A healthy economy should be designed to thrive, not grow | Kate Raworth

What would a sustainable, universally beneficial economy look like? "Like a doughnut," says Oxford economist Kate Raworth. In a stellar, eye-opening talk, she explains how we can move countries out of the hole — where people are falling short on life's essentials — and create regenerative, distributive economies that work within the planet's ecological limits.

Check out more TED Talks:

The TED Talks channel features the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design — plus science, business, global issues, the arts and more.

Follow TED on Twitter:
Like TED on Facebook:

Subscribe to our channel:

78 Comments on A healthy economy should be designed to thrive, not grow | Kate Raworth

  1. Why the dislikes? People are here to show their ideas and it’s our choice to listen and interpret and learn, there is really no need to dislike.

    • That’s the issue when a majority of passengers drive a bus towards a cliff, and you feel there’s no way to change its way, because you can get everyone convinced. I just think we all are phuc up, seriously. There are people who want to make things better and create new solutions, but the vast majority prefers to criticise these solutions or impose its own old-craft ideas (comunism, capitalism, etc.), or even worse, not caring at all (this is mostly the case). We are not on 20th century anymore. The hardest thing is to make things go better.

    • imwiisi , point is that a sponsored system of greed will attract the greedy, narcissists fit the bill, theres no thinking to be done, its alive and kicking ,and we all end up with misfortune,

    • pincarto donn greed is everywhere around me, i think about it in civilizational level – its crisis of balance between ethics religion and law (Immanuel Kant). some of this main phillars are broken, and project on all the rest.

    • Belial and the China’s growth is the best example right? Only few people are individuals – some bushmans and people from edge of civilization. We live in collective world wheather we like it or not.

    • “You can’t criticize Austrian economics because it has never been really tried!”
      Hmmm… This argument sounds awfully familiar….

      Also, I’m not talking about unemployment or other tiny insignificant issues like that. Nor is the woman in the video.
      Economics can handle made-up issues like those just fine.

      But there’s little evidence in history that these economic models can handle the ecological problems we’re facing. In fact, history is riddled with examples of humans fucking up because of these optimistic economic models.

      The ecological constraints of human activity dwarfs any petty economic issues you think you are solving with private property, free markets, tax rates, and so on. That’s what you have to understand.

      Civilization itself, with our notions of property rights, our governments and laws, our schools, our banks and our bank accounts, our political parties and everything else; ALL of that won’t exist if we don’t live within our ecological bounds as a civilization.

      What we have to do, then, is figure out HOW can we base our society in such petty “man-made issues” (as we will continue to do so) while still keeping the eye on the big picture, which is what really matters in the large scale.

      We can’t pretend the problem isn’t there by believing these problems like “unemployment rates”, stock exchanges, market prices, and so on take priority over ecological sustainability.

      That’s a very simple and very reasonable message. The fact it is deemed controversial, in particular by people who defend economics as it is, which was and is directly responsible for the problem, is quite baffling and frankly, leaves me completely hopeless about the future of our species.

    • 1ucasvb market forces correct for ecological disaster. If you cannot maintain a property, over consume, fail to turn over crops, over breed, underproduce basic energy, society die. Yes the environment is the limiting factor, but no centrally planned network exists in the current form that can optimize the standard of living every person should have. We don’t have the model for that yet. Maybe AI will figure it out, but are we all to submit to the whim of an intelligent AI model that optimizes sustainable living for every person and animal? It doesn’t exist and it’s a disaster at that.

    • 1ucasvb Austrian Economics predicted the inevitable fall of the USSR. Marginal Utility, and The business cycle. Notable Austrians include Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, and Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek.

  2. What would technological advancements look like under this closed self sustaining loop? Would space programs cease to exist? How about the entire transportation industry? Would we have choice, or be allowed to choose something from a preperscribed list made by the rulers?

    • Ted Tansley Don’t take technological advancements for granted. Most progress has been made in relatively few free market economies while the rest of the world has copied those advancements.

    • yes, of course. This doughnut idea isn’t so much a restriction on the market. more of a realization that we cannot endlessly gain more from our resources without depleting them. It won’t be preventing us from making technological advancements either. It is only a suggestion for a new way to measure the economy.

    • I love the star trek like future shes describing but youll have to agree a vast amount of innovation is made for financial gain

  3. without the capitalistic multiplication of human effort expect the gains from your work to be the same as those of an African in desert…

    redistribution she says…
    without profit there wouldn’t be production, what would you distribute?

    The Marxist theory, one sentence to be proven false:
    surplus value with distributive economy = negative by the trillions

    surplus value with free market economy = positive by the trillions

    • Zillion was the company who made segas light-guns what do they have todo with profit if they made themselves obsolete?

