The End of Endless Growth: Should We Put the Brakes on Economic Expansion? (Kate Raworth)

24:38And so, again, it comes back to who owns the businesses and what what are the businesses run for? Are they run for maximizing profit that can be extracted or they run for community care? I mean, I know you were talking to Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry's last week. Right. Exactly about this. I think it's a really key issue. The deep design of business itself will determine how AI is used, what a business purpose is, whether it's there to extract returns for its shareholders, because that's what it's designed to do.

25:07Amol Rajan:And that's why some people who are proponents of, fans of capitalism would say the answer is a more inclusive form of capitalism. In other words, I see your eyebrow went north as I said that. But why is it not the case that one should respond to what you've just said about the diminishing returns to labor and the ever greater returns to shareholders? Why is the answer to that not spreading ownership through popular capitalism, i.e. investment, basically? So, you know, Margaret Thatcher would have said, you know, equity is preferable to equality. I'm paraphrasing there if there are fans of Thatcher listening to this.

25:40Amol Rajan:I know that wasn't her exact quote, but she would say that what you wanted is a nation of shareholders. is you wanted to use the public markets to say to everyone that when you have an IPO, this is a great thing because everyone can invest. The way to save and rescue capitalism is by giving everyone the chance to have skin in the game and to get on that compounding curve early on. Why is that not the answer? Nice theory. It hasn't really worked out like that, has it? I mean, the ownership of shares is concentrated in very few hands. The vast majority of shares are owned by those who are already very wealthy.

26:12But even if that was the case, I mean, you can see the appeal if everybody had a little bit of a share and we all own these companies a little bit. I just don't believe that a company that is run with the goal of maximizing share returns is going to be run in all its best interests, especially if it's run and kind of quarterly reporting. Got to maximize them every quarter. right there's going to be the system that's gaming the system that people who are speculating and trading shares in nanoseconds not because they really value what this company's doing but because they can you know make a return this afternoon i just don't see any evidence even from the most well-intentioned companies and the most well-intentioned ceos it's not worked out that way at all it's really concentrated in few hands and you know there are many other ways of running business you can have a company that is well ben cohen exactly you can have a company that's profitable but it's not here to maximize its profit it's got to make a profit otherwise it can't open its doors next week and next month or next year this is things like investment trusts mutuals yeah that's the thing i mean ben co-op companies or employee-owned companies or co-ops you know other countries in europe i mean i think again sitting here in the uk we can think well there aren't any really feasible alternatives go to other countries like in the netherlands rotterdam has an amazing take-up of cooperatives that are really thriving and showing that there are very very competent different ways of running your economy based on different kinds of economy

27:36Amol Rajan:I didn't know that I didn't know that a lot of people don't know that a lot of Labour MPs are actually members of Parliament for Labour and the cooperative party we have a cooperative party here we've got a big tradition famously John Lewis and Waitrose but there is a real tradition of cooperatives which is basically employees have a little share they might get an annual bonus and it's interesting to me when when the coalition government was in place 15 years ago or so when the big society was around as an idea, I sort of wanted to say to a lot of people, the way to reconcile the big society with your kind of model of capitalism, there is this thing called cooperatives and they all sort of went, oh yeah, there is that.

28:08Amol Rajan:But it doesn't seem to have, I don't hear people talking about that kind of thing very much. When Ben Cohen was sat in that very chair last week, I was thinking, I'm not hearing much of this. And if I may say, I'm not hearing a huge amount about it from sort of Westminster and indeed Labour Party circles. Well, I think we should get outside the UK. We're one of the most privatised countries in Europe. Colleagues of mine across Europe cannot believe that we allowed our water to be privatised. They just find it extraordinary that we would think, through Thatcher's era, allow water and transport and energy systems just to be held by companies around the world that choose to buy the water provision, because it's foundational to our needs.

28:46And so it's got no democratic presence. But also there are just other ways of running cities, of running countries, of enabling steward-owned enterprise, of enabling employee-owned enterprise. I think we've been so trapped in a neoliberal mindset that's taught in universities, but also that gets lived out in our economy, that we lose sight of seeing that there are just other ways of doing things. There are other ways of designing business that could be far more democratic, equitable, locally rooted, so those companies actually belong in a place. This is wonderful. You know, Preston has been really great community wealth building.

