N. 23 | LET'S LEARN TO THINK LIKE A XXI CENTURY ECONOMIST

October 11, 2018

N. 23 | LET'S LEARN TO THINK LIKE A XXI CENTURY ECONOMIST

The traditional economic model helped billions people to improve their conditions, a result obtained with the detriment of natural and social system.
It’s clear to everyone that this model have to be updated to the needs and reality of the 21th century.
Today, the human pressure on natural system is completely unsustainable, and with the great global changes that we’ve induced in nature, our civilization is at risk.
The change starts from young enterpreneurs and smart manager, and can be summarize as follows:

 CHANGE OBJECTIVE. Economy has been fixed for over seventy years on GDP as the main measure of progress, to justify extreme inequality in income and wealth.
In the 21st century, a bigger goal is needed: making the green economy and sustainable luxury, and bringing all of humanity into a safe and fair environment. It’s time time to find out how to prosper in balance.

 SEE THE TOTAL IMAGE. We have to redesign the economy from the beginning, integrating it into society and nature, and making it naturally fed. A new representation stimulates new narratives.

CULTIVATING HUMAN NATURE. At the center of the XXI century economy there is the portrait of the rational economic man: isolated, calculating, with stable tastes, which dominates nature. Today it’s clear that we are much richer than this: we are social, neighbors, fluids in values and dependent on the living world. We are redesigning a new self-portrait.

ACQUIRE COMPREHENSION IN THE SYSTEMS. It’s time to stop looking for the exclusive levers of economy command and begin to manage it as complex system in continuous evolution, overturning the emblematic coming and going of market supplies and demand with a systemic thought based on feedback.

DESIGN TO DISTRIBUTE. Social inequality isn’t an economic necessity: it is a design error. We must go beyond the redistribution of income, until the redistribution of wealth.

CREATE TO REGENERATE. We are particularly close to heart with this point. Economic theory has long considered a “clean” environment to be a luxury item.
This century needs an economic thought that triggers regenerative planning to create a circular economy – non linear – to restore to human beings the role of full participants in the cyclical processes of life on heart.

BEING AGNOSTIC REGARDING GROWTH.  The mainstream economy sees infinite growth as an obbligation, but nothing in nature grows forever. Today we have economies that need to grow, while what we need are economies that make us prosper, whether they grow or not.

 What we can do now is put together the best of emerging ideas, thus creating an economic mental approach that is not fixed, but constantly evolving. With our ethical fashion and sustainable design, we have started by choosing the road to the green economy as the only way to go. And you?

 Article inspired by the book “Doughnut Economics”  by Kate Raworth