How to pick an economic approach that really adds up

Assessing doughnut economics, Paul Williams asks what’s the economy for and who does it really serve?

Paul Williams

Paul Williams, the CEO of Bible Society, worked for over a decade in business in London and then as an academic theologian in Canada.

a round table with empty chairs is seen from above. An orange is the only item on it.

Meina Yin on Unsplash.

“Anyone can see that our economic system is broken.”

This is the conclusion of Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics, and her assessment has garnered positive endorsements from figures as diverse as George Monbiot, Andrew Marr and Sir David Attenborough.

Yet to judge by the discussion surrounding the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement, our political class is not included in this broad perspective that Raworth claims. In what is widely understood as the early skirmishes of an election campaign, anticipating the moment when the country’s voters have another opportunity to indicate the direction of travel they hope for, the focus is on who will be better or worse off by this or that tax cut or benefit change. If anything is broken it is not the economic system but something like ‘the government’s economic management’ (Labour) or ‘public sector productivity’ (Conservative).

If you are worried, as Raworth is, by “relentless financial crises,” “extreme inequalities in wealth” and “remorseless pressure on the environment” then it seems that both the government and the opposition believe that the solution is more economic growth, albeit with some barely discernible differences in fiscal and regulatory policy.

Our contemporary political discourse is dominated, regardless of party, by the mainstream economic paradigm in which the market generates economic growth and the state functions to keep things on track by taxing and redistributing some of the surplus to those who for whatever reason didn’t do as well as others in the process. It also provides some additional incentives to business and other organisations to act in the public interest, for instance by subsidising green energy or taxing fossil fuels. Both parties, it seems, support this approach. The difference between them concerns how best the state manages the economy to get the most out of it, how the resulting surplus is distributed, and what kind of further incentives are needed.

Visualising doughnut economics

An economics diagram in the shape of a doughnut.

Source: Doughnut Economics Action Lab.

For Raworth, on the other hand, the first thing to ditch is the assumption that economic growth is the right goal to pursue. The ‘doughnut’ of doughnut economics is an alternative to GDP as a measure of progress. It name is derived from the visual depiction of the idea of an economy that operates in the space within two limits – ensuring the human rights of each person on the one hand, and staying within the means of the planet on the other. This concept refuses to conceptualise the economy as a closed system in distinction from the social and environmental systems on which it depends.

Raworth also wants to shift the emphasis away from the individual rational chooser of economic theory toward a more social understanding of human flourishing. And in direct contrast to the mainstream paradigm sketched above, in which the market’s job is to deliver economic wealth and the state’s job is to worry about distribution and regulation, Raworth wants an economic system designed from the outset to ensure a more equal distribution and to actively regenerate the environment.

The economic system itself is like an engine that can be put to whatever purpose you want. It generates wealth and wealth can be put to all kinds of uses, good or bad.

How might we evaluate this? Nobody disagrees that financial crises, extreme inequality and environmental damage occur and are bad. A good number of mainstream economists find Raworth’s aims laudable and worth pursuing, because we do need a better measure of success and improved models of human behaviour and ways to incorporate and limit externalities like carbon emissions. Yet they also find her analysis of economics a caricature, as many of the developments in economics over the last few decades seem to be ignored.

For her harshest critics, Raworth fails to give due credit to our current economic system for the incredible reduction in global poverty that it has already enabled, provides very little by way of actionable policy ideas, and is full of erudite but wishful thinking.

Yet the popularity of Doughnut Economics reflects a deep sense amongst many of us (some mainstream economists included) that something is seriously wrong, alongside an instinctive identification with the kind of values and changes that Raworth seeks.

The vital question is: what is our economy for? If we can get a better sense of what purpose we want the economy to serve, it may prove easier to identify whether it is achieving that, or is in some sense ‘broken.’

But to ask this question is immediately to step away from the mainstream paradigm that dominates our public discourse in framing the economy. For mainstream economics, questions of purpose are ethical questions and those questions are explicitly left to the actors within the economic system and the state acting on their behalf. The economic system itself is like an engine that can be put to whatever purpose you want. It generates wealth and wealth can be put to all kinds of uses, good or bad.

These ancient texts suggest that our mainstream paradigm is seriously adrift if it imagines that our economic system is morally neutral.

