 So tonight in our seminar series we're having the Donald economics or seven ways to think like a 21st century economist by Dr. Kate Raworth. Before we start and head back to her I'll just introduce our guest for tonight. So Kate Raworth is an ecological economist and creator of the Donald, a concept that aims to meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet and co-founder of Donald economics an action lab and her internationally best-selling book Donald economics has been translated into over 20 languages and has been widely influential with diverse audiences from the UN General Assembly and Pope Francis Jewel Extinction Rebellion. Kate is a senior associate at Oxford University's environmental change Institute where she teaches on masters in environmental change and management. She's also professor of practice at Amsterdam University of Applied Science. Over the 25 past years Kate's career has taken her from working with micro entrepreneurs in the villages of Zanzibar to co-authoring the human development report for the UNDP in New York followed by a decade as a senior researcher at Oxfam. She holds the first class be in politics philosophy and economics a master in economics for development both from Oxford University. She's also a member of the club of Rome and currently serves as on the World Health Organization Council on the economics of health for all. Kate has written extensively for media including The Guardian, The New Statement, Newsweek, Wired and has contributed to many radio programs including BBC Radio 4 and The World Service, ABC and NPR as well as television including CNN World News, Al Jazeera, BBC, ITV and CBC. So we'll be having Kate talking to us for 50 minutes then we'll be opening for questions for the audience. Okay thank you very much and enjoy. Thank you very much it's lovely to be here. So I'm really into distributive design so let's make the most of the resources in this room. If you can see empty seats can you move inwards so that all the folks at the back who can't sit down can find a place at the end so everybody move inwards if there's an empty seat near you and then there'll be places where I want to sit down. Thank you. There's one here in the front, there's one there at the end, lots over here, there's always more seats, there's even seats here. There's one here in the front if anybody wants there's several here. Okay thank you it's lovely to be here I'm going to jump in. The reason I'm here is because of those degrees that Ingrid just mentioned I studied economics at Oxford University over 30 years ago I'm 53 so when I was in my early 20s I studied economics I wanted to help change the world economics is the mother tongue of public policy it's going to equip me right didn't got frustrated I did development economics made a lot more sense and left me thinking why isn't that just economics like let's shouldn't all economics start with a marchesend why would you not start with a marchesend but I walked away from economics frustrated I never wanted to say hello I'm an economist right I don't know if anyone else has that feeling but just like so I just left myself with no discipline and I spent three years working in Zanzibar an ODI fellow if that means anything to some folks I spent four years working on the human development report in New York at the UN I moved back to UK I worked for Oxfam for 11 years I became a mother of twins so immersed in the unpaid care economy of nappies and babies I really understood gender and technology politics like you don't get it until you're in it and then there was a global financial crash and all the economists started saying oh perhaps we should rewrite economics to so that it reflects financial realities and I thought well up damned if we're only going to write you up rewrite it for financial realities what about all the social and ecological realities that have always been excluded from economics and that's what drew me back towards it and I drew this doughnut diagram that's had way more traction than I ever imagined it would and I thought hang on there's a lot of appetite for rewriting economics here so that's what brought me back into this and that's why I'm here today and I'm gonna start with the power of pictures I see there's some pictures some equations and some pictures here I kind of like that I've got no equations for you the only numbers in my book the page numbers so nobody's intimidated by that let's start with pictures pictures pictures are really really powerful universities teach us either to focus on maths and numbers or words and we get super hyper analytical and critical about meanings of words contested words we think pictures are illustrations they are not mere illustrations they go into our eyes they go right through into the back of our heads sit in your visual cortex and can stay there for decades for a lifetime you don't even know it's there and it's shaping the way you think but it is it's shaping what you put at the center and what you leave at periphery what you make visible what's left invisible and it changes everything and these guys knew it right Ptolemy back in Alexandria he drew this map thousands of years ago of the known universe with earth at the center and all the planets around it and in the 1500s Copernicus was sitting there with his telescope and he was looking at the sky and he knew Ptolemy had got it all wrong it didn't work like this but Copernicus did not dare publish his own map his picture until he was on his deathbed because he knew that what he had up his sleeve up his little red sleeve was revolutionary he had put the sun not the earth at the center of the known universe and the earth is just a sort of incidental planet going around and that's deeply challenged the power of the church upended our sense of who we are in the universe challenged people orthodoxy I mean this was revolutionary so rearranging a few concentric circles can be revolutionary pictures matter they are I think foundational to the models that we make and so we should always pay attention to the pictures that we draw that we teach that we learn that we pass on so what are the pictures of 20th century economics and I say 20th century economics I'm talking very broadly about what I consider still actually is mainstream economics still taught in many universities and I'll be curious about how much it's taught to those of you here who studied economics so let's just who here has ever studied economics of any kind whether it's a level or do you okay lots of you great okay so what's the first diagram you remember learning do you know that is the same answer the world over I can't think of any other single discipline where you could ask that question and get that unison answer from every single student it's really quite weird and if you think about it economics the art of household management that's what it means welcome to the art of household management here's the plan demand I mean and and that is a really political act because it goes here is economics what a noble art to manage our planetary household in the interest of all her inhabitants here's the market so right day one bang we're in the market well that's just I mean it's a particular place to start and price price is suddenly right there at the cross it's monetary value that is at the center of our concern and if things fall outside of the market contract they're not reflected in market value they're called well there's a thing it's kind of like out there right this framing this is a very visual language of framing I think it has huge repercussions so we start 20th century economics the starting point is that or the big picture even of the economy it's the circular flow of goods and money it's the market relationship there we are we started with the plan demand money and resources going round and round between households and businesses yes some leaks out through banks through governments through trade there's a lot wrong with this in fact when the economy said we need to make economics reflect financial reality the big thing they were talking about was that actually banks don't take your savings and turn it into investment they're not this little little you know nice balancing out they create money as debt bearing interest they are a pump that was what they wanted to fix needs fixing but there's a hell of a lot else going wrong in this diagram very quickly governments don't only turn taxes into spending governments like this one any government with a sovereign currency can create money and spend it into existence but also there's absolutely no mention of energy here no mention of resources of earth's where is the stuff coming from and where is the waste going to it's not a circular flow there's no mention of the unpaid caring work that gets labor fresh and ready for work every day hey presto ready clean fed well slept children raised labor is reproduced missing there's no mention of the commons so some of the fundamental sources of our well-being are just completely absent from this diagram but it's the starting point and it underpins most macroeconomic model still today the self-portrait is of rational economic man I drew a little picture of him he's that guy at the top he's probably a guy standing alone it's got money in his hand ego in his heart calculator in his head and nature at his feet he hates work he loves luxury he knows the price of everything and the biggest problem with this character is not how absurdly narrow that portrait is is the real problem is what looking at him does to us because research is shown by people like Robert Frank but the more that students learn about rational economic man from year one to two to three of their studies the more they value his traits the more students value competition over collaboration self-interest over altruism so the models we make of ourselves remake us and who we tell ourselves we are shapes who we become this is not just an economics problem this is a problem or an issue for every single discipline that claims to tell us who we are it's performative it matters who we tell ourselves we are and then there's the goal and the goal of economics I mean any mainstream economist tell economics there's never gold it's a science don't be so normative it's a science we're objective here well there's a goal in every single economist's advice and every politician's speech and it is of course growth growth endlessly no matter how rich a nation already is like this one we're in one of the richest countries ever in the history of humanity and yet we have the Labour Party and the Conservative Party saying growth growth growth this is the best vision we can apparently offer in the run-up to an election so growth endlessly to me these diagrams profoundly damage our minds and they damage our chances of reshaping the future they are such an inadequate beginning for an economics education today so oh yeah this is the bit that really gets me I mean this alone is reason enough to start again right if you say to an economist right you've already told me externality so oh where does chemical pollution close up climate change where did where does it show up in the models well in a macro model the best thing we can say well you know labour and capital kind of land is a kind of capital land is kind of nature okay so the whole of the living world is there in that word capital if you choose to bother to recognize that it's maybe have these other kinds of capital it's there inside the model and over here it's that red wedge it's the gap between the social cost and the private cost and that's the kind of the pollution group I really honestly think that if aliens wanted to destroy human life on earth they would merely need to convince us us to depict our relationship with the living world like this and job done they don't need to come here no lasers that this this is enough because humanity does not stand a chance of learning to live as part of this planet and thrive as part of this planet if this is how in economics we tell ourselves we depict the living world it's insane so for me this is the motivation to start all over again and there's good company our dear friend John may not case it's always helpful when you can quote Cain's you know it's like you're on home turf of the economics economics is the science of thinking in terms of models yes look some lovely models let's be really scientific about this but we need to choose models which are relevant to the contemporary world and I think right now is a time where we should focus more on the bottom half before we get on with the top half we jump too much in the textbooks are written too much about the top half of that quote it's time to rethink for models that are relevant to the contemporary world because what we know now is totally different from what Cain's new or Friedman new or those just decades ago this is a different reality we need new models that actually do justice to this and then we can go to Buckminster Fuller you never change things by fighting the existing reality right you change things by building a new model that makes existing one obsolete so for me this was a really important motivation in writing donut economics I'd noticed that I'd spent years and many other economists that spent years heterodox economics attacking and critiquing the mainstream and all the things that are wrong with it and I kind of did that just now in one slide if we keep just attacking the old model we're just still talking about the old model and we have these little caveats on and we go down the cabinet anyway yes caveats but let's carry on anyway no let's not carry on anyway let's start again with something that actually serves us so I'm much more into proposition than critique it's more interesting it's harder by the way to be propositional but I really encourage you as a just a principle be propositional be critical but then be propositional okay then what instead so let's be propositional and that's why I love this website by exploring economics part of the rethinking economics movement students in Germany created this model this website and it what it does is just a really nice laying out of recognition that there are many many different schools of thought in economics and I think so a pluralistic a pluralist education or pluralist call would say teach us all of these schools of thought so that we know that they all exist first let us know they exist teach us the basics of them and then trust my critical reasoning to decide which one is the one I want to use as my worldview or which one is most useful at the time brilliant call by rethinking economics because how do you resist that how do you say no no no we're just going to keep you here in this box nothing to see here nothing over there just stay in this one box it's unreasonable I'm not going to be pluralist here I'm going to actually take a position in a donor economics I essentially say let's start kind of here ecological economics complexity feminist let's learn from Marx some evolutionary institutional so donor economics is a bit of a mash up of this side okay that's and I was I wrote it because I turned to all the economics I had never been taught and found amazing ideas and I thought but I don't want them in their separate boxes oh you're going to a feminist economics conference I'm going to an ecological economics conference and she's gone to a complexity economics conference we need to bring them together and make them dance on the same page I really recommend this website if you want to say I want to know the basic concepts of each of these they've done a beautiful job of laying it out so I really recommend so in donor economics I brought those schools thought together and set it out as seven ways to think moving from the old let's recognize where we're coming from in the mindset we've inherited and a proposition of where we want to get to so that's what I did in this book and I've spent the last since 2017 gosh nearly seven years now responding to the fact the amazing thrilling fact that teachers get in touch or communities or businesses or mayors and counselors get in touch and say we will want to do this we're actually going to put this into practice so that's what donor economics action lab is and that's why we exist to work with change makers who want to make this happen so I'm going to tell you some of the theory here and then I'm going to land in here's some examples just from the world of cities and practice of what it means to try and put new economic thinking into practice in the midst of a system that doesn't really want to change so here's the doughnut right we were saying you know did we bring some doughnuts if you came hoping for actual doughnuts I'm really sorry to disappoint the best ones are conceptual you don't put any calories but they can help change your mind so it's think of it as a compass so this I'm starting with the goal by the way as opposed to mainstream economics which never draws the goal but it's tacit under everything I think we should put our hearts on our sleeves what are you here for why why are we here what's the goal of economics if we don't know what the goal is how the hell do we know whether it's going well or not how do we judge any policy any measure so for me this is a statement of proposition of a goal to meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet leave no one falling short in the hole in the middle those come from the sustainable development goals so all the world's governments have already agreed that every person in the world has a claim to meet those essentials but as we seek to meet our needs and our wants and oh so many wants there are we put pressure on the planet and therefore we overshoot the ecological ceiling and put pressure on these life-supporting systems the nine planetary boundaries so it's made up really of the sustainable development goals in the middle the planetary boundaries on the outside and the green space in between is that safe and just space a minimally safe ecologically a minimally just because no one is left falling short on life's essentials already the shape of progress is completely transformed right but the the one we've inherited the one our our politicians still speak to is this shape of progress endless growth and it doesn't just stop with my hand it's an expansion an exponential curve so it goes right through that ceiling pretty quickly and nobody wants to ask what happens when we get there but it just keeps going this is a different shape of progress right it's between the boundaries it's a goldilocks zone and if if anyone's a medic it's like well this looks quite like a heartbeat and in our bodies we already understand that health lies in balance that's what keeps us alive that's what amazingly has all of our bodies at about the same temperature right now so bodies are continually balancing food and warmth water hydration we stay alive because we thrive on balance not endless growth you grow but then you grow up I think we can learn a lot from bodily health to planetary health if anybody wants to see there's one plumb little chair right here in the middle you're very welcome so if that's the goal I was really blown away when I first published this with as it was like a discussion paper published by Oxfam in 2012 we just like oh here's an idea and so many people responded to it so I then it was through that that I learned the power of pictures wow so many people are motivated and powered mobilized just by having a new diagram and it made me start looking at how other cultures non-western cultures have for a long time depicted their vision or their diagram or visualization of well-being of thriving of health of wealth and I was just blown away that across the world in so many different cultural contexts again and again this the image are is of a circle but with a dynamism within it so there's something very deep that people from many different cultures for millennia have picked up on this sense of dynamism within a circle and the doughnuts just tapping into something that's been long long long known in other cultures so I now tend to think of it as a bit of a bridge between this Western economic mindset that's taught not only in the West but actually worldwide between is it a bridge can we can we have like a Western mindset recovery program I think of the doughnut as a medication along the way you know can we find a way back towards a wisdom that's long been held in other cultural traditions so that's the way I see it if balance is the goal we are very far from that right now as all the red here shows billions of people worldwide falling short on life's essentials those are measured sometimes with one metric sometimes with two that's why it's a bit staggered in place just a couple of indicators but also in ecological overshoot having overshot at least six of the nine planetary boundaries so this is this is a selfie I mean if we want to selfie of who we are this is this is humanity right now and I really think my kids my kids already asked me they're 15 your kids your children's children will literally pull on our sleeves and say and what did you do once that you knew once you saw this once you understood this reality what did you do in your life in how you worked how you studied how you taught how you made your money how you saved your money how you voted your volunteered you invested divested you protested what did you do to help turn this story around what could each of us do we see it every day in the headlines and I think one of our big psychological challenges is to stay alive to it even though we can get inured by these headlines another hurricane another flood another drought how do we stay alive and not overwhelmed by that and actually be in action about transforming it I'm showing you a global picture and most action happens closer to home so let's bring this down my colleague Andrew Fanning and several others created a brilliant database of 150 nations if you want to see yours you can go to this website and they got a lot of data there but here's just four nations so Malawi on average income fifteen hundred dollars per person per year massive human shortfall not overshooting their share of planetary boundaries China a double whammy challenge the UK since we're here inequality that feels familiar and significant ecological overshoot you tonight at states even greater in quality we know what that right we can all see that showing up in the US massive ecological overshoot and let me just say that the red overshoot it's not measured in the production basis it's not just the carbon emissions and the material footprint in the country it's consumption based so it's all of the emissions that have been imported from elsewhere I mean just look at this room all the clothes were wearing the food we've eaten the laptops everyone's got the lights the carpets this stuff was not made in the UK so what's enabling us to live well right now in this room is materials from all over the world that's incorporated in the UK's overshoot so there's four nations let's now put it into a scatterplot there's around 50 just a selection of countries the place where every nation should be aiming to be is that little green donut in the top left hand corner because we rise up to meet the needs of all people but we come back within the means of the living planet so the first thing you can notice here is there's not a single countries that they're yet Costa Rica is closer than any other and I invite you next time you catch yourself or somebody else talking about developed countries you can see I'm sorry I'm why do you mean I'm not quite sure what you mean because there's not a single country here that should be calling itself developed and definitely not the high-income countries there's absolutely nothing developed about overshooting planetary boundaries so that you destroy the life-support systems of our planetary home and utterly undermine the possibility of these kinds of nations of ever rising up and meeting their needs so I invite you to take out developed countries from your vocabulary I just talk about high middle and low-income countries just to be factual about it so that's also recognized that although these countries stand like little separated scattered plots on the on the page they are of course profoundly interconnected from the histories of colonialism all the way through to current and future impacts of climate change predominantly power relations from the global north upon the global south so they are interconnected and it will be I would love to make a visualization that brings out more and more of those interconnections for me this is where data visualization needs to be going next is showing the relations between any interconnections of place okay so the history of pursuing growth that thing our politicians love so much has generally taken nations in this direction and let's acknowledge if you're a Malawi on fifteen hundred dollars per person when you double that national income it's massive it's massive in terms of child survival and nutrition and girls education and women's opportunity and the fundamentals of life it can have massive impact on getting people out of the hole in the middle of the donor and and again from three to six and six to twelve but as you go higher and higher in income countries generally have not converted it into meeting the needs of all without overshooting the planet they go straight past that sweet point into ecological overshoot so the history of pursuing growth has taken us broadly in this direction can we transform that can we instead have an utterly different future change the dynamic that would take us somewhere else so that these lower income countries we've got Malawi Mozambique Kenya Cameroon Pakistan India Bangladesh Nepal can these countries rise up and meet the needs of all without overshooting the needs of the planet in the way that most nations before them have done that's an unprecedented journey what would it take is it possible is it reasonable to ask a lot of really interested technological political ethical questions around is that a desirable trajectory what if middle income countries we've got Turkey Russia Iran China Mexico major emerging economies here that are laying down massive infrastructure currently moving straight past that spot could they reorient 90 degrees and head towards it what would it mean what kinds of changes of policy and infrastructure would actually take them in a very different direction and can the high-income nations those massive overshooters and that red glaring out from the page can they massively reduce their ecological overshoot while finally meeting the needs of all of their people because they certainly have the resources to do so that's also an unprecedented journey so there's nothing easy about any of this for any of these nations they all have different kinds of lock-ins and challenges and for then for this to happen I believe it's going to call for a huge rebalancing in the world and that rebalancing bring there the specificity of what that means for you is it reparations is it redistribution of wealth and how is it through technology is it through financial transfers is it a rebalance of power in international financial institutions in the G20 what kind of rebalancing is going to be required that enables those countries to rise and others to reduce at the same time for me this has become my sort of uber map of accounts for any policy any proposition is it helping to take us in this direction it's also can be quite overwhelming because you can think is that feasible or it can be very motivating it's like at last we actually have a map of what we're trying to do and a starting point of where we want to get to so we could spend the rest of our time together sitting on this and if anybody wants to come back to it I invite you to bring us back to it later I'm going to take it as a starting point saying if that's the goal if that's the directional goal we want to travel in what kind of mindset I'm going to come back to the mindset what kind of mindset would we seek to equip ourselves with and rising generations of students of the economists and beyond the economist and practitioners of this century who you know by the time you're my age by the time you're 53 it'll be your generation holding the institutions and being the you know when the prime minister sort of younger than you that kind of moment there'll be the end and it'll be your generation in and what mindset will they have brought what mindset will all of your generation be bringing to this challenge so I want to go back and start again and I think we will start again what's the first diagram you show and it's not going to be supply and demand for me it starts here and I call this the embedded economy diagram so for me the first diagram should be the biggest we need to see the whole right and so this is systems thinking you need to see the whole and recognize the parts within a bigger system look up a level always look up a level and look down a level if you really want to have some kind of mastery of the system that you're concerned with so this blends ecological economics with feminist economics and commons theory bringing it into one diagram what we got going on we've got the economy is a subset of society the economy is an entirely human construct even even the fact that we call it the economy like many sociologists would say well where did this thing the economy come about it's quite a new framing that it there's a thing called the economy that everything is protecting and the economy is entirely human construct it's the way in which we provision for our needs and wants it is a subset of social relations and it depends upon other social systems on our political social cultural legal media many other systems that shape and frame this economy there's never such a thing as a free market it's always shaped by cultural and legal regulation and that human society is a subset of the living world we are part of nature utterly dependent upon it held within it and dependent upon the healthy functioning stable climate biodiversity water clean air the healthy functioning that those planetary boundaries seek to protect what you notice is that in this diagram compared to the old the first one I showed you the circular flow in the circular flow diagram all the arrows were showing you money flowing round and goods flowing round they're all human product this diagram shows you energy so the sole energy coming in from which all life comes without the Sun right I should probably just draw the Sun here the energy coming in and the waste heat bouncing out that's where all yeah everything that's ever been made is made with energy and I think energy is massively missing from economics it should be the fundamental currency of economics not money energy is fundamental money is invented in it its value is not constant it's it's a illusion or illusionary energy is not illusion there's laws of thermodynamics and we can't muck around with them they are like the foundation of the universe so I think it'd be 21st century economics is going to succeed I predict it will move much more to energy-based accounting and the physicists will come in and say ah now you need us now you want to talk about thermodynamics but also we've got the economy drawing in matter and materials from the living world drawing in and putting out waste and so it really matters how much material where is it coming from and how is it disrupting the balance of biodiversity of forests of the oceans and where is that waste going and how is that disrupting the balance of the atmosphere so how we use materials impacts upon the bigger system of which all life depends which is the stability of life on earth to me putting the economy inside the living world is not a nice add-on oh I think I'll do a bit of ecological economics as a third-year option it should be in my mind the foundation of every macro model in fact I would I would I would argue with any professor how can you not how can you not recognize that the all economic modeling is a subset of this and has consequences for energy use the climate and for stability of life on earth because the scale of humanity in the Anthropocene means we have to move up to this scale to me it makes no sense to do macroeconomic model that does not recognize it's a subset of the living world so but also let's look inside the economy right now when we go in I think it's really important to recognize there are many different ways we provision for our needs and wants so as we know mainstream economics goes welcome to economics here's the market and then we play around with the market and then we generally go well but markets don't always you know they don't always provide because they've got some caveats of great personality so we might need the state and then we play around the state and go well but the state might fail we might have state failure she got to kind of market state dichotomy and the story of 20th century economics is basically across the horizontal there are you a free market less a fair capitalist or your state-loving socialist and let's have a you know let's have a stand-off between the two and that the obsession of that ideological boxing match means that economics mainstream economics just missed two other fundamental forms of provisioning household where we begin every day except when we're a student because we're not living at home which is a really ironic moment to be pulled out the household because you're you know if you're a mercenary when you got kids or when you are a parent you're you're just can't miss it your time budget your caring responsibilities the cooking washing cleaning sweeping it's essential and it reproduces life thanks to all your parents for all the work they did to enable you to be here at this point in life and and the caring responsibilities will come I'm in a family sandwich between my children and my parents and that double-ended care you really really feel it but also the commons where we come together not as a market or state but as a community we co-produce goods and services we value so for me all of these deserve recognition from day one so let's give them names you know we we know this right even if you might not study this in economics you know it in life because we all move through all of these right in the space of the market every day we are a consumer we buy stuff or you sell things and Karl Marx is really useful in reminding us that in the space of production are you a laborer getting a wage or a capital owner getting the profit pretty critical difference or are you destitute and excluded from market-based relations because you don't have money and can't access per purchasing goods in the space of the market sorry the state a resident of a place using public services or are you a public servant you a voter or protester a regulator or are you stateless and excluded from public provisioning the space of the household the parent partner relative child or are you kinless and excluded from household care and relations in this space of the commons your commoner or a steward a co-creator a volunteer or excluded from those commons so we all weave these together I mean I bet today you've probably been through all of them in some respect but we don't normally name them and I think it's important to name them recognize we know how to move through them you know if if somebody I don't know if Naomi invited me for supper and had a lovely meal at her house and at the end of the meal I kind of got out my wallet said that was lovely how much do I owe you that's like that's rude you just mixed up the household gift economy with market what's wrong with you you should know these that you know we know when we're in one space and we know when we're in the other space and it's taboo to blur them so we know how to use these and we know the values and the different qualities and attributes are expected when we're in them and of course there's finance right that that are your credit or a data an investor speculate at all financial excluded so we can everybody has a story in fact if you know if we have more time I say tell your neighbor your story in relation to these where are you at in your life which roles are you playing right now and what's the history of the roles you've played or history of your family's roles because we have different stories in relation to this this space of market and finance is very dominated but oh when we're in market relations and finance yes we should be rational economic down self-interest competition right this character has really dominated this space but actually in the other spaces the values and the behaviors and attributes that are desired and admired are much more reciprocity communal collective the whole the community and many people out of COVID said when market spaces got closed down for physical distancing and much more went into the state household in common a lot of people said after the one thing we don't want to lose is that bigger sense of a we that we found ourselves using these different kinds of relations more can we create an economy that actually that stays with us not just in a pandemic let's just dive into each one so markets many many kinds of markets from a street market tiny stall holder to a mega supermarket cooperatives and markets as a corporation so there's many different kinds of forms within the market space i'm definitely not saying market bad right markets an amazing amazing mechanism adam smith was on to something when he admired the power of the market to distribute goods and services through the price mechanism as if it was an invisible hand but markets are incredible they have a couple of caveats they only serve those who can pay and the rest they ignore and the only value what's priced the rest they exploit those are massive caveats those are caveats for externalities the second one but the first one distribution of questions and so there's a massive reason to say i don't want an economy that only uses the market as an organizing form for provisioning so let's go to the state no let's go to care let's go to household so i love this diagram this is the cover of a book by nancy frolbray which is called who pays for the kids and you can think of it it's a very 1950s picture think of it 1950s uk right though in the morning off goes the husband it was the husband goes off the factory does his days work productive economy at the end of the day comes out the factory look he gets the wage you see the guy with his little wage packet he gets the wage that matters comes home and his wife cares for him and she washes his clothes she makes his dinner and she tends to him if he's sick because she raised the kids by the way and this is this is her getting labor fresh and ready for the factory gate the next morning these two systems of productive economy and reproductive care economy utterly interdependent but only one of them gets paid and therein you get household gender dynamics of who's got the money and who's doing the reproductive work so to me this is essential to recognize let's recognize it still continues today and of course men and women are both involved so gender the gender stereotype of this has softened in many contexts and it has become much more normalized in different ways but care we still seek to ensure recognition of its importance because it's not taught in mainstream economic it's just left out the time oh the time reduction of it through labor saving devices these women pouring water on their heads right i mean you can think of so many different ways that they could not spend three hours a day merely carrying water and firewood back and forward they had a tap a well a barrel with water in it redistributing it between members of a family so the political question of and who does the washing up at home and who does the laundry and who cares for the kids at the weekend and representation in decision-making spaces so ensuring that these voices are able to attend meetings and able to be heard so that it's taken into account so the importance of taking account of care has come to the commons i love this diagram because the the cloth that is woven here is only feasible only possible because of all the people holding the many threads it's a collectively created uh value whether it's the wikipedia or the community garden or open source fab lab or the atmosphere these are all commons and in the words of david bollier if you want to know if something's a commons as he said you know you have to look for yeah there's a resource you're looking for a shared resource but you've also got to find a community a defined community and rules and norms that they're following a commons is not just a piece of waste ground that is not a common that's a piece of waste ground as he says if there's no commons without commenting a community who are following a shared set of rules and norms better or worse quite well followed on wikipedia really badly followed on the atmosphere but these are both commons better or worse stewarded so the potential for the commons and then the state the state which provides lighting and traffic lights and car lanes or bike lanes and buses and trees vaccines the state not only provides public goods but also has a particular role obviously which is it manages the relation between through regulation and subsidy the state provides public goods but also enables households role for care unleashes the commons and embeds markets and rules so the state has a responsibility not only to provide but to enable the rest to provide well last one let's just go to finance and just let's recognize that there's many many many kinds of money many kinds some of it's created by the state as fiat money a lot of it's created by banks as credit and that's what the financial crash kind of oh let's put that in our models okay some of it's created by communities as community currency some bits created by households anybody here when you were kid did your parents like give you tokens or reward stickers or when you put your hand up if you did yeah okay so that's a household currency i tried that when my twins were two and a half i said if you pee on the potty i'll give you a sticker and my daughter took one look at me she sat on the potty and she went she did six little peas and she said six stickers mommy i was like that is the end of household currency she gained it right from day one but we create currencies in our households so many kinds of money and it's shaped by who has the power to create money right all money you can ask who has the power to create this money what character does it birds it does it bear interest or demerge where it loses value over time instead of gains it and what can it be useful and these three design characteristics of money shape distribution they shape behavior and they shape outcomes hugely powerful design of money right let me pull back out of here and let's just recognize in this space that all four of these forms can provision for so many things we got i think we live in a society that's so dominated by markets in a little bit of state that we don't recognize the other potential so all four forms produce food it's happening all the time people figure it out all produced with different rules and norms of how we do this because if we're in the market it's different from the state different from the household and comments it's happening everywhere they all produce energy and thanks and this is an interesting one technology has transformed this right 20th century energy was either an oil rig or a gas pipeline or a coal mine so it was massive capital brought together only the big market corporate or the state could do that so it was dominated across the horizon but now technology has given us small panels single turbines you get the vertical too households can be energy generators communities can be energy generated transforms ownership and power they all build houses they all steward forests and they all create money so i just think it's really useful to open our minds up and recognize there are so many different ways of provisioning and they will have very different distributional political consequences of which ones we make work and what do our politics lean towards and this country we've had decades of privatization that have just put us so much in the market can we return and enable more state more commons more household different forms of provisioning okay last one on this really important obviously is some of the most interesting stuff happens across the boundaries whether it's households and state with a state funding household insulation or heat pump installation whether it's prosumers through solar microgrids households acting in the market whether it's open source software that you have open source software but you build your own enterprise on top of that or whether it's through community land ownership so many many many more but a lot of the most interesting things happen and i think a lot of the most interesting innovations that are coming in the future happen at the conjunction of these so if we ignore market state household commons we're missing out on some of the most dynamic spaces of organizing in our economies so that was that was all from the embedded economy diagram a new first big picture and it changes everything but also let's recognize this diagram tells us this is a world that is extremely unequal there's billions of people who can't meet their basic needs and we've collectively overshot our pressure on the planet because of excessive consumption so it's deeply divided world it's also a deeply degenerative world we are literally destroying earth's life-supporting systems so we need to transform the dynamics as well as the goal we need new dynamics and there is just two dynamics i'm going to share the two big ones we've inherited degenerative designs industries that just take us materials make them into stuff we won't use it for a while and throw it away and that's what made a lot of 20th century profit and it's also what's driven us over planetary boundaries we need to become regenerative circular cyclical by design a cute a couple of examples just from the world of construction the best buildings are the ones that will exist as many architects will tell you we need to do retrofit and restoration not knock down and build again work with the materials that are already there preserve by the way it creates more jobs and uses less energy and less materials in amsterdam there's a district where all the new buildings that are being put up have to be made with circular materials which means they have a passport of what they can be used for next they can't be glued and cemented together they can only be clipped and bolted together so they can be unclipped and unbolted so it's literally an architectural design change enables that circularity passive house in new york and many many places but on a big scale here this is social housing in new york and the sponge city in kundli in china recognizing that every place is embedded in nature so nature's bringing her water and it's going to flood have a sponge city that absorbs that rather than tries to block it out and then gets overwhelmed by it so designing with and around the ecosystems of place so regenerative design and i'm just showing construction but you can think of it in terms of food and you know electronics and clothing and every product line but we've also inherited deeply divisive economies that capture value and opportunity in the hands of a few through privilege through inheritance through regulation through racism through gender inequalities we see the rise of a one percent locally nationally globally and we've absolutely no chance of getting into the doughnut in this state you know the richest one percent people own half the world's wealth it's it's just off the scale it's just but that's where we are and it's absolutely impossible so we have to become far more distributive by design and the way i put it is sharing opportunity and value that's created with all who co-create it that turns out to be the whole of society of who who co-creates value in a place so just again some examples from construction in the city of vienna a very elegant european city over 60 percent of residents there live in what we call social housing it's normal central affordable it's owned by the state it's owned by the city or city-run co-ops because a hundred years ago vienna decided that housing is not a luxury investment asset for the wealthy it's a human right for all so they decided to own the stock of the city's housing in order to ensure it could be serving that purpose in chile the architect alahandra adavena realized that many many people would never be able to afford to buy their own house but lots of people could afford to buy half a house so he started designing half houses that have inside them in that half or the heating and the plumbing electricity everything that you need you can buy the half house and as you save up more money over the years you could fill the other half in and surely by changing the architectural design he has opened up home ownership home ownership to many many many people who would otherwise always have been stuck in the rental market community self-builder lewis schimmer was actually there yesterday this is the first black led community self-build in newbia way people who were on the waiting list for housing for social housing and they said i can never afford to buy house but i've got my time they had to donate 24 hours a week of their time for two years and they built these houses together and then get to live there for free because they've already invested their labor in it and then in cleveland in ahio they are making sure that the jobs that go around retrofit and reconstruction and solar energy go to people who've formerly been excluded from the trades and the skills so that they're creating new locally based high income jobs these are just for examples again of many many ways in which we can be more distributive by design in our economies but that we can actually choose distribution as a design it's it's not given it's not an inequality is not given it's all due to the design and the law and the architecture of place okay that's enough theory uh that's just a couple of the ways ways to think in donut economics what thrilled me over the last few years is that what we launched donut economics action lab because so many people from companies or communities or in schools or cities got in touch and said we want to do this here so i'm just going to show you okay it's all very nice ideas on the page yeah but what how do you actually do this so i'm going to give you one example from the world of cities we were approached um very early on by mayors and councils can we can we can we can we do the donut here we want to live in the donut here in our town and our state and our village in our street so as a team we've created a downscaled tool a framework for really unrolling this literally so that you can use it locally so as i present this i invite you to take your mind to somewhere that you know and love a place that you know and love so you can think about it through that lens so oh yeah before we go there we need this man yes because milton freeman said only a crisis actual or perceived produces real change and when that crisis occurs the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around he knew that because he he ceded the idea of neoliberalism in the 1940s and it took until 1980 Reagan and Thatcher in power so they waited decades we don't want to wait that long but we're going to learn from milton we might as well learn something useful from him uh we're going to learn from milton but you know see why would you just leave them lying around milton why would you leave the ideas lying around let's have them up and running so that when crisis occurs they're not just lying around in high-ex books in Margaret Thatcher's handbag they say let's have them up and running in places that you can say look they're doing it here and there so there's places that are pioneering it that's what we're doing in donut economics action lab working with cities and communities that want to get ahead and do it so that there's proof of concept in practice so when crisis hit you can turn to that you probably notice i've given you lots of quotes from dead white men so let's stop there and let's listen to Shirley Chisholm she was the first black woman to be elected the US House of Representatives fabulous quote so don't give your seat at the table bring a folding chair and i think of donut economics action lab is a bit like that it's kind of pop up and the mainstream economists still don't really want to know don't many some caveats there are some exceptions but many don't want to know i'm not usually invited into economics departments let's put it that way so we are a pop-up chair and we work with all of those who want sit sit at our table and join us in this table and pop up so what would it mean for a city to live in the donut right think of a place uh what would it mean to say we aim to live in that donut could we do that how would we do that here what how would we know so what we do and we created this tool we unroll the donut got to make some space between the social foundation and the ecological ceiling and there you can see a tiny question that's actually a really really big question so there it is how can our city or town or district or neighborhood state become a home to thriving people in a thriving place while respecting the well-being of all people in the health of the whole planet big question it's actually four questions and we call these the four quadrants or the four lenses of the city portrait on this side we've got the local and over here we've got the global down here we've got social and up there we've got the ecological so i'm going to just run through them or for okay so let's start where most places start thinking about the people of this place how can all the people of this place thrive what would it mean for everybody here to be over that social foundation and that's a conversation for every locality it's going to look different in Dara Salam than in Stockholm because people have different cultures and histories and values what does it mean for everybody here to live above that foundation who is still below it and how do we get them above it local social justice then let's go to the local ecological how can our city be as generous as the wildland next door this comes from the biomimicry thinker Ginny Benius who's a huge inspiration to me and if she were here she'd say london take me to the wildland next door i don't know where we'd actually go but we'd go and try and find nature in thriving natural habitat and she'd say right what is nature doing here nature has a genius in every place nature knows how to store carbon and house biodiversity and cleanse the air and cool the air from the treetops to the forest floor nature creates conditions conducive to life everywhere and this is how nature is doing it here and we can take this as the aspiration for our city can our city store carbon rather than release it can our city store groundwater after storm rather than have flash floods can our city cool the air on a hot day rather than have an urban heat island effect how would we change the design so that we mimic nature's generosity that's what this lens focuses on so it's about local ecological qualities of place then let's that that's the local stuff and if we only looked at that people would say oh you know Denmark's in the donut and Sweden's in the donut and Norway's in the donut because they're really good at this stuff but they have not got that stuff sorted so we need to take the global impacts into account as well everywhere is connected to the whole world this room we're connected to the earth's materials we're connected to people worldwide through what we're using right here so how can we respect the health of the whole planet this is the planetary boundaries now how can we you know great education in central London massive planetary impact because of the way we provision for our needs and wants how do we come back within that red overshoot this is where all high income countries fall very short how do we come back within that overshoot and think of all the people who are connected to the laptops and the clothes and the machines and the carpets who made this stuff that we're wearing and using and eating were they paid a living wage we depend upon their work for our lives so to global supply chains who's impacted today by the lifestyles that we lead who's who's hit by climate impacts what's the culture and policy of welcome to towards refugees and towards those who come and many many other questions you could ask what's a university's role in global solidarity in terms of building international connection and understanding so that we have solidarity and connection between us so those are the four lenses and we invite every city to make a self-portrait through these four lenses so far there's over 70 town cities or local governments let me say whether it's a state-level government or a district or county or borough that are using this frame and these are all places that have come to us and said given the transformation we want to make in the world this looks like a really useful tool and it's a it's a lovely way of working we've never tried to persuade or convince or push anybody to use it because there's energy that comes from others and they own it and make it their own so I'll just quickly show you some examples so one of the most recent ones to be made is Glasgow right instead of Glasgow so we're going to make a portrait of the city we want to be and they did a really participatory process they've estimated their ecological overshoot that's not a pretty thing and I admire any council that is willing to publish that because that's not you know that's not hand clapping that's not to be proud of that's this is where we are we need to transform this we need to come back within so they've come up with their vision of the city that they want to be looking at all four lenses Cornwall said for every infrastructure project we do we're going to run it through our decision wheel you can recognize that's the donor and ask is it having good social impact and how could we improve it is it bringing us within planetary boundaries how can we improve it so they're using it as a way of better designing their infrastructure projects and they're measuring their change over time and you can I don't even have to tell you what that traffic light system means you can read it you know imagine if Cornwall puts out a press release over the last year Cornwall's GDP is risen by 1.3 percent so what I mean we just have no idea whether that was cleaning up an oil spill off the Cornish coast or whether that was good jobs in local towns and villages so the single metric of GDP is massively replaced by a multi metric a dashboard like this in Epo in Malaysia they had the ambition of being the first city in Asia to aim to live in the doughnut so they've been exploring what that would mean to do in Epo Barcelona have done you can see that's doughnut unrolled and they've quantified it all Barcelona's phenomenally ambitious city what you're looking at there used to be a crossroad jam packed with cars they took the cars out they put the commons in they put ecology in they're transforming their physical space to transforming how and who it's used by and they're using the doughnut to think about creating a culture of sustainability there the government of Bhutan got in touch and said you know of all the all the ideas coming out of western economic mindset the doughnut resonates most for us with our concept of gross national happiness so we want to pursue gross national happiness in the doughnut and think about it in our design for the future of our capital city Timpo who do we want to be and they've created their own cartoons of the vision of what would what is a good life like in Timpo in 2047 so we've been working with them on that architectural plan and then bringing it right back close to home in Birmingham amazing work by this organization Civic Square at the street level they're saying can we retrofeed one street together can we engage community can everybody feel like they could be part of the economic conversation so many people are intimidated by economics how do we engage it in a way that everyone says actually this is my conversation I belong in this and I have opinion in this last one I'll show you is design manual that we created together with an organization called home to earth they they do very ambitious ecological design construction so social ecological in Denmark and they use the doughnut to create the template for saying if we really were going to build or retrofit within planetary boundaries what are the limits and by the way those limits are really tight that's a really great handbook that we co-created together okay if you're interested in any of those ideas they're summed up in our publication about how cities are getting started this is we're learning from them so we don't tell them this is how to get started this is the tool and we're learning back from them the different ways they're trying to start this because of course they're trying to they're a city in a nation that's not transforming it's still going for growth growth growth perhaps so how do you start to be an island of change when you're surrounded by a sea of stasis it's really challenging on these policymakers and we work with them to at least build the solidarity in their networks of those who are trying to make change happen so let me finish here we started seems a little while ago now we started with the big picture of 20th century economics and I really believe these ideas damage us and damage our prospects and we should not be an option to choose to think differently I believe we have a claim on ideas that serve our times as Cain said so I would start here starting point the economy is a subset of society in the living world and all economic modeling should be in that context that we recognize we are part of the web of life and utterly dependent upon it and we are collaborative reciprocal pro-social creatures we are the most pro-social of all mammals the most pro-social mammal how do we how do we build on that quality rather than undermine it by telling us you know be competitive hard-edge Russian economic man and we need a goal and the doughnuts one vision of a goal so what if this was just the starting point of all economics degrees and I can't wait for the day when I present this and the economics students say well and I mean yeah we already know that trouble is that's not happening yet so how and when do we change that I'm working with the rethinking economics student movement to turn the core concepts of donor economics into a curriculum that we're going to post online in the commons for any lecturer who wants to teach a set of slides resources he will hand it over it's for you to teach and of course any student will be able to use it too so we're trying to put all these ideas in the commons to break down any barriers that there are and there are for academics to move into this kind of teaching so let me stop there everything I shared is on our platform donoreconomics.org and I really look forward to turn this into a conversation thank you thank you Kate that was pretty much a thrilling experience I forgot to mention that I mean as a student of economics of course my first impression my first graphic was the supply and demand but teaching as a seminar leader during my phd introduction to economics I it was the first time I came across the donut economics so it's starting at least my students from introduction to economics have the chance to have that in their first year of studies we'll go through a round of questions now if you could please raise your hands and see who would like to start can we start with her or maybe as well please introduce your names and make make a quick questions thank you very much Kate I'm Jade I'm studying environment politics and development as a master's and I was just wanting to ask whether you have any opinions or thoughts on degrow as a concept and whether it's compatible with the circular economy or a way of practicing if the circular economy is a way of practicing degrow yeah that's the question thank you great do you want me to uh let's do a round of question I think you wanted to ask or question okay um how many people want to talk about degrow okay okay I'm getting lost here but yeah I just wanted to ask about how do you create the kind of the political and cultural space to expand the commons given that if you imagine the UK the most the biggest asset most people can dream to own is a house and that kind of stands in political I guess kind of a contention with the commons itself you could introduce yourself yeah I'm sorry I'm sorry thank you very much hello my name is Oryong Jin and I'm studying the development human antagonism my question is the the on the divided role in different blocks of economy in the world so are you saying the what divided the blocks of economy for example westerns like north america they are more doing consumption and market or pressing monetary and west like emerging countries including east asia and east europe is more about manufacture and a like africa and south america is more about producing primary resources which is so called like comparative advantage but actually not so many people are benefiting it do you think this red part of official happens because of maybe this fixed role of different blocks or you know like a Detroit city or Rust Belt in USA they start feeling zero some game and that we enter the more severe competitions because of this division it's very much fixed and unless we don't create any market in the global south should we stop on these three questions okay great so I had a funny feeling people might want to talk about degrowth so i don't know if it's cheating but i just stuck some slides on the end because can i because i can i can give you a better degrowth story if i yeah is that all right i thought i know it's gonna come up so let's all right here we go da da da da da just click through and here we are right i'm gonna start here so okay actually uh not to put you on the spot but actually to put you what how do you define degrowth what's degrowth or does anybody want to define degrowth there's like a metabolic growth that's happened it's kind of like reducing our how much we're consuming and the resources we're using and rebalancing that yeah and what do we reduce it what great resource consumption and growth obviously and gdp not focusing on that okay great great okay so let's start here and you didn't say but i in any particular part of the world global north okay so let's go here right so let's work with this line something i think it's really interesting to start with is to recognize that what these different views have in common and see if this sees does it feel counterintuitive green growthers and degrowthers and post growthers when i speak to them they all want the same thing at this point they all want that direction in fact of many people who support degrowth many people who support green growth and they don't know the definition of degrowth that you just gave they go oh i want the same thing and there's this real shock of like hey we're brothers up to this point we all want the same thing so where do these views come apart and you just brought it in here i think these views come apart and it's something i get frustrated with it's not in the definition of degrowth because degrowth is as you defined it it's a planned reduction the consumption or production of energy and resources necessary consumption or production to have a democratic return within planetary boundaries in a socially just way sounds very very like getting into the doughnut to me so if if that's the specific definition getting into doughnut and degrowth are i would say the same thing there coming back within here but where they come apart is their view about what's going to happen to gdp as you mentioned right that's the difference everybody wants the same thing the difference is the view about what can happen to gdp at the same time so let's just play with this a little bit okay again let's say gdp is the black line going up and resource use has decoupled a little bit from it right and i'm saying resource use you can think let all resources bring your own kind of resource carbon materials if we're committed to coming back within planetary boundaries which degrowth is committed to coming back within planetary boundaries and this is the global north it's high income countries okay so if we're saying we must reduce consumption or production so that we come back within planetary boundaries this is what we're committed to then the question is what do you think is the likely future for gdp as we make this decline of resource use so here's some options do you think gdp can keep going up continue growth now i would say that is the green growth position there's plenty of people who for very good understandable argument i respect the argument they make they would say we so many technologies we haven't even started trying policies aren't even aligned we're still subsidizing fossil fuels we haven't actually got the policies in place yet we haven't even tried we could do this simons sharps written a really good book called five times faster which basically argues this that we could go much faster in this direction so he would say yes we can have continued growth and combat within planetary boundaries do you think gdp needs to flatten out okay you know uk's gdp if we just stop growing now we could sustain it and come back within planetary boundaries some people would say yeah we could do that we can have a stationary gdp and come back within planetary boundaries a lot of work to open up that space between but maybe we can go there i'd say degrowth says uh so it's not in the definition but many many people who support degrowth say and i believe we need to see gdp actually go down at least for phase and then it can stabilize so that's kind of and it's planned right so that's the coming down and other people might come along say well you're all naive because actually what's going to happen is we're going to try and go for growth and it's going to collapse and it'll be unplanned a rejoinder to this would quite rightly be you're very unlikely to get back in planetary boundaries in that scenario that's just really not a good scenario for anything so then the question is which one of these do we think is going to happen and it comes down to decoupling i'm going to go quickly on this one because this is the equipment the conceptual equipment you need to be engaged with the decoupling debate do you think we can decouple or not if gdp keeps going up like that there are pathways of resource use that's relative decoupling we're more efficient in our use of carbon or materials but they're both still increasing so it's relative decoupling and in terms of planetary boundary ain't good enough because it's still going up even though it's more efficient we only want when we get below the horizon then we're into the land of absolute decoupling and everybody should cheer for this because this is the beginning of all futures we have to have absolute decoupling where resource use is absolutely going down while gdp is still going up some greengrocers say look we have absolute decoupling and many other people say hang on it's not nearly enough because we want to get back to planetary boundaries it's not just going down we need to come down within planetary boundaries it needs to be sufficient absolute decoupling and if i can just land this for you if i said to harry harry we've got to we've got to get the last train home it's going to leave in 10 minutes and we're only going to make it if we sprint and harry starts like you are not sprinting mate you are doing a slow job so basically what the government are doing then many countries are like look we're decoupling we're decoupling because it's only actually falling by about one or two percent per year and it needs to be falling by eight to ten percent a year so we are doing a carbon slow jog when we need to be doing a carbon sprint and the point is you miss the train it's not nearly fast enough so we are not going to show you data right now this is the only thing i'm showing we are nowhere close to sufficient absolute decoupling so yes there's a bit of absolute decoupling but nowhere close to sufficient and then and this to me is where the debate is can we go a fast enough or we can't go fast enough and by the way that evidence is only on carbon if you want to talk about material footprint we're still in the world of relative decoupling barely even started so i want to take a quick poll of the room so if we want to come back with implanted boundaries let's see put your hand up if you think and be brave let if you think we could actually do it with continual growth put your hand up thank you people for putting your hand up because at university is a place for debate and there are so many views in the world and we should and and there are some good reasons why people might think this okay so some people a couple of people putting their hand up thank you yes a couple of people think we can do it great these are great people to have a conversation with who thinks actually we need a station we say okay so we could have GDP as it is right now and we could decouple just keep it the same who thinks we need to see actually GDP go down the UK's GDP go down that's a lot of people really interesting okay by the way it's really big and i'm with you but i believe there's massive challenges to transform your economy so that the GDP can go down without crashing for the worst off people so it's not an easy future it's a really rocking a hard place situation i'm not going to go into it right now and as somebody says to me come back and go into that but how all the ways we're locked into growth that's a whole other big challenge and that's where i think that's why i say big not stick about growth meaning we've got to create economies that are no longer structurally dependent upon endless growth and we have economies that need to grow whether or not it makes us thrive we need to take that growth dependency out of our economies because even somebody who's avidly degrowth can't tell you should it go down by one percent or two percent of how long and when we we don't know that's what i mean by being agnostic we need to follow the plan if you're bound to not follow growth so that aren't your question great okay pleasure um harry on the commons how many people think it's going to be a oh i didn't did i who thinks we're going to have an unplanned collapse thank you okay so what what the heck can we do because that's not going to go well for anybody is it that's really not going to go what can we do to move us away as peter victor would say ecological economies how can we go slower by design not by disaster whether it's steady state stationary state or degrowth planned reduction how can we go slower by design not by disaster okay to harry's question um i have some slides on this no i don't don't um on housing so really nice point like the biggest the the biggest asset most people can ever aspire to earn as a house there is of course community land trusts and community owned housing and i think so i've been working a lot in the city of amsterdam and there's a rise of community led initiatives but you need enough people coming together and you need often even changes in the law to make it possible to get a community-based mortgage so off so much economics is about changing the law to make it possible for these new legal forms to be made and i also think it's about proof of concept you know if we're not if we've never seen it you can't imagine does it really work should i really invest my savings there but the more that these things become visible and normal like i showed a picture of the community house in in in amsterdam that that actually it can work and it's much it's feminist right you can have communal housing that has shared spaces for raising our kids and we can dine together and so many benefits of not living all in our segmented little lives so i think it's a really great place actually to rediscover the commons as well as communal spaces yeah um your question on those overshoots on the doughnuts on the national ones yes the world is massively divided as everybody in this room knows at least as well as me into the kind of the service economies the manufacturing economies the primary production economies but the red overshoot that i was showing is consumption based so it's drawing on the resources from around the world and so i don't think it explains in that sense it doesn't explain the level of overshoot certainly if you're a primary production country and you're told that's your comparative advantage you are locked out of moving up into the high income levels that would enable you to to import that much stuff but i but i mean it would be a great exercise to go back to um that chart i showed this one right and and and really you could do amazing conversation and visualization of the relation you want to say come on go what i wanted to say is that if we don't shift this structure and there is a fixation always then if we reduce this consumption from global and north then maybe they can be a depriving of this opportunity of selling product from ah got that one okay so it can be damaged because uh if they have a like purchase power they have market they can work between them but it's very much dependent on this consumption of this product got it so you might say look even though these countries are being exploited by the global system they're utterly dependent upon selling their grain or their their labor to the high consumers there without any change and we just reduce this uh the growth and this consumption of course it's natural for the earth but maybe there is a will be this impact for example koto diva which is producing 50 percent of a kakao but if the price of this primary material goes down then whole of economy are damaged yes and that's and so i she brought really nice to the rebalancing of demand in the world so again uh the point i had about markets markets serve those who can pay and the rest ignore and because the global north has the purchasing power right you know the drawing of the world's resources here and there's massive human needs but not purchasing power here so how do we redistribute purchasing power of this part of the world so that instead of north south to north trade you've got much more south south regional trade and moving away from this center periphery economy that we're creating yes i i think that's right and that's actually why we can't just say reduce without undermining right so it's all interconnected thanks that's a really really good point and it's one one reason why some people argue the high income countries need to keep growing because lower income countries are dependent upon us well it's like well let's yeah i i would make the same face let's reduce that dependency rather than say we must keep growing because they need us to grow yes exactly so i had a well my name is my i'm studying environment sustainability like harry and i had a question about the private sector because obviously you said like there is massive consumption and this is what is destroying the planet so in terms of um the private you know like the private sector i wanted to ask so how can big how can businesses effectively incorporate environmental considerations into their decision-making process us like frameworks like csr or esg do you think they work um great question and i just want to say at this point there's this is kind of i'm i also don't know as everybody else i just want to i just want to acknowledge the weirdness of everybody asked me a question and i have to have the answer i don't have i don't know all the answer thank you for the question i don't know the answers either so i'm just going to share back what what's in my mind but we're all trying to figure this out together i don't know uh what we're doing with companies so when companies come to us at donut economics action lab and they say like you know like this is a fair phone let's say fair phone gets in touch we make this great phone it's modular by design so it's regenerative we pay decent wage labors we've chased out all child poverty and slavery from our supply chain so this is a regenerative and distributive phone is this phone in the donut for example if they said that we'd say look we don't really want to talk only about the design of the products you make we want to talk about the design of your company itself because the design of your company will determine what you can do and and be in the world and there are five design traits of businesses i don't have that slide here but we'll just do it five design traits that and i'll say to you anyone who you know when you graduate and you're going to go and work for a company or an organization or university i mean every organization has a design so these five design traits i always say to the students i teach like be a like a detective about it you're interviewing them as much as they're interviewing you does this organization have in its deep design the capacity to be part of transformation or not am i giving my energy my creativity my skills to an organization that just can't use them can't let me unlock them so five design traits one the purpose what is the purpose of this organization why does this company or NGO or think tank or university or council exist what what is in service to in the world second it's networks of relationship how does it hold itself from relationship to its employees to its customers to its service providers to its supply chain what relationships does it let go of and what will alliance is it building three how is it governed who's in the room when decisions get made does in a company right so there's a company called faith in nature it's a shampoo company they always used to ask themselves rhetorically what would nature do what would nature do and they said you know what let's just give nature a place in the board so nature now is one of 11 directors of the company held by an environmental lawyer who has equal voting rights to the others in the company and and also faith the nature say we're the first company to have nature on the board but we don't want to be the last again they're doing this to demonstrate to other companies we can redesign the way we're governed to change the decisions that we make so i would far rather a company that had nature on the board as an environmental law with decision making power than say oh we do esg corporate social responsibility you know like structurally design into your company so go purpose we've got networks we've got governance i call this corporate psychotherapy so the deeper we go the more profound it gets so let's go down ownership how is this company owned is it owned by a family for 300 years is it owned by shareholders by venture capital is it owned by private equity is owned by its employees is owned by the state these are all completely prevailing designs and ownership of companies today and they all have huge consequences for the one that sits at the bottom purpose networks governance ownership finance right finance because where is the money that drives this company coming from is it built only off sales is it venture capital is it share issue is it private equity investment because where that money's coming from is it crowdfunding where that money's coming from totally determines what that money is expecting and demanding and what it will extract for the owners and what will be reinvested in the company so classic design you get people setting up a really aspirational i don't know let's say fairphone if i'm if fairphone had set themselves up and got this great product and along comes venture capital and says we love it it's such a good brand venture capital goes in and then i'm making this bit up please don't tweet this i'm making this bit up okay venture capital goes in and then we say well i mean it was really lovely in the early years that you did this really responsible stuff and supply chains but come on you're with the big boys now you need to grow up we want our 15 times return out in 10 years so if you're going to hit our growth targets you've got to just knock some corners off your cozy sustainability image so the money will totally change the purpose so you've got at the top purpose and at the bottom finance and these two are just often hugely in tension with each other mediated by particularly government's and ownership so every company that comes to us oh we love the doughnut we say thank you we're really glad you love the doughnut we don't want to talk about your product we want to talk about your deep design and many big companies go oh thank you that's too challenging and they go away but actually it's the small startups that say no we want to design great products and we want to make sure we are designed in a way that means we can continue to pursue that goal so that's how we engage with companies and organizations actually and i you know the deep design of an organization shapes what it can be in doing the world that answer yeah okay just can i just add one thing if that's really of interest on our platform on our website doughnut designed for business is the name of the tool my colleague erinch sahan explains it sets it out gives examples from companies if anybody's really interested in that company story just just everyone just wait one second doesn't announce just before we go on through another round of questions uh professor Christopher Kramer asked for us to announce that there is a joint seminar series starting tomorrow at 3 p.m for co-dev students joined he organized and presented with the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance at the University of Cape Town so there are six seminars emails did go to students kicking off with him tomorrow and Nimrod Zolk in Cape Town they are in room 301 and the series is on structural change and economic development in Africa so you're all invited to to join this series tomorrow as well but going back to another round of question let's try to take at least three yeah so we can since you were calling the next hello my name is Jamie I'm an alumni I did the environment politics and development program in my research I looked at overdeveloped countries and historical conceptualizations of that and I found that most overdeveloped countries are identified as countries that over consume um so I was wondering if you have any ideas for policies that should be implemented to help battle issues of overconsumption thank you um my name is Dan I'm on the energy and climate policy master's program um my question's about here at SOAS uh one of probably by far the biggest contributions to emissions carbon emissions is all of the travel that we have both academics going overseas for various reasons and overseas students coming here to study all of which is for great purposes and it's not obvious to see what the alternative is to flying for that for at least some of that do you have any thoughts about how we should approach that problem and zero one more hi um I do econ here and fully relate to you saying I don't want to identify myself as someone who does it on here uh we also thank you for your thinking we do rethinking economics at SOAS as well and have been using your book for that um but what happens with such student organizing is and similarly to here you were surprised that people raised their hand for actual growth mindset and so the people who kind of joined those conversations that people who are called slightly already on the same page and my question is how and where do you have those conversations with people who actually disagree with you and how do you kind of change those minds thank you great questions um okay uh again I don't know the answers folks I'm just having having a go and you all probably have as good answers the things to say as me on this Jamie I've got a funny suspicion you've thought a lot more about this than me you've probably gone excellent so I should just say give us the policies but I like the way you call it over consuming countries uh I I tend to call them overshooting countries um but the same maybe same same maybe same thing but they're the red ones right they're those guys right would you say they are they're over consuming if they're if they've got the red overshoot that's almost different yes yes