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

‘The future can’t be predicted,’ wrote Donella Meadows, ‘but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. Systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned … We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than can ever be pr

‘There is no wealth but life,’ as John Ruskin wrote in 1860. His words were poetic but they were prophetic too. Economic value lies not in the throughflow of products and services but in the wealth that is their recurring source. That includes the wealth embodied in human-made assets (from tractors to houses) but also the wealth embodied in people

Such a values-driven mission is what the analyst Marjorie Kelly calls a company’s living purpose – turning on its head the neoliberal script that the business of business is simply business.

We evidently want something more than growth, but our politicians cannot find the words, and economists have long declined to supply them. So it’s time to cry and to laugh but, most of all, it’s time to talk again of what matters.

Pre-analytic vision. Worldview. Paradigm. Frame. These are cousin concepts. What matters more than the one you choose to use is to realise that you have one in the first place, because then you have the power to question and change it.

Visual frames, it gradually dawned on me, matter just as much as verbal ones.

Since the 1980s the social psychologist Shalom Schwartz and colleagues have surveyed people of all ages and backgrounds in over 80 countries, identifying ten clusters of basic personal values that are recognised across cultures: self-direction, stimulation, hedonism, achievement, power, security, conformity, tradition, benevolence and universalism.

So what is a system? Simply a set of things that are interconnected in ways that produce distinct patterns of behaviour – be they cells in an organism, protestors in a crowd, birds in a flock, members of a family, or banks in a financial network. And it is the relationships between the individual parts – shaped by their stocks and flows, feedbacks,

As the visual literacy expert Lynell Burmark explains, ‘unless our words, concepts and ideas are hooked onto an image, they will go in one ear, sail through the brain, and go out of the other ear. Words are processed by our short-term memory where we can only retain about seven bits of information … Images, on the other hand, go directly into long-

That’s the essence of the fifth business response: be generous by creating an enterprise that is regenerative by design, giving back to the living systems of which we are a part. More than an action on a to-do checklist, it is a way of being in the world that embraces biosphere stewardship and recognises that we have a responsibility to leave the l