Doughnut Economics crushes Death Star Economics. But, suggests Jon Alexander, there should be more creative people power in it
Kate Raworth is founder of Doughnut Economics, which sketches out an economy that can flourish within climate boundaries, is currently driving Amsterdam forward, and is about to become an Action Lab (and here).
Kate handed a question over to Twitter that was put to her the other day (see the embed to the left). Essentially it was: What about the greedy 1% in your model, defending their self-interest determinedly?
We’ve just come upon a great and profound response from Jon Alexander at the New Citizenship Project - much of his good works already on this site - which he’s kindly agreed to let us crosspost (suffice to say, you should visit and support the New Citizenship Project).
Jon writes it in the form of a letter to Kate - we’ll gloss terms that aren’t obvious within the text (original Medium post here)
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Dear Kate
(I hope you don’t mind the informality, you seem the sort of person who wouldn’t.)
First, thank you for writing your book. It’s genuinely brilliant. It captures so much of what needs to change to make economics a profession that drives human thriving.
But there is one of your seven ways [which are the “Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist” from the title of her book] that I think you need to push further. It’s the third: nurture human nature [Ed: see explainer in YouTube embed above, and below are the seven ways:]
Don’t get me wrong, your critique of homo economicus is bang on. But the alternative you paint is too tentative, and defined to too great an extent by what it’s not. I worry that you’ve accidentally accepted some critical boundaries set by the model we’re trying to leave behind, and as a result leave key power dynamics in place. And while you play that game, the change will never come fast enough.
My challenge to push further builds in stages: from your conception of human nature, to the corresponding metaphor for the role of the economist, and the resulting strategy for change.
In terms of the conception of human nature, your “smallest unit of analysis”, I want to propose three fundamentals, in place of your five shifts.
First, we humans are creative. As Picasso put it, “All children are born artists. The challenge is to remain artists as we grow up.” There’s plenty of evidence to back him up: it’s increasingly accepted that all of us are born with an inherent capability to invent, hack, imagine and reimagine the world we live in; and equally recognised that most of us have these talents systematically beaten out of us.
Death Star Economics (as I prefer to call what came before the Doughnut) can’t deal with creativity because it’s inherently difficult to model. In your analogy with Newtonian physics, this is the property of the atom that shows up at the system level in the complexity you highlight in your fourth shift [“Get savvy with systems”].
It’s vital you build this into your thinking at this level too: without it, you risk accepting the old frame that humans are choice makers, who merely quibble over how those choices are made. Instead, we need to make it an absolute fundamental that we are also choice creators and shapers. Educationalist Sir Ken Robinson defines creativity as “the process of having original ideas that have value”. We need this in our economics.
Second, we are empathic. You talk of reciprocity and fluid values. But we don’t just reciprocate, we empathise. It’s not just that our values are fluid rather than fixed, but that empathy could be more important a driver of evolution than the competition and status that Death Star Economics accentuates.
Experiments by animal behaviour experts like Frans de Waal highlight empathy among creatures as diverse as monkeys, elephants and fish: a well-fed elephant, for example, will help a hungry elephant access food regardless of reward. Advances in neuroscience are helping us locate this capacity for empathy deep in our evolutionary inheritance.
As De Waal puts it, “the possibility that empathy resides in parts of the brain so ancient that we share them with rats should give [us] pause”. We need our economics to be built not just around the idea that self-interest isn’t our only driver, but that the very concept of the self is something that expands to include others. [Ed: Note both A/UKs “I - We - World” model, and Alex Evans’ A Larger Us]
Third, we are moral. This takes us beyond the idea of humans as rational, approximating or adaptable, into an understanding that we want to be good, but that we define what good is by the stories we live in and look to (more or less consciously) for guidance.
This is a truth manifest from Homer’s Odyssey, which carried the ideal of “virtue” (arete) for the ancient Greeks, to the great religious books. Indeed, this is the root of the word “religion”: that to which things can be tied back.
Its significance today is that, in the title of economic historian Robert Nelson’s book, we need to understand “Economics as Religion”: it is Death Star Economics that provides the story that surrounds us, and therefore our morality.
Here’s the deep implication of the consumer priming and Death Star education studies you cite. The truth is not that people are fundamentally selfish, it is that when we live immersed in the moral story that selfishness is good, we act accordingly despite our nature.
When we put these three together, we get to very different ideas of the role for economists and the resultant strategy for change than is currently set out in your Doughnut. In Death Star Economics, people are basically bad; incentives designed by strict, all-powerful economists are the only way to harness our negative nature. You argue that people can be good if nudged and moulded by nurturing economists. But that leaves the power with the economists.
People are creative, empathic, and moral. We can and want to come together to shape the world we live in for the better.
We don’t need to be nurtured. We don’t need parents to mould us on their terms. We need coaches to help us use and build our power on our terms. If we get Death Star Economics out of the way, what we need is not to be nudged but to be involved: to have our power recognised, and unleashed.
What would this look like in practice?
First, it means reducing the negative nudges wherever possible, not nurturing but getting out of the way of human nature. Think of those consumer priming studies, then consider the thousands of advertising messages we are exposed to every day. The task of reducing this exposure becomes essential. We have to stop telling ourselves not to care.
Then economists need to involve others. Instead of providing personal financial literacy classes to consumers who need to be taught to protect their own interests, we need to equip nations of citizen economists and give them meaningful opportunities to shape big decisions, using everything from citizens’ assemblies to participatory budgeting.
We need to devolve power and wealth to the greatest possible extent, to be used by those whose lives it will shape, with the support of economic coaches. These should not be allocated from the centre by all-knowing economists, nurturing or otherwise.
We need to build power, in as many people and ways and places as possible.
The Doughnut is a transformative idea. But I believe that to really change the world, the smallest unit of analysis needs to become the greatest centre of power.
I hope this comes across in the spirit intended, and look forward to hearing any thoughts it provokes
Yours
Jon Alexander
This obviously and also picks up the theme being pushed by Rutger Bregman’s new book Humankind - which we profiled a few weeks ago. We found this great exchange with Bregman on Channel 4 News’ interview series, Ways To Change The World: