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Dear Kirk Rensmeyer,
We’re proud to announce this year’s 42nd Annual E. F. Schumacher Lecturer: “renegade” economist and renowned author Kate Raworth. Kate will speak on new tools in Economics for the 21st century, joining us remotely from Oxford, U.K.
The event will be held virtually on Saturday, November 12th at 2 PM EDT New York City, 7 PM GMT London. Registration is free.
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2022 marks 50 years since the groundbreaking publication of The Limits to Growth (1972), the global report that challenged conventional assumptions around heedless growth. In the 21st century, the problem of meeting shared needs within planetary means remains as urgent as ever. Fundamentally, the task remains the same: ensuring that no one falls short of life’s essentials (from food and housing to healthcare and political voice), while avoiding collective overshoot of our pressure on Earth’s life-supporting systems (a stable climate, fertile soils, and healthy biodiversity).
One year following The Limits to Growth, E.F. Schumacher’ Small is Beautiful (1973) articulated this new call for an economics in which people and planet truly matter. He insisted that the root concepts which guide our thinking are vitally important for such a reorientation. In the same vein, Kate Raworth teaches that economic models cannot be isolated from ecological health nor holistic human wellbeing. As she recently put it in her keynote address at this year’s Geospatial World Forum:
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"In the 20th century, those gathering metrics focused a lot on economic metrics, and on refining the measure of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) nationally…I believe that is going to become a metric of the past. The data we actually need is going to be measured in terms of life itself, in terms of Earth herself: in terms of human well-being: our health, our security, our connectedness to others… and also in terms of planetary health: the quality of water, the quality of air or soil.
We need technologies that give us the metrics of life in her own terms."
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Among today’s economists replacing old paradigms with new tools, Kate stands among the most accomplished and well-recognized. A Senior Associate at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute and a Professor of Practice at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, her work is focused on making economics fit for 21st century realities. She is the creator of the much-lauded Doughnut Economic framework for living within social and planetary boundaries, and co-founder of Doughnut Economics Action Lab.
Kate’s internationally best-selling book, Doughnut Economics: seven ways to think like a 21st century economist, has been translated into over 20 languages. It has been influential with wide-ranging audiences, garnering acclaim from the UN General Assembly, Pope Francis, and Extinction Rebellion. And this framework is now being taken up by communities around the world and put into action at the local level. The Dutch capital of Amsterdam became the first city worldwide to formally implement doughnut economics in early April of 2020, and other major cities, such as Brussels and Barcelona, have similarly embraced these concepts.
Kate cites both The Limits to Growth and Small is Beautiful as foundational influences. Her approachable yet uncompromising approach to rethinking economics and educating broad and diverse audiences calls to mind some words of Schumacher himself:
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...the way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds…When people ask for education…I think what they are really looking for is ideas that would make the world, and their own lives, intelligible to them.
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Please join us to hear Kate Raworth live as she shares her perspective on new economic frameworks and how they can be applied at this pivotal moment.
Kate will be introduced by Sebastian Wood, Managing Director of sustainable engineering practice Whitby Wood, our newest Schumacher Center Board Member and grandson of E.F. Schumacher. A Question and Answer session moderated by fellow Board Members Alice Maggio and Agatha Bacalar will follow the lecture.
Best wishes,
Susan Witt and staff of the Schumacher Center
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