  4. Too late. This capitalistic selfish growth, has us done in. Too late to change. Blame it on the rich for not doing something about it. But it is usually the rich that are the ignorant to the true reality. Not the man made economic reality. Reality is, we are toast. Within a couple decades maybe even 10 years, this world will turn upside down. These stupid billionaire ‘s are not even going to be protected when you have millions of starving people at your door.

    • Jason LMAO How will you feel when you realize you are talking like a TV advertisement, while scolding someone about proper grammar, who was scolding someone. The irony is rich in your circle jerk.

    • TomTom You’re right that she didn’t say much about taxation. Why should she? She did point out that governments want growth in tax revenue. That is one component driver but it is not fundamental to the current system.

    • Squirrell You’re missing the point. She’s not saying capitalism is bad. There was capitalism before the crazy growth model we’re in. It’s the fetish fixation on growth that is the problem.

  5. A donut chart instead of a pie chart. I’m holding out for a baklava chart before I take any economics seriously.

    Because that’s just one step away from a balaclava chart which is a potentially terrorizing chart.

  6. She’s absolutely right. But humans think they’re special and everything we believe in cannot ever be incorrect. We’re the center of the Universe, everything we do is justified.

    Our civilization is clueless. We’re going to render ourselves extinct discussing politics and economics all the way down.

    • maybe what ur believing is incorrect, like using government to block economic growth.
      U use like 20 years of modern age to base ur assumptions just lmao. no we wont get extinct, at very least we will go back to services and resources as it was 1950 then go up again

  7. What an empty video. She literally says I don’t like growth >:| so let’s thrive! Ok….. how tho? Also she barely acknowledges the Pareto principle and blames imbalance and inequality on the current economic systems. So let’s thrive! Meaningless words.

    • MrHerobrineHunters inspire people, Scifi has done it before and some quote about getting of an island or building a boat.

      Here
      Antoine de Saint-Exupery quote:
      “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea”

    • Etienne-Emile Antikatastaseis
      Nitrogen you can get from clovers, some you can even eat.
      There are bird poo islands for this too, top soil seems a bigger problem, vertical farming perhaps.
      Sulfate emissions and putting iron in the oceans are some suggestions to stop global warming.
      For more land, be vegan especially sweet potatoes are efficient.
      Encourage people to live in cities, so there’s more natural land.
      Actual education on preserving of rare species would also be nice. There are a lot in US that try to con their audience.

      Anyone got this far?

    • Clayton Mackenzie
      Whether you believe it or not is irrelevant; avoiding dangerous climate change has a timeline and technology alone is not sufficient to solve the problem. By the time we managed to separate economic growth from unsustainable resource consumption, if we managed to do it, we’d be far beyond a 2C warmer world. Hence the importance of challenging the continuous growth paradigm. Now let me see…she is a senior researcher and lecturer at both Oxford and Cambridge universities and writes in peer-reviewed journals. You write comments on youtube. As you’ve made evident through your comments, her views are considerably more informed than yours.

    • Mariachi Ingles apparently Clayton is a Yaron Brook fanboy

      Why are Laissez-Faire economists so good at marketing and so bad at economy.

    • Clayton Yeah right. As if your economics has a handle on anything significant. That you can think otherwise after several major crashes proves you are blinded. Your assertions with no evidence in combination with this lend you no credence at all. Just go back to your bubble.

    • economies can be as simple or as complicated as they need to be. Boiled down they’re only a means to trade services and goods that you require to survive easier. The rest of any given economy is just bandaging inadequacies.

  8. What are you even talking about? It’s always the mysterious “we” that need to do something. How about you? What have you done? People don’t interact with the economy as groups. They do so as individuals. And we all have roughly the same goals. Economic growth is the natural outcome of the collection of all our individual inputs. Economic growth isn’t a choice made by anyone. Even if they think it is, it’s not. No one can choose growth as if it were just a matter of pulling the right lever in the next referendum.

    • Except they do. Governments manipulate markets by providing tax incentives, deregulating or regulating. Manipulating interest rates, etc. Meanwhile CEO’s strategize through marketing and investments how to lean out their company further while increasing their output to give better numbers to share holders.
      For the average consumer and employee, growth might not be what’s on their mind. But as an end goal it’s entirely planned and aimed for by those individuals with the power to make such decisions.

      as for “What have you done?”…. People get on TED to share their ideas. I assume they do so with the hope that people will take those ideas and use them to better themselves and the world. Asking her what she’s done is kind of missing the point. She’s already thought about the problem and came up with a strategy or goal everyone has to meet. It’s up to the listener to decide whether to act on it or not. Either making it a reality or to dismiss it.

  9. Clearly a diversity hire, doesn’t know what she’s on about!! This is chay happens when your country starts being run by cultural marxists.

    • Believing in the conspiracy theory of cultural marxism brings you right up there with some of the most uneducated people on the planet alongside those eating Tide pods, Alex Jones’ viewers and the flat earthers. Congratulations on never reading a book in your entire life.

  10. lots of hollow words… masked as a looney green.
    The problem isn’t growth. The problem is greed and corruption.
    Looks like Ted Talks are getting more desperate for talks. Way bottom of the barrel.

    • She refuted your argument at the end of her talk. All systems in nature do not grow indefinitely, growth is only a stage which serves the system. If it persists past maturation, it threatens the system itself. This is the stage that we are at now. Anyone who studies environmental issues knows this is true beyond any reasonable doubt. Anyone who can see the drastic inequality in the world right now and who isn’t blinded by power and privilege can also see it. You can’t see it because you refuse to truly pay attention — you have closed yourself off from new information. Don’t blame TED.

    • even the word growth (with no context) is a loaded word. Which can means different things to different people.

      For example technology. Things have gotten smaller and consume less power. Even though they are getting more powerful. ….. What has grown? Energy… materials…. or utility….

      Recycling can be a never ending loop.
      As long as the Sun keeps shinning we can become better at harvesting it’s energy.
      Geothermal energy is virtually limtless.
      Fusion energy when it matures will be virtually unlimited energy.
      Human being are a very adaptive/resourceful species.

      The problem with this looney greeny. Is that she is guiding you through her narrow experiance.
      And using vague statements without the use of ones critical thought you may only be seeing her very narrow point of view.

      A mind is like a parachute works better when opened.

  11. Designing an economy has never been shown to work because people are simply not wise enough to run an economy without distorting self-interest. Forget that “communism” is a trigger word and just look at its economic performance because one has to create a command economy to truly create the sort of economy Raworth envisions.

    Change can come from the ground up but fails miserably if imposed from the top down. It’s here that the example of communism and the Soviet Union’s 5-year plans is useful. Or if you prefer, Venezuela from Hugo Chavez into today.

    Command economies, planned economies, fail and fail badly. We get the best results from letting people do what they want within regulatory boundaries that are as loose as is practical but no looser. If the people want this “doughnut” economy, it will happen without anybody in government lifting a finger or writing a subsidy check. If they don’t, government’s money and attention will only bring greater waste than would otherwise occur. RE Solyndra for one item on the ash-heap of history.

  12. Looks like Ted has moved from SJWs to communist values. Feel bad for people in the comments that are clueless as to why we think this is stupid.

    • No one actually cares what you think in between your League of Legends games. Go back to playing, kiddo. Let the adults do the thinking.

  13. In other words, if only Kate Raworth ran the world’s economy with complete authoritarian power, we would have Utopia. Every other planned economy has failed, but that is only because she was not in charge. Damn, if only she had ultimate, complete power over every single one of us…

    • LOL, China is NOT a planned economy. Maybe you should look up what that even means first. China’s economy is a hybrid economy at best, specifically, a Socialist Market Economy, not a Command (Planned) Economy.

    • I think the China blueprint is an interesting one, but still one that has yet to play out. It’s in the infancy stages. The one child policy has failed, presenting a generation of uninspired men with purposeless roles in society, like endless construction projects that have no practical use case except for projected future demand. What if birth rates start to collapse? Will they go to a three child policy for a decade? And we have yet to see China innovate on the world stage, they rely on theft of IP and imitation, but hopefully that will change…

    • Yeah, right now we just have corporate greed that is in control … DEMOCRATIC socialism is a thing you know. Take the Scandinavian countries, for example. If the people in power start disappointing, we kick them out. Or is democracy completely dead? Well, it is in the United States, one of the most hyper-capitalistic countries in the world.

  14. I have always thought that growth as a goal was asinine, since you’d be constantly striving, rather than be satisfied with and enjoy how well we are at the current point in time. We’re no longer dependent solely on manufacturing and farming, but heavily on services, and you don’t need growth, you need to sustain and improve what you already have.

    • Addition: Actually, it is pretty much how we have been sustaining growth throughout the history of capitalism.

    • Also, her idea WAS to halt grow completely, or at least it can be easily interpreted so. Just LOOK at the circular chart a.k.a. the doughnut chart. That is the ONLY part of her speech that will probably survive simplification, and really only extremist tree-huggers can look at that and say that it is good.
      You interpreting it in a good way doesn’t mean that the idea is good.

    • I guess the bronze age people could have taken the same logical path and think they have reached much further than the hunter-gatherers and decide to consolidate on that.

    • AnBio What you don’t realize is that the facts she models exist whether you think it’s a good idea or not. The current system can not continue; it will eventually crash. The only question is how humanity responds.

    • Hakasedess,
      That is utter bullshit and exactly the brainwashed understanding that Raworth was talking about.
      The concept of “necessary growth” is purely the invention of the greedy to excuse the their draconian methods against the working class. The number one measure of this is the excessive ratio between executive and worker pay.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.


*


Shares
Share This