29:22Nobody's showing up to save us. We're going to have to do it ourselves. We're going to have to use the local council budget, schools, hospitals that are here. How can we buy locally? How can we buy from small businesses here? We need to bring this kind of inspiration back. And if you put that at the heart of your economic strategy, you won't be going growth, growth, growth. You'll be saying, let's thrive in local communities. Let's think of new kinds of enterprise that can belong here and and let's learn from not just our european neighbors but actually all over the world in india there are amazing examples of large cooperatives of many many farmers coming together to sell their milk through co-ops that means that they don't get ripped off because the co-op is run in their interest and not in some shareholders interest who

30:08Amol Rajan:never stepped onto the farm can i i'm enjoying this so much can i in a very bbc way put some other polite objections to your positions. Go for it, BBC. Isn't the strongest argument for growth that the biggest reduction in poverty in human history happened very, very recently in China and India? And it did because governments in China and India targeted economic growth. In China, in 1990, 83 % of China's population, 83, more than four in five Chinese people lived on less than three dollars a day in 2019 it's zero percent and that's where it stayed that is by some measures the biggest change in human circumstances in the history of our species in india in 1977 funny enough the year my parents got married in india in 1977 57 of indians lived on less than three dollars a day 57 in 2022 it was four percent in china that happened because of something called socialism with Chinese characteristics, which other people call capitalism.

31:09Amol Rajan:It was a command economy centrally controlled by the CCP, but capitalism came into China in a big way. In India, Manmohan Singh, former finance minister, liberalized India's foreign direct investment rules in 1991. And then when he was prime minister a decade or so more later, he turbocharged that stuff. Hasn't economic growth reduced poverty in China and India in a way that everyone should be applauding absolutely i don't disagree with you at all so what have you got against growth i have i didn't say i had anything against growth i said growth is a wonderful healthy phase of life and i would say it's a really important phase of economic development if we were to go to still today one of the world's poorest countries like malawi or bangladesh so you do want growth for those people so what i believe those people need are their human rights to be met right let's start at the roots.

32:01They need health care, education. They need housing, food, water. In the process of ensuring that those needs are provisioned, absolutely, I believe the economy is going to grow. GDP is going to go up because it's going to be more economic activity. It's going to be provided through market interactions. It's going to be provided through the state providing stuff. When you measure the value of economic activity, of course, it's going to go up. So growth is an outcome of meeting people's fundamental needs. Absolutely. China needed that growth to meet people's needs. India too. We're sitting in the UK, right?

32:33Now, here's the conundrum. On paper, this country is one of the richest countries in the history of humankind, as is every European country in North America and Canada and Japan and Australia.

32:43Amol Rajan:Got four million kids in poverty. Yeah, because it's rich, but it's this country, one of the most unequal in Europe. That's our problem to deal with, right? But on paper, this country has gone through extraordinary growth through colonialism, through being a pioneer of capitalism and industrialisation. And yet here, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, if you listen to our politicians and their economic advisers, they'll tell us that the solutions to our problems in one of the world's richest countries on paper lies in yet more growth, endlessly. Nobody ever says, look, we just need it for a few more years and then we're done.

33:19No, it's endless. It's written in. I think what would you see if you were sitting in Malawi or Bangladesh and you look at the richest countries in the world that have many, many fold income per capita as your country. And they're saying we can only go forward if we have yet more. And by the way, when we grow, we're going to use more of the earth's resources. We're doing it still using more fossil fuels. So this has consequences for every other country too.

33:44Amol Rajan:So what should we do instead? Saying we've got enough wealth, we need to arrange the distribution of it better. I mean, yeah, right? We have got enough wealth. Surely we have a lot of wealth. We have historic volumes of wealth. We have colonially acquired huge amounts of wealth. Let's recognise that. We definitely need to arrange it better and to share it better. I mean, we are one of the most unequal countries in Europe. Again, I think we've just come to think, well, this is how things are. We've just got a little bit used to extreme levels of inequality that others still, thank God, come here and find shocking.

34:17Amol Rajan:Couldn't both things be true, though? Couldn't it be morally unconscionable that we live in a country with the wealth that we have? This is, by the way, something I talk about on the Today programme all the time. Four million kids in poverty. If you actually look at the poverty levels in the UK over the last 20 years, they've stayed roughly constant, except the thing that's changed within that overall number is the number of people in what we call deep poverty, which is really, I would call, destitution has increased. And if you think you've got rising destitution in a country like ours with the wealth that we've got, it's unconscionable.

34:45Amol Rajan:But couldn't it be the case that we ought to do both things? We ought to arrange our affairs internally better, but that more growth would also be good because it would allow us to pay for things that we want. For instance, better public services at a time when we've got a population that's ageing. Why can't both things be true? Why can't the pursuit of growth be reconciled with a moral kind of disgust at the reprehensible levels of poverty in our country? So first of all, I just would always turn away from saying let's pursue growth and kind of hope that some of it trickles down, right? That just hasn't worked.

35:16We need to pursue meeting the fundamental needs of people. We need to pursue getting those 4 million kids out of poverty. And it may well result in some economic growth. So I'm making a real point. You'd flip it.

35:27Amol Rajan:You'd flip it. I'm flipping that. Fix poverty and growth second. Yes. But I'm going to add in a big clangor, right? When we pursue growth, when we say, let's grow, grow, grow, we are using more construction materials. The way that we are often doing it, more construction materials, more energy, more fossil fuels. Remember the donut. It doesn't just have a social foundation of getting everybody out of deprivation. The whole point of this dilemma that it brings us is that there is an ecological ceiling. And guess what? The UK, like every high-income country, is way in overshoot.

36:05Amol Rajan:I really hope you're enjoying this conversation with Kate Raworth. If you are, please do. Even if you're not, just hell with it. Subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds and that way you won't miss future episodes. And if you do subscribe, please do make sure You've got your push notifications turned on and that way you will get an alert whenever we publish a new episode and you'll never miss out. Thank you. And now back to Kate Raworth.

36:33Amol Rajan:Some people would say that one of the dangers of the donut and of your approach to economics is that it is a sort of philosophy of limits. And there's an obvious response to that, which is if you go to space and turn around and look at this incredible blue marble dangling in the infinite blackness, you'd say, well, there is a limit. And the limit is this incredible ball of gas and rock and water that we call the Earth. But is there a danger that a bit like Thomas Malthus, 250 years old, just after 1798, he wrote his essay on population, a bit like Thomas Malthus, who said that there's going to be this fundamental impossibility of reconciling a growing population with our ability to feed that population, that approaching things in terms of limits is actually not the way to go.

37:20Amol Rajan:That what we should aim for, as some people on the left in America are now arguing, is abundance. And that we can have abundance. That actually, if we, you know, that's not to justify biodiversity loss. That's not to justify unreasonable extraction of fossil fuels, which puts carbon dioxide in the air and causes us terrible damage. That's not to justify, you know, polluting the hell out of poor countries and making ourselves feel better in the process. But that actually a philosophy of abundance, building more of the things we want and need within planetary limits is a better way to approach economics.

37:54So, this argument...

37:58Amol Rajan:How to wind up Kate Raworth. You know that I'm saying this is from a... Oh, no, I love it. I love it. In fact, when I first drew the donut diagram and it has this social foundation and then an ecological ceiling, Some of my American colleagues at Oxfam said, ooh, you know, I'm not sure about this. You know, we Americans, we don't like limits. We don't like degrees. We see a boundary, we want to say, going to break right through that boundary. Yeah, you're putting limits on the possibility. Yeah, don't limit me. So I offer you this. Imagine holding one of your little children under one years old.

38:30That child has a fever. Their temperature's gone over 40 degrees.

38:33Amol Rajan:What do you say? Been there many times. Go, go, go, go. You go break that boundary. Yeah, look at this kid go. No. So we immediately do everything we can to bring that child's body temperature back within what we know is a safe limit. We are alive because of limits. Every day our bodies tell us, I'm hungry or I'm cold or I'm too hot. And our bodies send us little feedback signals all the time. I mean, we would know immediately if there was not enough oxygen in this room, right? Our bodies would immediately tell us, I'm hitting my limit, whether it's my upper limit or my lower limit. That's why we're alive, because our bodies keep us in this zone of health.

39:12And it's incredible. All of our bodies are almost exactly the same temperature. Our bodies are so good at this. Life depends on staying within healthy limits. We know this in our bodies. We've got to get it about the planetary body. There's something called climate stability. And Earth system scientists are tearing their hairs out, trying to figure out how do we communicate this to people that we are collectively about to push ourselves 1.5 degrees, 2 degrees. We are pushing ourselves out of a safe zone from which there will be no chance to say, oh, whoops, that wasn't so good after, was it? Shall we go back?

39:48No, we can't go back. It tips. There are limits of pressure. We can live within our own bodies. There are limits of pressure we should put on this planet. And anybody who says, oh, I don't like limits, you know, let's go through it. Just ignoring the fundamentals of human biology and planetary integrity. and abundance yeah we can have abundance but let's be smart about what we want abundance of perhaps we could have abundance of care abundance of respect abundance of community right these things are available to us can we have an abundance of building endlessly no because there is a limit of materials and energy systems and until we figure out how to do this in a far more regenerative and transformative way we've got to be smart about how we use that if we want to learn about abundance there's one being on this planet who's figured that and that's nature nature creates conditions conducive to life nature is extraordinary in the abundance of blossom in spring in the abundance of clean water in streams and the clean air and the cooling capacities of forests we need to go and stand in forests and learn wow look how nature does this how could we be inspired through biomimicry to bring that kind of abundance but it's held within delicately balanced systems you

41:02Amol Rajan:don't burst through limits you will not get abundance do you think of nature as a being as gaia like james lovelock yeah i think i do i think of this planet as a whole interacting system i'm not a religious person but if i have any kind of spirituality any any greater thing i believe in I'm just awed by life. Watching a little root grow, watching mycelium grow. It's just like the growing tip of a root. If you watch a close-up video, you know, life. Well, that time-lapse material. Yes. Yes. It's in all of us. It's incredible. We're alive. And this planet is alive. And we don't know of any other planets in the universe that are alive.

41:44It's so extraordinary. and we're so cavalier and foolish, caught up in our little systems of growth, not understanding the fundamentals that keep us alive. We've got to wake up. We're in the second quarter of the 21st century and we're still running things on a 20th century economic mindset based in 19th century theories. We've just got to jump into these times and grow up and create economies that belong now.

42:10Amol Rajan:What if some of the consequences of your way of thinking What if they lead to policy decisions which have bad consequences for the very people you want to help? We live in a country where there's very live debate at the moment about whether or not we should drill for oil and gas. The reason we currently don't with these oil fields in the North Sea is because of a policy of net zero carbon emissions by 2050, which the UK government has adopted. There are lots of people who are saying that's all very nice and well. There's a future ambition because we're concerned about planetary limits. but a the uk is only responsible for one percent of global emissions and b poor people are suffering right now more than rich people because of the price of energy drill for north sea oil and gas rather than importing it in norway from norway and get your prices down isn't the north sea limitation on drilling an example of how there can be costs for the very people you want to help from the philosophy of limits that you've outlined so let's unpick this bit by bit North Sea oil and gas if more were drilled it doesn't suddenly become available as a little reservoir for us to use in the UK at low prices so it's just a fiction that this will save it it's a really nice convenience store, it sounds good so nearby it's ours, well you know what it's other companies, again privatisation, it's companies from other countries like Equinor that are going to drill it and sell it on the world market so it's not going to impact on the availability of oil and gas for the UK Secondly, there are so many other ways of providing energy.

43:46We have lots of coastline. We have wind power.

43:49Amol Rajan:Tidal energy. Tidal energy. We have wind power. We have solar power. We have air source heat pumps. There are so many other ways which help you free yourself from the rise and fall, the crash around of prices on global fossil markets. then you're free of the geopolitics of oil and gas prices so that you're actually providing the energy for your home or your school or your hospital or your university or your council with panels on the roof or nearby wind turbines and then you can have much more democratically owned energy systems now now we're back to who owns the companies communities can own their own wind turbines.

44:29Schools can own their own solar panels. We can bring ownership of this back and we're not determined by what some corporation in another country wants to do with the oil and gas they drilled and where they sell it on the world market or which president decides to launch a war against which country and now oil tankers can't get through and people can't pay their household bills because some geopolitics on the other side of the planet. We can be free of that.

44:52Amol Rajan:That's one of the things that people might say about your position though or your economics is there was a very cutting moment when Tony Blair, who was outspoken a few weeks ago about the future of the Labour Party, did a bunch of interviews. And I saw, he seemed to say with a certain relish that Xi Jinping is not sitting in Beijing thinking, I wonder what Ed Miliband's policies on net zero are. And I think the point that Blair was trying to land is that, you know, you can have your philosophy of being against growth in your country, but around the world, other people are just charging ahead. And the countries that will win tomorrow, according to Tony Blair, are the countries that are big enough and rich enough to be able to buy the future.

45:29Amol Rajan:And there's a sort of hard-headed pragmatism, he would say, about kind of why growth is fundamental to Britain being able to, you know, be a powerful force in the future. So first of all, I'm not against growth. Rather than being for growth or against growth, I'm for regenerative and distributive design at the heart of our policies. And I believe those work on this planet. Secondly, you talked earlier about India and China. Yeah, China went through years where each province was put under huge pressure to deliver on these growth plans, 7 % to 10%. Well, now they're turning, right? They've done that.

46:02And now they're saying, actually, they're talking about ecological civilization. They're saying, actually, lower that growth expectation. Now we need quality of life. Again, the push is to say, we've gone through that big growth phase.

46:15Amol Rajan:It's a phase. Now we're pursuing something else. Now, I don't want to be simplistic or naive about China. there are many nuanced different kinds of policy going on, but one of those strands is eco-civilisation. And I think the government of China, some parts of the government of China absolutely recognise that if China is going to thrive the next thousand years, let's not talk about tiny cycles of four, five, six years, a thousand years, China and the rest of the world can only thrive if there's a stable climate. So you've got to look after the fundamentals. Is it, in your view, wrong for the people who provide capital to expect a return which they can just take, as opposed to that return going totally to serving the purpose.

46:55Amol Rajan:For instance, is it completely wrong if a venture capitalist gives a million pounds to a small company and that small company might have a noble goal, for instance, reducing poverty in a distant part of the world, but in return for doing that successfully, the person who provided a million pounds might take, I don't know,£20 ,000 out of that as profit. Is that wrong? This is the heart of the question, right? And this is the heart of capitalism. Exactly. And I would say capitalism is an economic system that is designed to drive return to capital. Exactly. Is that what we want? Is that how we want our economy to be run?

47:31Amol Rajan:Is that what we want? But there's also if the VC who's provided a million pounds, they might provide the million pounds because they want the 20 grand in return. And if they don't get the 20 grand in return, they might not provide the million pounds, in which case a little coffee shop or coffee chain that's doing great work far away might not be able to do its work. Isn't the profit motive, the profit incentive, this is what a capitalist would say, were they in this room and there's many of them, isn't the profit motive a way of incentivising the distribution of capital that allows people to grow and do the good things that you want?

48:00So hold it with your venture capital. I think they want a bit more than 20 grand for that million. That's true. 200, 200, like now.

48:06Amol Rajan:I think we were going to come back to that in a second. But I want to go to the heart of the matter. Is it reasonable? And what is a reasonable return to expect? So let's go radical, mate. To the roots of it, capital, finance, money, it's an invention, right? It's a human invention. It's a story. It's a story. It's a construct. And it works because we believe it. If I give you this piece of paper, you'll give some back. This piece of paper or this digits in my bank account, somebody else will accept them. Credit, you know, I trust. I trust this will work. It's invented. And it's got a narrative of its own, if you like.

48:38And, you know, capitalists want venture capital. They say, oh, I want my kind of 15 % to 20 % returns. that becomes sort of market rates. Just jump out of that story and let's just step back into that astronaut looking at this little blue marble floating in space, this delicately balanced planet whose life support systems right now are under profound threat because of the way we're doing business. That is being funded by this venture capital. My question is this, why should an investor expect 15 to 20 % returns while the earth is crumbling on the basis of what they're doing? In what way is that at all reasonable?

49:16Amol Rajan:That sounds like a bad investor doing bad stuff. What if the investor's got a million pounds for a little coffee chain that employs? Okay, let's go crazy utopia. A coffee chain that employs neats and provides incredibly good, meaningful, dignified labour to people who otherwise wouldn't have jobs. That's a good investor. By the way, I know someone who's doing exactly that. That could be a good investor. And then I would ask them, what's the return you're requiring from them? Are you requiring market returns? And why? Because it allows them to buy a nice house and a nice car and go on holiday with their family.

49:46Another one. Another nice house and another nice car and go on even further. So we're talking about people who have a lot. And I'm just really actually deeply fascinated by the psychology. I know I've had the chance to talk to some very, very wealthy people, some who work in philanthropy. And they say, I do impact investment. But I want when I do impact investment, I invest in good things like what you're describing. But I want market returns. I want market returns because I want people to know that I'm smart. And I'm really fascinated by this. Why do the super wealthy still need really high...

50:15What are you collecting this up for? What are you going to accumulate? And again and again and again. I've actually... Can I just go sideways? I've started doing economic circus. I stopped doing lectures and I actually put on a circus. I've got a red top hat. I'm the ringmaster. And I invite people up on the stage and we do a circus about the battle between nature and finance, which is what we're mostly talking about today. I bring someone up, plays Mother Nature. Someone comes up and plays the financial system with a briefcase with a big hose on it. sucking up all the returns of the world. We open the briefcase and inside it, these three little black masks.

50:46And I say, oh, did you know, finance, these are the three deepest emotions and motives that are driving you? And I ask the audience, what are the three deepest emotions and motives that are driving financial system to keep accumulating and accumulating? Over 50 % of the global financial assets are owned by 1 % of people. So finance is accumulating for those who really have. Every single time I've ever done this circus, the audience immediately come up with the reasons why finance keeps accumulating, greed and fear. And the third one might be ego or power or separation or loneliness. Some people just want to be rich.

51:23And richer. Richer. Sure. Yeah. And richer, but not... Yeah. Okay. Super rich. Super rich. And this is really damaging to democracy, to economic balance and integrity, social cohesion. It's damaging to action on the environment because they're lobbying against stopping the industries that are driving the super rich. So it's deeply damaging. And I really think it's important that there's now a discussion in this country and many about an extreme wealth line. We know there's an extreme poverty line below which no one should fall. What if there are an extreme wealth line beyond which no one should go because the harm to the rest of society?

52:01Isn't it extraordinary in the week that Elon Musk might become a trillionaire? Isn't it extraordinary that we're acting as if it's normal in such an unequal world, whether the extremes of inequality are so wide. We've got no chance of living in the donut with such inequalities. We have to wake up and tackle this issue without just saying, oh, the only way out of it is to grow more.

52:22Amol Rajan:So at the state level, would you support, and if so, what kind of a wealth tax? Because, I mean, wealth tax is such a strange phrase. What does it mean? Are you talking about inheritance? Are you talking about capital gains? But do you think that we should be taxing differently and taxing wealth, especially what you might call unearned wealth, which itself is another debate, but taxing unearned wealth more? Yes, I think we should be taxing wealth more. What form would that take? Would it be taxes on property, assets, land, capital gains? What kind of things should we be taxing more that we're not taxing enough or that we're not taxing at all?

52:55So the movement that's happening now for an extreme wealth tax.

52:59Amol Rajan:What is that? I don't even know. So they're saying, look, we've got to go beyond just taxing capital gains. So is that income tax at 80 % or what? Oh, no. They would say people who have more than 10 million, for example, 10 million pounds or euros in wealth. What they're advocating for is saying you should tax 2 % beyond that. Now, they're not going to change much because people who have that much wealth are probably getting 6 % to 8 % returns on it anyway. So they're still going to be accumulating. The point is to recognize and act on the extreme levels of inequality. But just tapping on this, I think we need to go further than just saying, oh, there's extremes of inequality.

53:34Let's tax the super wealthy and redistribute the poor. I'm interested in going beyond redistribution of wealth to the predistribution. redistribution. And then this brings us back to how are things owned? So who owns the sources of wealth creation? This brings us back to what we were talking about earlier. Who owns the land in a country? We know the UK has extremely unequal land ownership held in kind of aristocracy and crazily unequal compared to many other countries. Who owns the businesses? Are they owned by a few very wealthy people who own the vast number of shares or are they owned in local communities?

54:10if they're owned locally or by employees. Again, we're back to the design of the ownership of business. Who owns the utilities? Who owns the water supply? Who owns our energy systems? Who owns our transport systems? We've privatised the lot. They're owned by shareholders, many of them in other countries. Who owns the technologies? So I want to go back to the deep thinking about the ownership of wealth because then you can pre-distribute that. And that's why public goods of state health care and public education matter. And I think education really matters. A country that invests, you know, Tony Blair did say a good thing once, education, education, education.

54:51Invest in state education because if there's one moment that gives an opportunity for reset generation to generation, it's kids going to school together. learning together, meeting people who are not like themselves in a classroom, having empathy across society, sharing their knowledge and their connections. You create social cohesion and you create some kind of moment of equality.

55:18Amol Rajan:Can I ask you for two radical ideas? One for the government, radical or otherwise, including the present one. A radical idea you would like to see this government enact and then a radical thing for our listeners to do today to change their lives. Why don't we cut the radical idea for one of Wes treating Angela Rayner or Andy Burnham? My book's subtitle is Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist. So I'm not in the game of specific policies. It's just not my space. You want to change thinking? I want to change mindsets. So I would love the next time a politician wants to say growth, growth, growth.

55:53What if they say thrive, thrive? What would it mean for the UK to thrive? What would it mean to start by thinking about how do we invest in local communities, building a sense of belonging and cohesion here? What kind of policies would enable localities, be they cities or rural areas and districts? And many across the UK, many councils have got in touch with us at Donut Economics Action Lab and say we're using the tools of Donut Economics to think about how we want to transform our place. Right. They want to become regenerative and distributed by design. If that mindset is at the heart of local policy, and I'm going to local policy, not national, because I'm seeing a lot more space for innovation there.

56:36Amol Rajan:You often see volunteering at a local level, which answers some of the things you're after, yeah. But also volunteering, but also local councils. Local councils saying, yeah, this really makes sense to us. We want this place to thrive. So putting that idea of thriving, what would it mean for the UK to become regenerative and far more distributive, going to the source of who owns the sources of wealth creation? So this is about long-term policy change. It's not a quick fix. Individual takeaways. I mean, there'll be so many people that listen to this, and I do mean so many people, who feel like, okay, she is saying stuff.

57:04Amol Rajan:Kate Raworth is saying stuff that I've been thinking for years. She's doing it with a kind of energy and intellectual confidence of someone who's actually studied it. But what do I need to do now to change my life? I really like it when people say, oh, yeah, I've always thought like this. I'd never seen the diagrams before. This book helps articulate the way I've thought. And so I know I've tapped into something that many, many people have been thinking and feeling and I'm really glad if the book Donut Economics helps make that visible and helps them articulate that because I think it does tap into a very widespread feeling.

57:35Each of us can think in the same way that city councils have said across the UK and across the world, like more than 50 city councils around the world have taken the concept of Donut Economics and put it at the heart of their strategies and their policies. We can also do that at the scale of neighbourhoods. Amazing work going on in Birmingham with a group called Civic Square who We're like demonstrating what it means for a neighborhood to take these ideas and put them into action street by street. But we can also take it into our own homes and our own lives and say, how is the way that I'm living impacting on humanity's ability to meet the needs of all within the means of the planet?

58:10So we can start with things that we know we personally can do. How do I eat? What is my diet? Can I move towards a more plant based diet that actually is lighter on this planet? How do I travel? How do I get to work? What do I think is a decent holiday? Like how far do I think I need to go? Am I flying? Am I going on the train? Am I biking? How do I invest my money? What bank do I give the privilege of having my savings? Can I move it to a bank that I think actually cares? How do I invest and can I divest? And how do I protest? And how do I vote? And how do I volunteer? And how do I care in my community?

58:46There are so many things we can each do. But the thing I've really learned from the work of Donut Economics Action Lab and seeing it spread is the power of peer-to-peer inspiration. Right? So one schoolgirl protesting outside the Swedish parliament, people can say, city girl, go back to school. What are you doing? Well, that can kick off a kind of awakening and a mobilizing of school kids around the world. because people are inspired by somebody like themselves who's doing that thing that you thought was impossible until, look, they're doing it. So a schoolgirl can inspire school kids around the world, but a CEO can, over a quiet pint in the pub, inspire another CEO, give them permission, give them courage to do something different in a way that nobody else can quite get near.

59:31A mayor can inspire a mayor, and a parent at the school gates can inspire other parents at the school gates, whether to get a kind of mobile-free school or let's travel to school differently. So actually all of us have a superpower of who we are because there's millions of other people like us, whether we're a parent or a school kid or a teacher or the latest employee or the CEO or a board member or a local voter. Research shows again and again that when we make changes in our lifestyles, it does inspire others. We have a sense of that which I can control. Agency. I'm glad that I want to live aligned with the way planet works.

1:00:07And I really want to say there are big systems that we are forced to be part of that means we can't change everything. I don't want to put all the responsibility on the individual. So also do things systemic. Do move your money to a bank that gives a damn. Do vote. Do show up. Do go on marches. Do show that you are part of bigger systems and that you care. Move the way your energy is supplied. so it's not it's not all about changing just my own behavior but how can i be part of bigger

1:00:36Amol Rajan:systemic change can i ask you a slightly personal question i had the enormous pleasure of chatting to your um sister about the death of your dear dad i've been there as well and one of the things that grief can do is it can make you feel this tremendous sense of urgency something sort of this acquaintance with mortality and listening to you we've never met before but listening to you I do feel there's this sort of enormous, not just intellectual energy, but urgency. You seem like someone who's like conscious of the fact that we need to get on and do stuff. Does that urgency, as I expect is the case, predate your dad's illness?

1:01:12Amol Rajan:And how has it changed by the fact of your losing a parent? Thanks for that. Yeah, so my beloved dad, Ricky Raworth, he died on the 1st of May last year. After 10 years of experiencing Parkinson's, which is not a kind disease. But he died at the end of a long life. He was 83 years old. He died in bed at home, surrounded by people who love him. Given that we all die, it is part of the contract of life that comes with birth. I think he had a good death. And it was, to me, actually, on many levels, a beautiful experience. And we were able to be with him. But yeah, having a parent die and also seeing my mother, whose health isn't great either, seeing it, of course, it brings mortality really close to home.

