The current economic system with its focus on money and GDP is highly destructive to our well-being and the entire the planet. It is hard to envision how we can move beyond this way of managing our activities and meeting our needs. There have been in recent decades a number of  alternative economics concepts developed. The conceptualisation by Kate Raworth of a Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries that can be used to guide our economic activities is one of the more recent, and I think exciting, approaches to challenge the dominant paradigm.

The following clip is a good introduction to the concept:

Economics is often seen as something too complex for the average person. What if we took back the original meaning of the term economics, ‘the management of the household’, and began to articulate what we want our economy to achieve? Is endless growth really our endpoint, or do we want say a system where we balance the well-being of humanity with the capabilities of our planet as articulated in this Doughnut model?

The following podcast offers an easy to understand discussion of the development of our current economic system and how we can all in our own way begin to reshape the system.

For more information see Kate Raworth’s website.