overdeveloped yeah the thing about the overdeveloped it's there's a lot of underdevelopment in them as well because there's huge social inequality in them so somebody who's living in poverty might say hey you're telling me I live in an overdeveloped place it doesn't feel like that from where I am so anyway but it's it's that it's a it's a really good tension of trying to come up with new frames that that represent realities complex realities um policies what do we I mean some some responses to if people are committed to green growth some degrowth would say fine let's just if you really think the growth will come let's just cap cap resource use so actually it's become it's very politically charged though in the Netherlands there's a nitrogen ceiling you know if you've been in in the but the European Commission said hey in Netherlands you're using too much nitrogen you need to reduce it so because they're regulated by Europe that's been imposed this nitrogen ceiling I was fascinated when I heard that because it's we've all got quite used to talk about carbon footprints and it was the first time I'd really heard someone talking about just a different like nitrogen ceiling who 20 years ago would have thought we that would be a political thing but the politics of it is they immediately got the election of farmers the creation and the election of farmers but it's very charged and as one friend of mine in Europe said this is what happens when when we leave issue so late that in order to respond to them it's quite drastic it becomes socially unacceptable and you get a a democratic revolt against the drasticness of these policies so that that just says we wish we didn't have to start from here we wish we'd started in the 1970s when limits to growth had said we think this might be a thing can you edit out what do we edit out Paris just edit out well Paris is partly editing out suvs yesterday Paris voted to charge what three times more parking for suvs so there's the editing out of things you can also infrastructurally edit cars out with bike lanes so changing infrastructure so that people just choose that the easiest thing to do is take public transport and bike and not drive edit out private jets but edit in public transport go on give it give us give us two because you I know you've thought about this more than me go on yep yep like cities like Basel have done that there's no you go there and it's like what there's something different here what is it what is it there's no apps you're just not bombarded but also just you talked about the psychological I'm really struck that in France the word sobriety is a thing right so English translation sobriety now in English what does this tell you about the English that when we say sobriety it means I don't drink alcohol but in France it's come to me in a kind of dignified frugality sufficiency moderate and I hear politicians talking about sobriety in France like our politicians like growth growth and in front of like sobriety let's have some elegance here you know or in Sweden there's a word lagom which means it's plenty and it's enough and how do we find the and we need this kind of I think psychologically we need this aspiration actually it's a a good frugality that we a sufficiency that we that we learn um to dance question about travel who big one especially because we want the international solidarity of international students I mean how much richer is a is an educational experience when we are bringing experience from all over the world I'm going to focus on the academic travel point of it and I I think I think there's just far too much I personally this is a total personal view I think it's far too much travel by and and if we and I think it also if people come to a country how often do you think you're going to pop home again in between I think we all need to be more sobriety in our international travel expectations this is real in my life I married by mistake I married an Australian he'd lost his accent and it was too late I'd fallen in love when I realized oh my god you're from this so it's real right it's a big moral and ethical issue many people's lives do you do you fly home for your brother's wedding on the other side of the world you fly again for your aunt's funeral do you go for thanksgiving and how do it how do we hold social relations it's it's got massive moral carbon ethical issues it's really hard but I personally have almost I'm going to say almost completely stop flying I don't fly I don't fly I don't fly on for for well I went to see my father in law in Australia while he's still alive I decided now you know I won't fly home for his funeral I decided to go now with my children while he's alive we'll be there but we we're not going there again and I don't fly for work um and I've made that choice and for me how do we do make it work I just think we have to be really great on zoom like I'm here because my parents live in London and they're not very well so I yeah I'll come to London but I would not have come if this had been in another country and I had to fly there I'd take a train and taking the train is really good you think do I want to spend two days on the train to Stockholm is it worth it and then you decide it's worth it and you do it but I just think we have to learn to be great on zoom because it's amazing we have this technology so we just have to make it work online hello to the people online we have to make it work online we just have to travel a lot less that's my answer on that one um on rethinking uh and you said how yeah yeah thank you to the people who put up their hand when I said do you think you know endless growth because actually it's harder to hold opinions that a lot of people you know a lot of people in the room are challenging and I think it's really important as you said not only to be in our own little bubble of people who already agree with us so um I teach in in the School of Geography in Oxford and actually I started just doing a series of sessions called we respectfully disagree so I had Jason Hickle arguing for degrowth in collaboration or in debate with Sam Fankhauser who was arguing for green growth and I was moderating it and as a woman I don't I won't lightly accept to be the female chair of two men in debate so I was like I'm gonna I'm gonna be very active moderator here I really and I would I invited them and I said to them beforehand I'm gonna ask you what do you most appreciate about the other one's position where are the edges of your own certainty what would it take to make you change your mind and and I respect people who are willing to do that because often actually they they're so entrenched in the debate they are I just want to win I just want to win and we can all watch brilliant rhetoric but actually everybody should have uncertainty the edge of your mind or realize what it would take to make them change the view we did another one on pricing nature with Bob Costanza should we put a price on nature and Eric Gomez Bagathon no we definitely shouldn't and because universities should be a place exactly where we respectfully disagree like what an amazing privilege to respectfully disagree with each other it's fascinating you think that is it an emotional difference is it statistical you're looking at different data from me what would it make what would it take to make me change my mind so maybe we think economics could hold debates based on we respectfully disagree I think it's in fact I said to the the guy who runs Ted very nice very great man who I really like in a bar but it's like there's enough Ted talks in the world somebody standing I I think this shouldn't we have more spaces where you invite two well-known people who respectfully disagree and we'd all be really fascinated to understand if they would be vulnerable enough to show the edges of their own certainty and let's hope they're still there as the slam poet Taylor Marley said changing your mind is one of the best ways of knowing whether or not you still have one so in that spirit we should do a lot more respect for disagreement my name is tawny I'm a master student at the DPU I study along with them environment and sustainable development so I'm interested in pedagogy so a lot of this seems to be in like kind of premised on shifting the collective consciousness and a bit in tune with like political ecological ideas so what do you personally see as being the most powerful pedagogical strategies that could be implemented to begin changing sort of how people perceive themselves in relation to nature so mending this society nature rift and then secondary to that is since a lot of this sort of knowledge co-production is already happening most like very powerfully at the community level does donor economics prioritize implementing this like knowledge production specifically from folks that are at the margins thank you for presentation my name is Cynthia and I study environment and development at the LSE so I'll just want to know that is do you do you have any experience or is there any prescription or strategy to integrate the donor to the currently establish a model pathways or scenarios from the IPCC which actually significantly inform policymakers around the world about our environmental policy for example and because there are a lot of measures for for instance carbon budget the carbonization and fossil fuel a phase out for instance there are very very very according to GDP according to growth and so on so does the the action lab also focus on this or what is the experience and how do you integrate this into like a larger um policy models thank you thank you my name is franklin I study nothing um is it naive uh to think that somehow population growth could impact this I was looking at your GDP graphs and it it struck me that they're not normalized metrics right if we were to reframe them in terms of per capita GDP perhaps um uh with that could the problem that we're facing be solved by by population shrinkage um or is that just wishful thinking that the system will somehow adapt which one which one are you saying when population what was with the graph the GDP graph I took that to being just aggregate GDP oh yeah yeah uh so I asked myself you know what if this was pop you know I wondered because I don't know over history has has per capita GDP stagnated or is is it as you know uh exponential as as GDP and could we not you know will the system heal through you know just not growing anymore in fact possibly shrinking and are we beginning to see that I'm Majid and I study international relations and economics and my question is in regards to the relationship between local donor economies or donor societies and they're either adjusting to other societies that don't have those ambition other parts of society that don't have those ambitions or those targets or those measures um and their relationship to words like more like uh like a peaceful and just society so um one example might be if the nebulin the the the doctor government um for example if they run the numbers and they said that um because if we were to cut out all fertilizers uh or damaging fertilizers and we were just to like and uh other societies and other countries weren't going to reduce it nearly as much we could have we could maintain our food security in a locally sustainable manner but that requires us to not take any immigration for example something like that that was really clear and just and I'll say the question again that the relationship between like local donor economies and that either lobbying other um governments or jurisdictions for increased like environmental um justice um Tanya your question about pedagogy great yeah I really we appreciate that question and you said specifically how can we change the way we people perceive the relation between humans and nature um so there's a quote from Hannah Arendt that I really like she said um a stray dog has a far greater chance of surviving if it's given a name and I think in economics we have treated nature and the living world as a stray dog I mean it was the little red wedge it was it was kind of practically missing in those diagrams it was just sort of a little externality so how do we name it how do we bring it back and what I've shown is examples of diagrams so I showed no go back um yeah so here the living world is not treated as a stray dog the living world is treated as our mother so that's a visual reframing but then there's also a verbal reframing so I sometimes say you know tell me how you talk about the environment and I'll tell you what your job is um and actually even if you think about the word the environment it comes from French environ surroundings so right now our environment are the walls of this room and there's nothing living in the the language of environment so I don't talk about the environment so when when I see a course that's called the economics of the environment it puts the heebie jeebies in me in lots of ways it's like it's not the environment it's not the economics of the environment oh now let's apply economics to the environment the environment is that we in which the economy exists so we need massive reframing so playing with Hannah Arendt's example if you find a stray dog and say let's give this dog a name right it's going to really matter whether we call that dog scamp or champ I've totally reframed the dog in your head just because the name makes a difference so when we can say right we're going to name the environment but are we going to call it natural capital and ecosystem services we're naming it and we're naming it in the land now and you know if I say okay you you talk about natural capital and ecosystem services I bet you're facing policy makers today you're trying to embed this in very mainstream economic analysis because you're trying to talk in the language of power of today's power holders but the danger of and I and I respect and understand why people do that but the danger of course is that we hand it over here you are I've given you it's just natural capital and ecosystem services and now it goes into your calculations and you'll come out with a number and we don't need to protest outside we don't need to write poems and sing songs and because it's in the calculations or at the other end of the spectrum do you talk about mother nature pacha mama gaya the living world I bet and if you're there you're not trying to change this incremental policy and get into this document you are trying to change the whole worldview and you're going for the long and you'll have less immediate impact on today's policy makers but we need that too and so there's that spectrum and and coming back to the point you were making about working with those we disagree with there's actually often a lot of disagreement along that line people shouting at each other along the line because those speaking of gaya say and I'll do this too like why are you calling a natural capital ecosystem services well because they're trying to make it happen right now today so I think there's it's really useful to recognize what's the language we use and the diagrams we draw and that shapes the kinds of policies we come with do you say oh we need natural capital accounting and we need biodiversity net gain markets or actually do we need a cap on and quotas on ecological resources and we need ecologists in the room rather than economists in the room so I'm with you that the pedagogy of the words we use in the pictures we draw I think it's massive it just shapes everything that follows um and that's why I showed the portrait if humanity are we at the top of a pyramid or actually we're embedded in a web and that that that reshapes everything and how and you know the exciting work I think and it's big work is okay and then what is the economic tool we use instead of cost benefit analysis instead of ecosystem services pricing then then what do we do instead and and because that work is still nascent it's very easy for people who are just trying to get stuff done today to turn back to the other stuff that already fits with mainstream power that's where it sits for me the other question you asked me was about um don't put in don't eat key economics into practice and therefore do we focus on working with those at the margins so we focus on and that one of our first principles was we we go where the energy is we work with those who want to do it so like I said we've never pushed and tried to because there's enough ideas in the world and I don't want to be like a carpet salesman you know pushy pushy is just just doesn't feel good but it's when people get in touch now of course some people have much more resource to get in touch or that they'll come across it in the first place so there's an inequality of who finds these things we work with everybody who gets in touch with us and we put all of our resources in the comments so we don't have any market-based relationships so that they're online and available and we're translating them into more languages and we're thinking very hard how do we make this more accessible to more people how can we bring in more examples from around the world so it's very intentional that I bring in examples from Epo in Malaysia and Bhutan as well as Barcelona and you know so that we so that people might say oh that's happening there as well as here and there's nothing like peer-to-peer inspiration I mean it but over the five years I've been doing this the biggest momentum for change comes from peer-to-peer inspiration so when the city of Amsterdam first decided to launch its city portrait in the middle of COVID and the vice mayor of Amsterdam said yeah we're using the doughnut even her say even the mayor saying doughnut I still think it's really funny I can't believe this happened I only called it doughnut because it was just like a silly joke on the side oh my god what have I done um but when she said yeah we're using the doughnut to reimagine the future of Amsterdam because this is the city we want to be six weeks later Copenhagen you know we're like Amsterdam we're Copenhagen had a vote in the city council massive majority vote to explore what it would mean for Copenhagen to live in the doughnut I have zero doubt that happened because of Amsterdam and then when Copenhagen is doing and Barcelona is doing and and Glasgow is doing and then the European Commission is like what's going on some of our biggest cities are doing the doughnut what and so it's that that that to me is the most powerful for momentum momentum for change and therefore showing that it's also happening in Civic Square in Birmingham in EPO in communities actually that aren't resourced like those European cities it's incredibly important and we're working on always trying to find out how can we how can you do this without resource without money what if you don't have the data how can you run a workshop if you don't have the money to buy toys and things how can you just do it with your hands um how can we learn back from those places so some students in Uganda said there aren't there isn't any data here we can't measure the portrait with data there's no numbers locally but we can take photographs of reality so they started documenting it through images this is the state of housing this is the state of sewage this is the and I just thought that was brilliant that they this is what we can do and this is how we can document and then of course that'll inspire many others oh we can do it like that so we love learning back from places of and communities that say this is this is what makes sense for us we want to amplify that back out and if you have any suggestions and feedback from me I'll chat to me after I was love to hear that'd be great um Cynthia um are we getting done economics into the IPCC I'll give a short answer on this but I think it's a really important question my understanding is that and actually the degrowth community been really good and Jason Hickle's been really on it that IPCC scenarios they're all growth based right and so even when we say this is science yeah but science is so circumscribed by economics when Nicholas Stern back in 2006 came out with his landmark report on the economics of climate change his his claim of how much we needed to reduce carbon emissions was because he said we've never had an economy that could grow with more than a dramatic reduction that's a growth the demand for growth silently sits under even what scientists have been willing to set as a target and so I think it's really important that we have ICC projection IPCC projections and scenarios that actually let go of the presumption of growth that actually follow the carbon science and then ask what kind of economy would be compatible with delivering that so there's a political containment of what's possible there and I think that's a really important place that needs to change I'd also say in our in our team at donor economics action I have a currently 13 people and we've just hired somebody to be our government and policy and government and international institutions lead so she'll work with national governments and international institutions like the World Bank like the IMF like the IPCC they and they invite us to give talks which we do on zoom they invite us to give talks but we want somebody who can more actively say okay how can we really help these ideas land in those organizations in every one of these organizations there's a kind of the old guard and then there's a young generation of of people like they're the revving for change inside and you can tell the old guard like whoa like if I and I always do that voting on the different things and you can tell the old guard like my goodness so many of our young young recruits have voted for degrowth what are we going to do it's like it's in the house people it's in the house you're going to have to deal with it I love doing it in universities and economics departments and the old professors and the young graduates are like degrowth up it's like okay it's in the room it's not I'm not saying this it seems like you're saying this you need to make this part the curriculum so that's where we're heading um Franklin is it naive to ask about population so let me just put the donut back up whereas the old donut there we are okay so when I first do the donut some people would say to me you've missed you should have put population in the foundation which I don't agree with but I what I would agree with is that what is it that makes the space this space between the social foundation the ecological ceiling some people say how this is the existential donut question how do you know it even exists how do you know if we actually met the basic needs of all people in the world how do you know there would be any space between that and the ceiling that's a real question and I think it'd be solved by people working not not on money basis but on an energy basis and people like Narasimha Rao are doing calculations based on actually how much energy materials is required for basic needs and how much pressure does that put on the planet and but let's think about what what are the determinants of the thickness of the donut so often people say population for sure it matters it matters whether we are 8 billion people or 10 billion or 12 billion or 20 billion of course because the more people there are the more resources it's going to require to ensure that no one is falling short but if we're going to talk about total population we have to talk to about distribution as one analyst said it's like two sides of the square you can't only you can't measure you know population and inequality we need to talk about them both because in a world where the richest 1% owner half of the world's wealth the reason for the overshoot right now is not sheer numbers of people it's extremes of inequality so it's about reducing the overconsumption that Jamie was talking about the over consuming countries but it's also about technologies how we transform water into irrigation do you kind of do it you know hose pipe everywhere really wastefully or do you have drip irrigation so changing the technologies it's about how we govern ourselves it's about what we aspire to but let me come back to the population question and thinking about growth curves so population is not what keeps me awake at night and here's why population is a biological function and any ecologist or biologist will tell us that nature's growth curve is really well known it goes like this bro you go through a really steep growth phase and then there comes a point where it curves and it plateaus and that's exactly what the human population's doing and it matters whether we plateau at 8 billion or 10 billion or where we reduce go to 7 billion or 12 it matters where we plateau so we need to help it plateau but it is coming to a plateau and the good news is we know more about plateauing population than definitely than than other things empower women with birth control invest in child survival so that kids actually survive to their fifth birthday girls education so essentially get people out the hold of the doughnut if people are no longer living in that shortfall women are empowered to choose the size of their families and will choose to have smaller families and the work of um i've gone black hands rustling right he's done wonderful videos showing a generation after generation you can just say to someone like me born in the uk if i could go back to my my great grandparents they probably had seven brothers and sisters and that transitions happen and i have one sister right so in every country in the world we've gone from like there are seven of us no it comes down to there at around two of us when families are no longer in that space of deprivation so the best way to stabilize the world's population is to get everybody out the hold of the doughnut that's why my answer so it that'll come to stability what does keep me awake at night is the growth curve because on your point about increment it's locked in to our economies that we want to grow including on personal income because it's been locked in as a social aspiration that my kids should have go to a better school and have a bigger car and have a bigger house and we should fly further for our holidays isn't that what doing better is and that's been locked in by a century of consumerism so it's the growth of the economy that keeps me awake at night not the growth of the population but they all interact and that segues really well i think to your question um agide which if i'm understanding rightly the view you put i've heard people make this argument um sometimes in australia uh and canada which is and that's just where i'm hearing it from which is we want to have a stationary state economy let's go to a stationary state economy right we want to do that stationary state thing and we want to be ecological and live with the planet's means so that means we need a stationary population so that means we can't have any immigrants sorry right that and that's the argument that's what you're that's what i'm hearing from you and it can very quickly get to no immigration which means you get these islands of well we're okay we're a stable economy because we're keeping people out so that we can be stable here again that is optimizing a subset of a much bigger world we can't it's not going to work that way and there's a real danger that we have kind of fortress europe fortress canada we put up the walls and don't let anybody in because we want to be ecological and stable here even though those countries are massively importing from around the world so i am i understanding that that question correctly is that what you were the example you were leaning towards that was a more extreme example but um i've heard it so like it was to say um we're going to become environmentally sustainable we're going to enlarge our parks mix trees everywhere yep and we're going to be like very yep yeah and then do you think they should adjust their measures to account for say bermicam more people from bermicam and not quite following the bermicam car travel but let me i think so you so there are ways through design that we can accommodate large populations much more ecologically effectively and to me a lot of the design isn't actually going to come out of economics it's going to come out of architecture and urban design so if you take two cities at lanter georgia in the u.s and barcelona they both have the same number of residents but barcelona um is about as big as this piece of paper and that lanter is the size of the table because barcelona is built in small dense blocks where lots of people live in tight apartments they don't have a garden they don't have a tiny balcony because they have what george mondio has termed um private sufficiency but public luxury big public spaces that are shared whereas in lanter and many many u.s cities everybody has private luxury my house my cars my drive my land private luxury but you get public squalor because you get massive pollution and traffic jams so i think a lot of the designs that are going to make it possible for large numbers of people to live well are going to come from redesigning the infrastructures and the foundations but also back into the psychology of what is a sufficient home for me how can we create places that offer private sufficiency but public luxury rather than the other way around and in a far more equal society is far more likely to be willing to do that if that touches on what you are saying yeah thanks for that question okay people i think because of time uh we've reached the end of our thank you for the great conversation i really enjoyed it thank you