PERSON
Kate Raworth
The economist who replaced the growth curve with the doughnut—designer of a framework that holds ecological ceiling and social foundation in view simultaneously, and the clearest voice on why the most powerful amplifier in history will amplify overshoot unless the economic logic it runs on is redesigned.
In 2017, Kate Raworth drew a picture that changed the terms of an argument economists had been having for seventy years. The picture was a doughnut—two concentric rings with humanity's safe space between them—and its power lay not in its complexity but in its displacement of the central question of postwar economics. That question was: Is the economy growing? Raworth's doughnut replaced it with a different one: Is the economy helping humanity thrive within planetary limits? The distinction is the difference between a compass that points toward more and a compass that points toward enough. Her inner ring is the social foundation—twelve dimensions of human well-being below which no person should fall. Her outer ring is the ecological ceiling—nine planetary boundaries beyond which Earth's life-support systems destabilize. The safe and just space between them is where the economy should operate, whether or not that operation produces growth. Applied
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