For many people the idea that the economy itself can be separated from ethical questions will automatically raise an alarm. Certainly, for Christians it ought to. The Bible firmly resists the idea that wealth and its generation is morally neutral. Even the most superficial reading of the Scripture alerts to the inherently spiritual and moral quality of economic activity. Fruitful work is part of what it means to be made in the image of God in the garden of Eden. The product of work is offered to God in worship. The Law is full of commands to deal justly, use fair weights and measures, consider health and safety in the building of a house, and give yourself, your family and your animals a rest (to name but a few). Jesus tells us that you cannot serve both God and money. The pictures of the New Creation in both Old and New Testaments include economic imagery – The Old Testament book of Micah envisions an end to war with everyone living “under their own vine and fig tree” (a vision of peace and economic flourishing) and the New Testament book of Revelation depicts the product of human work being offered up in worship before the throne of God.

Overall the Bible sees the economic, social and environmental dimensions of life as interwoven and interconnected. Take the Sabbath, for instance. It is not only workers who get (or are commanded to take) a Sabbath once a week. The command extends to the whole community - and even to animals. Every seven years, the Sabbath Year provides a rest for the land and for those struggling with debt – the land must be fallow and allowed to regenerate, and all outstanding debts cancelled. Sabbath and Jubilee are deeply intertwined (the Jubilee was effectively a sabbath of sabbaths, taking place after seven sabbath years) and the Jubilee was the theological paradigm chosen by Jesus to explain his own mission and ministry. Quoting the prophet Isaiah, he said:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the captives, recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”

These ancient texts suggest that our mainstream paradigm is seriously adrift if it imagines that our economic system is morally neutral. And Raworth is closely aligned with the biblical vision insofar as she insists on the importance of an economy that exists not for its own sake, in some independent sphere, but explicitly to enable people, communities and creation to flourish together. We need to ask what our economy is for. And this is as good an answer as you might find.

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Books

Culture

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Wildness

5 December 2024

7 min read

Wild writers for those who wish to wonder

A wilderness reader for wintertime and beyond

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Sheep around a frozen pond in a snowy landscape, a ruined cottage sits beyond.

Winter near Brno, Czechia.

Tomas Tuma on Unsplash.

We live in a time of decreasing biodiversity, reduced access to wilderness, and worsening mental health, and these things are, I think, linked. I wrote a bit about this recently. We are intimately tied to wilderness. We evolved on a diverse, living planet – not separate to it, but in it, dependent on it. It can be easy to forget this in part because we manipulate the world with lights and schedules and ideas of progress; we seal ourselves away in the walls of home, of work, of shops. Some of us live within the walls of church, too – disconnecting us from a wild God who increasingly to me seems most at home under the loud silence of the stars, and in the way the setting sun points to beauty before darkness, and in the way two people can bask in each other’s hearts. When I encounter love, and the loveliness of the world, I also encounter God.

We are good at taking for granted the strange beauty of the planet. We are good at forgetting how to sit with wonder, how to even access it. The poetry of the Psalms tells us that “…they forgot what he had done, the wonders he had shown them...” We must restore not only the living breathing wilderness of the planet we live in and on, but also our own ability to feel wonder, because this can be a first step towards feeling, caring, and acting.

There are writers I turn to when I need to remember the diverse wildness and unlikeliness of our planet that is, as far as we so far know, an island of life in a cold and vast universe. When I read them, I wonder at our shared earth, at our hearts, and at the mysterious holiness of it all. Here then, some of those wild writers:

Wendell Berry has influenced the way I interact with my locality, my faith, my responsibility to the earth I stand on. He is the author of essays, poetry, non-fiction and novels, but he is also a farmer in Kentucky. His preferred tools are a pencil and a team of work horses. For decades, his tending of both words and soil have each strengthened the other. His writing is rooted in the particularity of place, and through that, he speaks to the universality of our shared existence. His voice is incisive and honest, clear-eyed but full of a well-worn love. His call to a more localised and rooted way of life is not a call to escape, but to encounter – with beauty, with neighbour, with a spirit that breathes life through it all. In recent years, his writings have found new audiences. A good place to start, is The World Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry. It contains a selection of his essays written over decades – essays that call out ideas of endless progress and the unthinkingness that feeds it. From here, you might turn to other collections like The Unsettling of America, or The Art of the Commonplace. His poems are earthy and beautiful – look at The Peace of Wild Things And Other Poems. For fiction, his best-known works are Jayber Crow and Hannah Coulter, rooted in the complexity of people and their community. At a time in which our planet burns faster than ever, his writing is prophetic and honest, yet braided with grace and love.

