a portrait sketched by Adam Smith—solitary, calculating, competing and insatiable—refined by John Stuart Mill, elaborated by Jevons and made into a cartoon character by Frank Knight, founder of the Chicago School, who endowed him with perfect knowledge and perfect foresight. But it turns out that homo sapiens is the most cooperative species on the planet and the economy develops via interdependency. Get Savvy with Systems From Alfred Marshall’s supply and demand graph of the 1870’s, economists have preferred simple equations to express economic ideas. Prompted by 2008 crash new dynamic models are being developed and there is a need for economists to work ethically. Design to Distribute Thomas Piketty finally destroyed the optimism of the Kuznets Curve which suggested that inequality would be automatically solved by rising affluence. As a consequence, issues including higher marginal rates of taxation and land value taxes need to be reconsidered. Other concerns include the digital revolution, robotics, intellectual property rights and the effect on the Global South. Create to Regenerate The fact that more advanced economies have at least partially solved pollution problems faced by developing societies led some economists to believe this was inevitable rather than a determined effort and used it to mock studies such as Limits to Growth. Industrial systems have been built around an extract-manufacture-use-throwaway sequence and economics has developed a system of quotas, taxes and tiered pricing to alleviate the problems, although corporations lobby hard against them. Be Agnostic about Growth Although indefinite growth is the assumption of modern economics, it’s rare to find an exponential graph in a textbook. Rostow’s influential Five Stages of Growth pictures a plane journey whose fifth stage (the age of high mass consumption) leaves us in the air without a landing point. In practice, most natural systems follow an S-curve as a particular niche is filled. It is hard to predict a successful landing point for growth which meets the financial addiction to growth. Various ideas, such as Steady-state economy, demurrage and breaking out of consumerism, are explored. We are all Economists Now “The twenty-first century task is clear: to create economies that promote human prosperity in a flourishing web of life, so that we can thrive in balance with the Doughnut’s safe and just space.” Major themes The hole or inner ring of the doughnut represents the space where those who lack the minimum requirement for leading a good life, reside. These