Economics beyond the growth obsession

Every introductory economics textbook contains a picture of an upward curve: growth, indefinitely. Kate Raworth's argument is that this picture is both a description and a prescription, and that as a prescription it is increasingly dangerous. Doughnut Economics sets out to replace the growth curve with a different shape — a doughnut — that offers a more honest account of what economies are actually for and what they must not destroy in pursuit of expansion.

The doughnut has two boundaries. The inner ring marks a social foundation — a set of human needs, from food and housing to healthcare and political voice, below which no one should fall. The outer ring marks an ecological ceiling — planetary boundaries, including climate stability, freshwater use, and biodiversity, beyond which human activity becomes self-destructive in ways that no amount of subsequent growth can repair. The goal is an economy that keeps everyone above the floor without breaching the ceiling.

Raworth is a trained economist and she engages seriously with the discipline's intellectual history, showing how its foundational assumptions — about rational actors, about the irrelevance of the natural world, about the appropriate separation of economics from other social sciences — were choices made in specific historical circumstances rather than natural laws waiting to be discovered. Choices that were made can be remade; that is the book's quiet central claim.

She identifies several ways economists need to think differently: changing the stated goal from growth to flourishing within limits; making the whole economy visible, including unpaid household work and the commons that markets tend not to price; understanding human nature more accurately than the rational-actor model allows; designing for distribution from the outset rather than redistributing after growth has already occurred.

Raworth does not offer a fully worked alternative economic system — she is honest about this, and the honesty is refreshing. She argues the discipline needs to let go of certainties it never fully earned before it can build one. The doughnut is presented explicitly as a compass rather than a map: it tells you which direction to go without pretending to show you every step of the route.

Doughnut Economics has had genuine influence beyond the pages of the book itself. The city of Amsterdam formally adopted the doughnut model as a guiding framework for its economic recovery planning, and several other cities and regions have followed in ways that produced concrete policy changes rather than merely rhetorical ones. That uptake suggests the model answers a real and widely felt need: for a way to talk about economic goals and failures that does not reduce everything to a single upward number. The doughnut is an imperfect compass, but it points in a direction that GDP growth, as the sole measure of success, cannot even acknowledge as existing. The doughnut is an imperfect compass, but it points in a direction that GDP growth, as the sole measure of success, cannot even acknowledge as a direction worth considering. That, in the end, is what makes it a genuinely useful reorientation rather than just a critique.