A healthy economy should be designed to thrive, not grow | Kate Raworth

Have you ever watched a baby learning to crawl? Because as any parent knows, it's gripping. First, they wriggle about on the floor, usually backwards, but then they drag themselves forwards, and then they pull themselves up to stand, and we all clap. And that simple motion of forwards and upwards, it's the most basic direction of progress we humans recognize.

We tell it in our story of evolution as well, from our lolloping ancestors to Homo erectus, finally upright, to Homo sapiens, depicted, always a man, always mid-stride. So no wonder we so readily believe that economic progress will take this very same shape, this ever-rising line of growth. It's time to think again, to reimagine the shape of progress,

because today, we have economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive, and what we need, especially in the richest countries, are economies that make us thrive whether or not they grow. Yes, it’s a little flip in words hiding a profound shift in mindset, but I believe this is the shift we need to make

if we, humanity, are going to thrive here together this century. So where did this obsession with growth come from? Well, GDP, gross domestic product, it's just the total cost of goods and services sold in an economy in a year. It was invented in the 1930s, but it very soon became the overriding goal of policymaking,

so much so that even today, in the richest of countries, governments think that the solution to their economic problems lies in more growth. Just how that happened is best told through the 1960 classic by W.W. Rostow. I love it so much, I have a first-edition copy. "The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto."