The Blind Spot of the Early Economic Thinkers

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We need to create designs that enable us to live within a circular system. And it has huge implications for our behavior. So we start with the cycles of the living world and say, how do we create industries that recognize that waste from one process becomes food for the next? That's why fairphone was set up to show that you could have a modula designed phone that actually brought its minerals through supply chains that didn't depend upon slave labor. They're showing that you can have,. youknow, click open design and modulo phones in thes video onu tube that tells you how to fix the battery, how to replace the camera, how to upgrade.

When Kate Raworth began studying economics, she was disappointed that the mainstream version of the discipline didn’t fully address many of the world issues that she wanted to tackle, such as human rights and environmental destruction. She left the field, but was inspired to jump back in after the financial crisis of 2008, when she saw an opportunity to introduce fresh perspectives. She sat down and drew a chart in the shape of a doughnut, which provided a way to think about our economic system while accounting for the impact to the world around us, as well as for humans’ baseline needs. Kate’s framing can teach us a lot about how to transform the economic model of the technology industry, helping us move from a system that values addicted, narcissistic, polarized humans to one that values healthy, loving and collaborative relationships. Her book, “Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist,” gives us a guide for transitioning from a 20th-century paradigm to an evolved 21st-century one that will address our existential-scale problems.