The World Ending Fire is curated and has an introduction by Paul Kingsnorth: a writer I increasingly turn to. His story travels a path from environmental activism via explorations of various beliefs (including Wicca, Paganism, and Buddhism) to a recent – and unexpected to both him and many of his readers – conversion to Christianity. His journey is recounted in his essay, The Cross and the Machine. In his popular newsletter, The Abbey of Misrule, he writes essays that explore deep ecology, and ideas of a wild God, and of early Christian mystics who seemed much closer to the earth than many modern Christians do. His background in environmental activism still echoes – he cares for the world deeply, but his writing now, like his contemporary Dougald Hine, faces what might come when modern life as we know it becomes untenable. Like Berry, Kingsnorth brings an honesty to his writing that is often challenging to sit with. His collection of essays and talks, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, was key in my own journey. He also writes fiction, set in a strange, old England. And his short book Savage Gods, in his words, “…marks a break in my writing, my style and my worldview. This slim semi-memoir is one long question about the value of writing itself, and about what it means to belong, or not to.”

Another writer of honesty and clarity is Marylinne Robinson. She is a social critic and novelist, perhaps Gilead being her most well-known book. Her latest book, Reading Genesis, is an interpretation of the book of Genesis. She takes words that are often interpreted in two-dimensional ways and makes them come alive. She speaks not just to the complexities of faith, but of what it is to be human in this world. Throughout her work more broadly, nature is a recurring theme, symbolising beauty but also fragility, and pointing to wonder and to our own inner state.

The late and beloved Mary Oliver points to the luminosity of the world. Whether small creature or vast landscape, she invites us to slow down and really look. She insists again and again that we “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” Often, her writing helps me to touch the interconnectedness of the living world, and of our humanity. Each fragment she shows us feels part of a larger whole she is also pointing to, and for which she regularly expresses gratitude, inviting the readers to consider “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” A good place to start is with Devotions, a collection of her most loved poems, or with Upstream, a mix of poetry and essays. Here, in the details of her daily walks and reflections, Oliver manages to conjure awe and a sense of the sacred.

Another author who is extraordinarily attentive to the natural world is Annie Dillard. Her rapturous wonderings and explorations of world and place and self, link to deeper reflections, and often to the divine. Like Oliver, Dillard values specifics: “The sheer fringe and network of detail assumes primary importance. That there are so many details seems to be the most important and visible fact about creation.” Dillard weaves her senses with her reading, and often her humour, zooming out and reminding us that “the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness.” Her 1975 Pulitzer prizewinning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is perhaps her best-known work, but a good place to start is Teaching a Stone to Talk; a slim collection of essays that begin with her observations of natural phenomena but end up encompassing the wilds of her mind and of its “ultimate concerns.”

Poet, author, musician and playwright Joy Harjo was the first Native American to hold the position of Poet Laureate. She is a member of the Mvskoke Nation, and often explores themes of identity, history and social justice. Harjo weaves together past, present and future, linking our innate holiness with the natural world. A good place to start is the personal collection Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, or for an insight into her life, try Poet Warrior which brings together memoir, poetry and song, singing often of regeneration in the face of darkness.

A few others you might naturally turn to from these authors include the late essayist Barry Lopez (his last remarkable collection published in 2022 is Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World), novelist and essayist Ursula K Le Guin (her Earthsea trilogy is fantasy but offers I think a profound reflection on who we are), and Robert Macfarlane, who writes thoughtfully of nature and myth, inner and outer landscape. And the old Psalmists tell of beauty and wonder: Psalm 104, in the New King James version, contains leviathans and rock badgers, lions and moons, trees and humans, all of it singing together the great song of life – a life that is precious, earthy and holy; a life woven by a God who we hear in Genesis say, “let us make mankind in our image, according to our likeness.” God is plural, as diverse as his creation. I am grateful for the writers, just a few of whom I’ve shared here, who help me to pay attention to the diverse and strange beauty of the world, and through that, help me see its luminous holiness. That holiness – wholeness – depends on all of us, all of creation, being able to be itself. As Mary Oliver says:

“…Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”