Can Growth Continue Forever?
The Shape That Could Replace GDP as the Goal of an Economy
For seventy years, economists have measured a nation's success with a single upward line — and Kate Raworth thinks that line is quietly killing us.
The Idea
GDP growth has an almost theological status in modern economics. Governments rise and fall on it. Central banks contort policy around it. Yet it was never designed to measure wellbeing, sustainability, or whether human lives are actually improving — its inventor, Simon Kuznets, warned against using it that way as early as 1934. It just measures the total value of economic activity. A forest fire, a divorce, a cancer diagnosis — all good for GDP, because they generate transactions. Kate Raworth, an Oxford economist, proposed a different shape for economic success: a doughnut. The hole in the middle represents the social foundation — the minimum every person needs to live a dignified life: food, housing, healthcare, political voice, education. The outer ring is the ecological ceiling — the planetary boundaries beyond which we destabilise the systems that support life: climate, biodiversity, freshwater, chemical pollution. The goal of an economy, in her framework, is not to grow indefinitely but to thrive in the space between these two boundaries. To be, in her word, 'regenerative and distributive by design.' This reframes the entire question. Instead of asking 'how much did the economy grow this year?', you ask: 'are people above the floor, and are we below the ceiling?' It sounds simple. The political and intellectual resistance to it is anything but.
In the World
Amsterdam became the first city in the world to formally adopt Doughnut Economics as its governing framework — not as a thought experiment, but as official city policy, announced in April 2020 during the early weeks of the pandemic. The timing was deliberate. The city's chief economist Carolien Gehrels had been watching supply chains collapse and social cracks widen in real time, and saw an opening to ask a foundational question: what is this city actually for? The Amsterdam Doughnut maps the city's performance across 24 social indicators — from housing affordability to social inclusion — and against nine planetary boundaries, many of which the city was already overshooting. The resulting portrait was uncomfortable. Amsterdam, wealthy and progressive by almost any conventional measure, was contributing to global carbon emissions, resource extraction, and supply chain inequality in ways that its GDP figures simply didn't capture. What followed wasn't a sweeping revolution but a methodical recalibration. Urban planners began asking different questions about construction projects. The city began tracking 'circularity' — how materials flow through the economy, whether they can be reused rather than discarded. Other cities — Brussels, Copenhagen, Dunedin in New Zealand — began paying attention. The idea had moved, in roughly three years, from a 2017 book to municipal governance on three continents. That is not a slow idea.
Why It Matters
You probably don't set personal financial goals by optimising for a single upward line either. You think about security, time, relationships, meaning — a portfolio of things that can genuinely conflict with each other. The Doughnut is, in part, an argument that economies should work the same way: pursuing a balance of things that matter, rather than maximising one metric that is easy to measure but impoverished in what it captures. The practical implication is subtler than it sounds. If the communities, cities, or countries you live in begin — even gradually — reorienting around different measures of success, the policies, incentives, and investments that shape your life will shift. What gets subsidised, what gets taxed, what gets built, what gets protected: all of it flows from what we decide to count. It also offers a useful personal lens. When you evaluate a financial decision — a job offer, a purchase, a long-term plan — asking 'does this keep me above the floor and below my ceiling?' is more honest than asking 'does this maximise the number?' Growth as a means to a good life is a sensible tool. Growth as the definition of a good life is a category error.
A Question to Ponder
If your own life had a doughnut — a floor of what you genuinely need and a ceiling beyond which accumulation starts costing you something important — where are you right now, and which boundary are you closer to crossing?
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