Ron Peters's Reviews > Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

“What if we started economics not with its long-established goals but with humanity’s long-term goals, and then sought out the economic thinking that would enable us to achieve them?” (pp. 8-9)

This book should be mandatory reading for all students of economics, commerce, business administration, and politics. It provides a much-needed framework for thinking about the purposes that economics should serve in society. It’s about striking a balance between the resources and organization needed to create a just world while staying within the survival requirements of the planet.

The book contains many visualizations of economic concepts, but here is one version of The Doughnut, the “sweet spot” between meeting the equally crucial goals of social justice and the needs of the planet: https://is.gd/9OHq3o.

A short review has no room for all the illustrative data and arguments. These are the main ideas. I found parts five and six especially interesting:
1. Change the Goal. Move away from constantly rising GDPs to “meet the human rights of every person within the means of our life-giving planet.”
2. See the Big Picture. Move away from the circular cash-flow diagram of self-contained markets to an economy that is embedded in society and nature.
3. Nurture Human Nature. Move away from homo economicus to a view of humans as social, interdependent, approximating, fluid in values, and dependent on the living world.
4. Get Savvy with Systems. Move away from mechanical equilibrium to the dynamism of systems thinking as summed up in feedback loops.
5. Design to Distribute. Design economies to be more distributive of the value they produce, especially the wealth generated from land, enterprise technology, knowledge, and the power to create money.
6. Create to Regenerate. Degenerative industrial design causes ecological degradation. Regenerative design restores humans as full participants in the earth’s cyclical life processes.
7. Be Agnostic About Growth. Instead of “economies that need to grow whether or not they make us thrive, we need economies that make us thrive, whether or not they grow.” (p. 26)

If you are remotely interested in this field, and you should be because it shapes our society in fundamental ways, you should read this book.