1:01:56I'm 55 and actually turning 55 was really, it just made me think like 55 to 65. Something about like, wow, 65. I mean, I think inside me, sometimes I think, wait, am I 32 or 30? Oh, my God. No, 55. Where did that come from? But I love it. I don't actually feel an urgency, to be honest. I mean, when I was at Oxfam, I was campaigning within Oxfam. Please, please, please, can we campaign on climate change? That was in 2006. I felt an urgency. We've got a campaign on climate change. You can't live in urgency. You can't live year to year and decade to decade being urgent. It doesn't work. The body can't sustain it.

1:02:37And it's not quite, you can't keep telling people it's urgent. But I feel this real aliveness. And I'm very, very aware of my mortality in a way that I love. I will not always be alive. None of us will. I'm alive now. I've also, alongside my dad's death, I've also had people very, very close to me in life die. really prematurely in their lives. And that's a very different matter. And that's always made me think, you know, who knows what happens tomorrow? So I'm alive today. I'm going to be alive. And I love the opportunity to be alive and to communicate and to bring energy to issues that I care about and the privilege of being able to work on something that I really care about.

1:03:18And it brings me into contact with people who get in touch and say, I'm teaching this in my classroom. I love those teachers. we want to bring this into our company great let's talk about how you could really do that so yes mortality the knowledge that death is certain not you know taxes no people are brilliant at evading those but death yes for all of us so what are you going to do right now that you're

1:03:40Amol Rajan:alive kate rayworth is such an honor chatting to you and you thank you so much thank you

1:03:54Amol Rajan:Well, well, well, you wanted Kate Raworth on. We got her on and didn't she deliver? I thought that was such a huge dose of intellectual energy, argumentative clarity and actually just moral fervor. A couple of quick sort of takeaways from that. You know, you heard there at the end her talk about the death of her dear dad after 10 years with Parkinson's. there was something about her answer which almost I felt didn't match her personality and I don't say that as an insult at all I say out of almost you know respect or affection really um I did get the impression that Kate Raworth is someone who feels a sense of uh what Barack Obama in a very different context called the fierce urgency of now this kind of burning desire and passion to get on with things to change the world to be in a hurry because she's acutely aware not just because of her the death of her dear dad but just because of being a smart person that you know time is all we've got and none of us have very much of it because you know our time on this earth is actually very very brief intellectually one of the biggest i always think about what have i been surprised by or what's kind of what's what someone said that i didn't think they would say and i was struck that she wasn't against growth i think people who know about donut economics who've read her book who criticize her or praise her often cast kate rayworth as being anti-growth and i was very struck by the fact that she said no she's not anti-growth she just thinks growth like in human lives is a phase so lots of poor countries india china most uh in the most celebrated way because the numbers are just bigger but around the world today lots of poor countries do need economic growth but they need economic growth as a means to an end and i think that that's really what she's arguing for people including in british public life talk about growth as an end in itself and she's saying flip it round don't sort of don't think the end is growth and then other things happen talk about the other things that you want to happen and then get to growth and I think that that idea that what matters is not can we grow but can we thrive is just an intellectually interesting way of approaching it and certainly puts her at odds with the mainstream way in which growth is spoken about in British politics today I think one of the other things about what Kate Raworth is doing is that she's really trying to create a fundamentally different way of thinking about the fundamentals of life.

1:06:15Amol Rajan:That is a big, big, big ambition. And, you know, around the world, the fact is her thinking has attracted a huge audience. And that shows that there is a huge appetite, including amongst you, I know, because many of you have been in touch with us. There is this yearning, this appetite for new radical ways of thinking about these fundamental economic, moral and philosophical questions. And so while there is a kind of awe-inspiring scale to her intellectual ambition, that ambition is justified by the fact that so many people, including so many people who listen to this podcast, are desperate for alternative ways of thinking and desperate, frankly, for radical ideas.

1:06:57Amol Rajan:And that is it for this episode. Huge thanks to Kate Raworth for making so much time for us and to make sure that you don't miss future conversations, please do subscribe to Radical with Amal Rajan on BBC Sounds. We will speak to you next week. Thanks so much for your time. Goodbye.

1:07:21Amol Rajan:She's one of the best-selling music artists of all time. Rising to fame as a member of R &B group Destiny's Child before launching a solo career that's produced chart-topping hits and era-defining albums. And with a business empire spanning hair care, whiskey and entertainment. It's fair to say she's more than just an artist, she's a global brand. Good Bad Billionaire is taking a closer look at the life and fortune of Beyonce. Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts.