Kevin's Reviews > Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

Confronting 21st century crises with revolutionary reforms…

Highlights:
--I have high standards for this topic (21st century economics); this accessible overview may one day reach my “bedtime stories” status (not joking):
-Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails
-Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present
-Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
-Debt: The First 5,000 Years

1) Structural crises:
--The first 2 concepts I look for here:
a) Logic of capitalism: production is driven by profits (endless private accumulation of money-power) rather than social needs (social needs without money go unaddressed; this neglect spreads to the entire economy during recessions as confidence in profits evaporate). The logic of the market commodifies social relations: market exchange-value (between strangers maximizing gains) are fetishized, obscuring use-value and social relations (labour in production/reproduction, ecological, commons, etc.)
b) Property rights of capitalism: market commodification expand beyond exchange of common goods (pre-capitalist "societies with markets") into peculiar markets of land/labour/money (capitalism: "market society"). These feature fictitious commodities since humans/nature/purchasing power are not produced for market exchange.
--Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails introduces this elegantly. Once such structural logic is uprooted from liberalism’s naturalization (“human nature”, as if history and social/class distinctions do not exist) and placed on a global historical scale, the connections to crises are clear: Financial casinos fetishizing market prices to oblivion… industrial overproduction amidst global maldistribution churning through global labour and ecologies… social relations/imagination reduced to consumerism/addiction…
“Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer.” -Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1
--Raworth’s writing is whole-heartedly accessible (attention to public communication, including visuals and figures-of-speech); a more academic delivery is Keen’s The New Economics: A Manifesto. The bits connecting theory to history are fun: John Stuart Mill shifting from classical political economy’s social goals to abstract “natural laws”; “economic man” and “equilibrium” as the foundations of mainstream (Neoclassical) economics, erasing class/gender/political struggle/economic volatility etc.; Kuznets' GNP originating in measuring war production to later being adopted as a measure of national “economic health”; Kuznets Curve’s supposed rising-then-falling inequality in industrialized countries then being adopted for post-WWII economic growth developmentalism (note: especially against communist decolonization), etc.
…However, we need to be careful of taking too idealist a position (i.e. assuming ideas drive history, without carefully considering the materialist context/structural logic/interactions). Otherwise, the framing becomes too focused on bad ideas (ex. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism’s focus on twerp-turned-war-criminal Milton Friedman’s free market fundamentalism) rather than on structural crises that were managed with conveniently bad useful ideas: US’s post-WWII global plan (dollar-gold convertibility) falling apart due to US’s genocidal war spending (annihilating Korea/Vietnam) draining US gold reserves, thus pivoting to “Neoliberalism”: unleash Wall Street to retain economic hegemony while breaking the domestic welfare class-compromise and derailing Third World industrialization:
-The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy
-Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance
-Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
-The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World

2) Revolutionary reforms:
--Revolutions are not simply an event; they are a process to build social trust, imagination and capabilities. “Reformist” reforms obstruct this process through short-term symptomatic relief, divide-and-rule, etc. “Revolutionary” reforms facilitate this process. Thankfully, Raworth is much clearer on this than fellow progressive Mariana Mazzucato’s Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism.
--Inspired by the complex systems science of Donella H. Meadows (Thinking in Systems: A Primer), Raworth distinguishes the lower (weaker) leverage points (for system behavior change) involved in reformist reforms (internalizing externalities within market prices, tax redistribution, tiered pricing, quotas) vs. the higher leverage points of:
a) Changing system goals: replacing “Economic Growth” (convenient for capitalist endless accumulation as distribution can be ignored) with “Doughnut Economics”, which combines the social needs rhetoric of the UN Social Development Goals as the baseline with the planetary boundaries of Earth Systems science (see diagram: https://images.gr-assets.com/photos/1... ) ...Now, be warned of the liberal imperialist biases of Western technocrats like the “Limits to Growth” pioneers of Earth Systems Science and their fallacy of “overpopulation” (critiqued in Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis). And once again, to avoid vulgar idealism, changing system goals requires changing the aforementioned structural system logic/property rights.
b) Changing reinforcing feedback loops (think exponential growth) into balancing feedback loops: we return to capitalist structural logic/property rights. Wealth accumulation of the following capitalist property rights is hidden by the mainstream focus on income via wage labour:
i) Land via landlordism/vast inheritance vs. land value tax (to capture windfall gains of social/Commons value-creation).
ii) Money via private bank debt-money creation/speculation vs. various ways to make money into a public utility (Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis?, The Bubble and Beyond). Finance is such an efficient Ponzi scheme that it is the pinnacle of runaway reinforcing feedback loops.
iii) Enterprise via shareholding (external ownership) speculation vs. stakeholder fixed-return bonds/workers self-directed enterprises (Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism).
iv) Technology/information via winner-take-all Big Tech privatizing social information, socializing costs while privatizing rewards vs. intellectual Commons/social dividend on technology/royalties & State equity for State-funded R&D, etc.

The Missing:
--Like clockwork, yet another progressive not spelling out the economics of imperialism (despite a clear opportunity during the critique of liberal economic-growth developmentalism), thus missing the nuances of decolonization in the real world which (using systems thinking) does indeed affect Global North activism (both to understand how our elites will act and to broaden our own social imagination for change/solidarity).
--Indeed, I have yet to find an accessible overview that synthesizes all of the above with imperialism. Luckily, I have you covered with supplements:
1) Intro to imperialism: The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions
2) ...with a bit more economic theory: The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry
3) …with more environmentalism: Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World and A People’s Green New Deal
4) …dive into economic theory: Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present