May 5, 2024 - Personal blog of Rick Giles

“Doughnut Economics”

May 13, 2019

By NZB3

GDP is a phony baloney measure The State uses to make itself look good. It mostly counts government spending.
“We need to overcome our global obsession with endless growth in order to save the planet, says economist and author Kate Raworth.

Raworth is the author of Doughnut Economics: Seven ways to think like a 21st century economist.”

“She spoke with Newshub Nation about the limitations of using GDP as the sole metric for a nation’s success..”- Our obsession with growth is costing us our planet – economist; Newshub

So Raworth wants to replace one phony baloney government measure (GDP) with a new phony baloney one based on doughnuts? And is attacking the idea of productivity and prices to do it?
 
A strawman argument to switch from baloney to doughnuts? Sounds like “21st Century Economics” alright. In other words, gimmicky!
 
Governments re-brand the way they count and the names of their departments (and their politicians) for only one reason. The old brand has fallen into disrepute. Bring in another agency or boss to do the exact same thing but with a face the people wont recognise so they’ll let you do it all again. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. 
eg How many times has the Department of Social Welfare been re-imagined like this? Child, Youth and Family becomes Oranga Tamariki.
eg Hospital waiting lists too big? That’s OK, we’ve found a new way of counting them that makes it look better!
eg Let’s do that with crime too. I can get you any result you like. What’s it worth to ya?
Raworth was plugging her book and her doughnuts at the Just Transition Summit last week. Or, as I prefer to call it, Storming the Taranaki Energy Castle. Meanwhile, most headlines were grabbed by director James Cameron and his wife plugging their own gimmick of a plant-based low-emission economy.

We should be mistrustful of State attempts to escape their crimes being observed simply by changing the disguise. It’s like moving the hands on a clock and thinking you’ve time-travelled. It’s like having a low IQ score so shifting the conversation to EQ (Emotional Intelligence.) Changing the wrapper on a set of statistics or the agency peddling them only works on really down-regulated minds.

Changing the entire economic accounting system to Doughnuts rather than GDP would be a bold move but the only goal would be to trick the starch out of New Zealanders. T’was ever thus.

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image ref. waterstonesbru.blogspot

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