KATE RAWORTH IS A RENEGADE ECONOMIST
Kate Raworth is an economist. A renegade, maverick, rockstar economist. After graduating from Oxford University, she worked in the villages of Zanzibar with micro entrepreneurs, co-authored the Human Development Report for the UNDP and worked for a decade as a Senior Researcher at Oxfam. Last year she published her seminal work, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. In it she highlights how traditional economics has not only failed to predict or prevent recurring financial crises, it has also allowed for worsening environmental degradation and increased social inequality. Old economic models created tools, language, norms, diagrams and mythologies that continue to grip our societies, preventing meaningful social and environmental progress.
“If you go back to the root of the word ‘economics,’ it’s made up of two Ancient Greek words: ‘oikos,’ meaning the household, and ‘nomos,’ meaning norms or rules. So ‘economics’ literally means the art of household management.”
Thrillingly, in Doughnut Economics she shows us how we can rethink, reclaim and redraw economics. Kate’s model is a strikingly simple analogy for a flourishing society where the outside of the doughnut represents the ecological ceiling that we cannot go beyond, and the inside represents the social foundation that we should not let people fall below. We are currently failing on both counts, clearly operating outside the safe and just space for humanity.
Kate’s work has caused a ripple across the
