The RegenNarration 148. Summer Flashbacks (episodes that people still talk about): Doughnut Economics, with Kate Raworth
Our next episode from the archives that people still talk to me about is episode 3, with Kate Raworth. She’s the best-selling author of Doughnut Economics: Seven ways to think like a 21st century economist. And the instigator of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL), helping put it into practice in communities everywhere.
This is an excerpt of the first 20 minutes or so our conversation just a couple of months after the book came out. And this release comes just a week after the launch in Oxford of Doughnut Economics Live, a free course for all economics students in the city who want to think like 21st century economists.
Kate said last week: “It's time for every university's economics curriculum to address the world's extraordinary and extreme realities.” And “We have had to change venues three times to accommodate all the students applying to join the course - now it's in the biggest lecture theatre available in the university and it's oversubscribed. Students demand and deserve change.”
You can hear more on the global student revolt that was kicking into gear in the last decade, and has continued to pick up since, in the rest of our conversation (link below).
Here, we kick off on with the shift in thinking involved, and how to communicate and practice it. Then it’s onto Kate’s journey, and how she came to this concept that took off around the world.
Interestingly, Kate brings up the work of George Lakoff, on the metaphors we live by – which used to be the primary text for the postgraduate students in sustainability that Frank Fisher and I worked with.
We close here with how we might go beyond growth and GDP as proxies for society’s progress, towards tracking what’s actually important to us.
This conversation was recorded in June 2017.
Title slide: Kate Raworth (pic: Roman Krznaric).
Music:
43, by Owls of the Swamp.
Find more:
Read a transcript of the full conversation on the episode website.
Hear the rest of our conversation back in episode 3. We go on to talk more about the practicalities of change, the student revolt that has only continued to grow since this conversation, and how we can go about the shift in thinking and acting in our own lives.
Kate’s website & book.
Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL).
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