Doughnut Economics

Raworth's argument is that twentieth-century economics handed policymakers a broken compass: an obsession with GDP growth as the goal, built on outdated diagrams and assumptions that ignore both human wellbeing and planetary limits. She proposes replacing the growth-obsessed mental model with the Doughnut — a visual target shaped like a ring, where the inner edge is a social foundation (enough food, health, housing, income) that no one should fall below, and the outer edge is an ecological ceiling (climate, biodiversity, freshwater) that humanity should not overshoot.

This matters because the growth-at-all-costs model has produced economies that are simultaneously failing to meet basic needs for billions of people and blowing past planetary boundaries that threaten everyone — proof, in Raworth's telling, that growth was always a means, never the actual goal, and treating it as the goal has left us with the worst of both problems at once. The book systematically dismantles seven inherited ideas from mainstream economics (the self-interested rational agent, the assumption that economies naturally balance themselves, the belief that growth is always good) and offers seven replacement principles for a economics fit for the 21st century.

Who should read it

Anyone frustrated that policy debates seem stuck arguing about growth rates instead of actual human and ecological outcomes will find a genuinely different vocabulary here. It's especially useful for students, policymakers, and businesspeople who sense mainstream economics is missing something but want a rigorous alternative rather than just a critique.

About the author

Kate Raworth is a British economist based at Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute and Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership; she previously worked at Oxfam and the UN Human Development Report office before developing the Doughnut model.