second law of Thermodynamics which is that things decay Metals rust paper rocks potatoes rot people die things Decay on this planet and so you're having to invest energy to either find new materials or renew them and regenerate them we need to do that within the cycles of

the living world but but even if if your new material scientist says well a circular economy isn't possible I can I can say well and a linear economy therefore is really impossible the idea of just having this through flow I mean I really believe that our children's children will pull photographs from the archives and they'll see pictures of oceans the surface covered in single-use Plastics they'll see photographs of people in Ghana and other countries like uh where there are Electronics waste dumps they'll see people photographs of people crawling through this dumped valuable materials and they'll

they'll literally say to us what about this did you ever see this I mean you can't ever see you you can't ever have known a book but we we think it's normal we see it all the time we're so used to living in an utterly waste-based degraded world it's we have to remove the scales from eyes and realize that of course the economy must be far more circular and cyclical than it currently is as well as reducing our demand and there's only so much metals and minerals out there that can be mined so the bigger

danger I think is that we will we will literally run out of that stuff that's why we must stop dispersing it throwing it away and reduce our demand and I think the idea of reducing demand is it's at odds with the Western mindset and the Western lifestyle that's been inherited but I think it's very interesting in the context of the the Russia Ukraine war at the moment it's only now that you hear political leaders start to talk about reducing demand or rationing demand and I think it's something to do with a throwback to the second

world war that's when people in Western Societies in Europe and the US that's what they associate rationing with whoa and it's almost as if the context of War now creates uh the basis for talking again about the fact that there are reasons why we need to reduce our demand but it's not only due to the current context of all it's going forward we need to live in Far More demand reducing ways we need to bring our footprint back within planet Earth and that is a reinvention of our lifestyles and what we think is normal but

moving away from thinking I can pay for it and therefore I can use it we must reduce our demand so are we are we are we talking about d-growth here I don't use that phrase because every conversation I've ever been in about degrowth that people are talking about different things so I don't find it helpful okay here's how I put it yeah it shows that we are massively overshooting planetary boundaries we need to combat within the means of the living planet we need to reduce our pressure on we need to massively reduce our use of

fossil fuels our material Footprints so our pressure on land on fertilizers on water on Timber on materials and metals aggressive reduction I mean that's what the donut shows I don't need to talk about the growth the donut shows we are way overshooting plenty boundaries and the first goal of the donut is to combat within planetary boundaries now how do you do that we need to become regenerative by Design and we need to be distributed by Design I believe that calls into question the presumption of endless economic growth for sure and we need to totally transform

our economic systems to make that possible right and so could you paint a picture of um a world in 50 years time say donut economics took off we we are living in a regenerative and distributive economy all around the world what does that look like because I think some of the some sometimes people are afraid of the idea of having anything vaguely slightly reduced because it would be some kind of change and it seems to entail some sort of loss um and therefore they either to ignore sort of the the horrors of the situation that

we're currently in or to believe that we'll just Electrify everything and live life that way those seem to be sort of to the prevailing and preferred options but could you paint as a picture for what life could look like and how it could be better using donor economics well there would definitely be reduced pollution reduced waste reduced screaming inequalities um there are many things surely in the world that we want to see reduced and and yet of course we will speak what we're for so it's a work it would be a world if we have

the wisdom and the chance and the ambition to create it that is much more interconnected with the rest of the Living World where it would be much more visible in the towns and the cities where we live that nature is what supports us and enables us we would bring nature back into our lives because that's where our resilience and health comes from it's a world in which we'll be much more playful actually with materials because we will have a much longer relationship with them we will be refurbishing and preparing and reusing and Reinventing and remaking

and I think a lot of creativity will come out of that I think it's going to be a world which will be informed by what's often called Cosmo local production and the idea is that atoms are heavy and they should circulate much more locally and I think we should use locally sourced materials but bits data bits of light and can travel globally so we can share ideas and designs in the Global Commons but we should make the materials and reuse and refurbish and repair those materials much more locally and to me the concept of Cosmo

