Kate Raworth Quotes

“Calling all economic rebels: humanity's future depends on you. Yes, really. Because, unless we transform the economic and public debate, we stand very little chance indeed of thriving in this century.”

“Inequality is not an economic necessity: it is a design failure.”

“What should economies be aimed at? For over half a century, the goal has been economic growth – but while the global economy has quadrupled in size since the 1970s, human deprivation persists, environmental degradation is deepening, and inequality is at the heart of it all. It’s clear that we need richer concepts and measures of what our economies should be aimed at.”

“Today we have economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive. What we need are economies that make us thrive, whether or not they grow.”

“A business that is built on a living purpose may have strong foundations, but without a source of finance that is aligned with its values it is unlikely to survive and thrive.”

“A skilled kite surfer rides her surfboard across the rolling waves while catching the wind in her kite, and she must continually adjust — bending, dipping, and twisting her body — to maintain that dynamic interplay of the wind and the waves. That is just how GDP should come to move in the twenty-first century,”

“A study of all 50 U.S. States found that those states marked out by large inequalities of power in terms of income and ethnicity had weaker environmental policies and suffered greater ecological degradation. Furthermore, one study covering 50 countries found the more unequal a country is, the more likely the biodiversity of its landscape is to be under threat.”

“Adam Smith believed that every economy would eventually reach what he called a ‘stationary state’ with its ‘full compliment of riches’ ultimately being determined by ‘the richness of its soil, climate and situation’.”

“Adam Smith was right when he said that we love to truck, barter and exchange, but he was also right that we and our societies flourish best when we display our ‘humanity, justice, generosity and public spirit’.”

“Adam Smith’s great insight was to show that the marketplace can mobilise diffuse information about people’s wants and the cost of meeting them, thereby coordinating billions of buyers and sellers through a global system of prices – all without the need for a centralised grand plan. This distributed efficiency of the market is indeed extraordinary, and attempting to run an economy without it typically leads to short supplies and long queues.”

“Around 13 percent of people worldwide are malnourished. How much food would it take to meet their caloric needs? Just 3 percent of the global food supply. To put that in context, 30–50 percent of the world’s food gets lost post-harvest, wasted in global supply chains or scraped off dinner plates and into kitchen bins. Hunger could, in effect, be ended with just 10 percent of the food that never gets eaten.”

“Back in Ancient Greece, when Xenophon first came up with the term economics, he described the practice of household management as an art. Following his lead, Aristotle distinguished economics from chrematistics, the art of acquiring wealth—in a distinction that seems to have been all but lost today.”

“By agnostic, I do not mean simply not caring whether GDP growth is coming or not, nor do I mean refusing to measure whether it is happening or not. I mean agnostic in the sense of designing an economy that promotes human prosperity whether GDP is going up, down, or holding steady.”

“Don’t wait for economic growth to reduce inequality — because it won’t. Instead, create an economy that is distributive by design.”

“Economics is not a matter of discovering laws: it is essentially a question of design.”

“Economics is the mother tongue of public policy.”

“Effective systems tend to have three properties – healthy hierarchy, self-organisation and resilience – and so should be stewarded to enable these characteristics to emerge.”

“For over 70 years economics has been fixated on GDP, or national output, as its primary measure of progress. That fixation has been used to justify extreme inequalities of income and wealth coupled with unprecedented destruction of the living world. For the twenty-first century a far bigger goal is needed: meeting the human rights of every person within the means of our life-giving planet.”

“For the twenty-first century, a far bigger goal is needed: meeting the human rights of every person within the means of our life-giving planet.”

“From prehistoric cave paintings to the map of the London Underground, images, diagrams and charts have long been at the heart of human storytelling. The reason why is simple: our brains are wired for visuals.”

“From Taoism’s yin yang and the Māori takarangi to Buddhism’s endless knot and the Celtic double spiral, each design invokes a continual dynamic dance between complementary forces.”

“Governments have historically opted to tax what they could, rather than what they should, and it shows.”

“H*mo sapiens, it turns out, is the most cooperative species on the planet, outperforming ants, hyenas, and even the naked mole-rat when it comes to living alongside those who are beyond our next of kin.”

“Here’s the conundrum: No country has ever ended human deprivation without a growing economy. And no country has ever ended ecological degradation with one.”

“Here’s the rub. Humanity’s journey through the twenty-first century will be led by the policymakers, entrepreneurs, teachers, journalists, community organisers, activists and voters who are being educated today. But these citizens of 2050 are being taught an economic mindset that is rooted in the textbooks of 1950, which in turn are rooted in the theories of 1850. Given the fast-changing nature of the twenty-first century, this is shaping up to be a disaster.”

“If reinforcing feedbacks are what make a system move, then balancing feedbacks are what stop it from exploding or imploding. They counter and offset what is happening and, so, tend to regulate systems.”

“In 1900, around 10 percent of people worldwide lived in cities; by 2050 around 70 percent of us will. Couple this proximity of city dwellers with worldwide communications transmitting news and views, data and ads, and what emerges is a dynamic global network of networks of human beings.”

“In contrast to Pareto’s pyramid and Kuznets’s rollercoaster ride, its essence is a distributed network whose many nodes, larger and smaller, are interconnected in a web of flows.”

“In politics, money talks – when it must in public, but preferably in private, with hidden handshakes, closed-door meetings and under-the-table kickbacks.”

“In the twentieth century, economics lost the desire to articulate its goals: in their absence, the economic nest got hijacked by the cuckoo goal of GDP growth.”