Doughnut Economics: The must-read book that redefines economics for a world in crisis

BUSINESS, which is innovative – so let it lead. ‘The business of business is business’ summed up Milton Friedman’s influential philosophy in the 1970s. Firms bring together labour and capital to produce novel goods and services and to maximise their profits. There is no need to look at what goes on in their factories and farms, so long as they play

Samuelson deeply understood and relished this influence because he saw the college freshman’s mind as a blank slate. ‘I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws – or crafts its advanced treatises – so long as I can write its economics textbooks,’ he declared in later years, ‘The first lick is the privileged one, impinging on the beginner’s tabula rasa

If the goal is to achieve human prosperity in a flourishing web of life – and it looks rather like a doughnut – then how can we best think of (and draw) the economy in relation to the whole?

As a result, between 2003 and 2007, 96% of people studied in such behavioural experiments came from countries that were home to only 12% of the world’s population.

The challenge now is to create economies – local to global – that help to bring all of humanity into the Doughnut’s safe and just space.

By revealing the old ideas that have entrapped us and replacing them with new ones to inspire us, it proposes a new economic story that is told in pictures as much as in words.

when the short-term interests of that decision-making elite diverge from the long-term interests of society as a whole it is, he warns, ‘a blueprint for trouble’.

Second, self-organisation is born out of a system’s capacity to make its own structures more complex, like a dividing cell, a growing social movement, or an expanding city.

Second, see the big picture. Mainstream economics depicts the whole economy with just one, extremely limited image, the Circular Flow diagram.

In economic terms, healthy hierarchy means, for example, ensuring that the financial sector is in service to the productive economy, which in turn is in service to life.