local production is a huge hope for the future because it means that we could actually through micro factories that have all the laser tools the the internet connectivity the distributed solar energy that connects them to the world we can create local fabrication centers that means you can actually bring fabrication micromatic fetching locally owned Enterprise into communities rural and urban around the world rather than what we currently see is the pressure of people toward Urban centers and people removed from the land that they've always known the community they've known pushed into urban centers and often into

um real deprivation and and vulnerability there so it's a world of Cosmo local production it's also a world in which we judge the success of Nations by whether or not that country is getting into donut is it meeting the needs of its people within the means of The Living Planet by the way today the country that's the Forerunner in this is Costa Rica it's almost it's much closer than most countries to meeting the native all its people and it's closer than any others to living within the means of The Living Planet while it does it

so we will never be talking about developed Nations right I mean let's banish that language yeah all all so-called developed nations are massively overshooting planetary boundaries and they're destroying the life support systems of the world there's nothing developed about that so we'll have a really different sense of what success looks like I think it'll be a world in which we have a much much stronger relationship to energy we'll stop obsessing about GDP and uh we'll I hope will massively de-financialize the power of markets to determine and the flows and the the ups and downs to

give the thumbs up and thumbs down to Nations we will focus much more on energy because that is ultimately the currency of life whether it's solar energy whether it's damaging uh impacts of fossil fuel energy that we've been using whether it's energy that we turn into food for our own bodies or harness through machines whether it's turned into electricity whether we call this water for energy we'll realize that that is ultimately the currency that is ultimately the budget with which work and then we'll look up at the Sun and say thank you for this phenomenal

solar income that hits this planet every day and we'll get so much more creative about harnessing this gift of solar energy that comes to us every day wow what a beautiful day it's also going to be a well it's a complex world right and if you read the work of King Stanley Robinson yes um right uh Ministry for future it it ain't it's not a pretty smooth story right getting it so I'm I'm envisioning a world that can work but I I think he's right in his book that this is a bumpy ride we're and

what he calls turbulent twenties and that's why these crises are happening and anyone who thinks we're going to go back to world pre-covered I I don't believe we are I believe we are in in an era of crises and the question is do we do we respond only very very short term to each one of these crises and try and fend them off and fend them off with outdated political language promising promising growth because it's so easily pleasing even though it's no way offers a solution to the complexity of what we face or do we

start to say you know recognizing the complexity of the context we face it's actually time to move to a much bigger Longer term vision of transformation and that's the obviously that's the space that donor economics Works in alongside many others alongside the well-being economy Coalition and Conley for the common good alongside buen Vivir alongside Maori World Views alongside Ubuntu the cup sangam in India there are so many World Views that have always spoken to thriving um and I think it's actually the dominance of the western economic mindset and Western um economic power structures that have

pushed us around this pursuited growth for so long it's time to bring through a vision of thriving so that we give ourselves even just half a chance of getting there I think what is so important and in what you've said is a there are so many projects and schools of thoughts and communities doing something around the world yes it is not hopeless and B it might be that the developed Nations come last in a way because it is this sort of globalized hegemony that we've exported around the world um and it we have seen time

and time again over history that is other parts of the world that have uh community and collectivism um uh in constant or um what's the word I'm looking for and community and collectivism are the foundations of the very principles of which we they live their lives and have been deliberately undermined by political forces from the West time and time and time again so it is for people who feel despondent I mean look to all other corners of the globe and you will see fantastic things happening around climate around Community around women's rights and all of

these kinds of things and we are currently playing catch up unfortunately because of the power of the West how quickly we play catch-up or how long we refuse um to no longer be world leaders in whatever and that's going to have a huge impact on the world but these things are happening and I just think it's such an important message to say to people I get so many people saying to me so often but what do I do what can I do I don't know where to begin what would be your advice to somebody that

says I don't know where to begin what I want to so there are many places to begin um don't economics office one of them but it's not the only one it's really important to me and I'll work we want to join the movement we don't want to be the movement right we're joining them there are many ways you can get involved in different people are motivated by different entry points but if somebody is interested in the the concept of done economics of what could I could I get involved where I am so we have downloaded

economics action lab and it's a platform that we invite anybody to join download economics.org you can just go to our website you'll see a map to see where all the members are is there anybody where you are is there any group organizing Where You Are people around the world are taking these ideas and combining them with say transition towns with economy for the common good what can we do to make this happen here how can we start organizing here so you can if you're a teacher in a classroom how can you bring these ideas to

your students if you're a community organizer how could you meet up with others and say what would it mean and I think one of the first places to start is to make visible what's already happening as you just said you look around well there are amazing things are really happening it's so easy to be hit by the headlines of Despair and feel overwhelmed by crisis it's so important to turn the other way and look at what is already happening what momentum is there already that's taking us towards the future that we want only when I

wrote donate economics the number of people who came up to me and said this this book gets a framing to what I'm already doing it gives a framing to the Enterprise I've already created the community group I've already mobilized it's already there it just needs the the language the images to help bring it together make it visible because we can see another world is already trying to be born she's already emerging and that for me is one of the strongest reasons not to give up and not to fall into a hopelessness because there it is

it's rising if we can only make it visible to ourselves so get involved at all the work on eco-anxiety shows that people who actually just get involved and start joining in action with others feel so much better about the possibilities and their engagement and and their um their agency than if we don't get involved with others beautiful thank you and my final question for you is who would you like to platform well given the questions you've been asking we've given your uh quite right focus on the importance of Community engagement taking economics out of the

Ivory Tower and bringing it into everyday lives that people can feel engaged with I would love to platform the incredible work of an organization called Civic Square in Birmingham they have in one neighborhood in Birmingham in the UK in a in a neighborhood called ladywood they are taking the ideas done at economics and really putting them into practice at the neighborhood scale go Street to Street uh with pictures with play involving kids involving Community conversation diving in what does this mean for us and for our transformation in this place it's work that blows me away

every day so one of the co-founders and directors of Civic squares called any core she is yes um she is she is coming on the show Ella salt marsh also platforms they're actually how lovely you can hi lovely Amy know that she's been doubly platformed I will there we go because I think I think what they're doing you know I'm talking about ideas that began on the page of a book and Emmy and the crew at Civic Square have an R bringing it to life in a place and that's not easy and for all the

Brilliance and play and the beauty of what you see what you don't see is the incredible Relentless work that goes on behind the scenes to to build community organizing but their generosity also I want I want to run ahead of and say that the generosity of the way they work is they practice it in like imagine something there through experimentation and then very very actively share out with others because they don't want to be the place where it's happening they want to share and Inspire and make the tools and ideas accessible to others so they're

currently writing up everything they're doing they're going to share it on our platform for anybody who's listening to day to go on and you can read about what they're doing in Civic square and say I could even start making this happen where I am amazing wonderful and that is exactly what we need we need blueprints we need to be sharing data I love what you said about data bits being light and ideas traveling far I love this idea of um borders in the sense of um local borders keeping things where they need to be for

the people that need them and that also the ideas can cross borders they're yes there is no proprietor of ideas I just yeah how wonderful Kate thank you so much for your time this is absolutely fascinating I'm so grateful for you for coming on the show thank you um real pleasure to talk with you about these really insurgical and critical challenges of our time we don't we don't have answers but we keep coming at it with questions with experiments and this is how we find a way through exactly by continuing these conversations thank you thank

you if you want to learn more about donor economics I've put links in the description box below remember to subscribe to this channel if you're new here and share the episode if you enjoyed it if you loved it support Planet critical on patreon the link is also in the description box below as always thank you to the planet critical Community who make all of this work possible thank you all for listening I'll see you next week