Money As A Designers Tool
Partners for a New Economy shares in their March Newsletter, P4NE’s Roundup No.33, an article published by Rat für Formgebung - German Design Council interviewing Kate Raworth on the occasion of her recognition as "Personality of the Year" at the German Design Awards 2025, for her globally successful concept of Doughnut Economics.
The theme of the interview is "Economy is a Design Task".
Kate tells us in the interview:
economics is really a design exercise
This is a radical idea. Most economists today would probably assert that Economics is a science. Which makes Economists scientists.
Designers always have clients. And clients are always required to supply a brief on the design they are commissioning.
Science, at least nominally, does not have a client, or a brief. Scientists are supposed to be disinterested seekers after truth. And the truth they seek is guided by their own curiosity.
Of course, science costs money. Money requires funders. Funders require an inquiry that justifies their funding, according to their own mission and purpose as funders.
Which points to an important point about our human way of being in the world. Money matters. And the funders who control the flow of money really, really matter.
So, if economics is a design exercise, and economists are designers, who is their client? and what is their brief?
Kate points to one possible answer, when she talks in her interview about cities implementing her Doughnut model of the economy, and then acknowledges the limitations of the city as the client:
cities … do not have full control over their economic environment
The simple truth is that no political institution has full control over its economic environment.
The economy is a self-organizing mutual aid society.? If it is self-organizing, how can it be designed? Who has the power to approve those designs, and put them into practice?
Governments have the power of the public fisc and public force, which they are authorized by social contract with the populations within their jurisdictions (sometimes expressed in a legal writing called a constitution) to exercise in defense of public health, public safety and social cohesion.
The power of the public fisc can be proactive, collecting taxes and spending those collections on enterprises in the public's interest, but the use of public force is almost always reactive, and corrective, compelling compliance with social norms deemed essential to public health, public safety or social cohesion (although all-too-often the powers of both the public fisc and public force are misused and abused in the self-interest of those entrusted with control over the exercise of those powers, requiring constant vigilance by the governed, to hold our institutions of Politics accountable for authenticity and integrity in their institutional exercises of their institutional authority/power true to their institutional agency/purpose/mission, through individual engagement in public discourse and participation in electoral and, when necessary, protest politics).
There is a huge conversation to be had about the strengths and limitations of the institutions of politics in shaping the right economy. For now, I will assert that it is limited, riffing off of William Shakespeare speaking through the voice of Hamlet, who tells us,
There are more things in [the economy], Horatio, than are dreamt of in your [politics]
One of those things, of course, is money, which extends beyond the public fisc, to private means controlled by private individuals outside of Government, much of which gets set aside for a time, for a purpose, and made available to institutions of Finance (that parallel institutions of Politics in our sociologies of social choosing) that aggregate this money set aside by others and deploy those aggregations as money made to flow into enterprises for their use in doing their work of paying cost-for-value in order to exchange value-for-price, for a time, at a cost and on terms that inform the businesses that inform the technologies that inform the choices that inform the economy that informs society that informs our future.
And so we see that in addition to institutions of Politics, there are also institutions of Finance, and of Enterprise, each of which is constituted with its own agency to act for society, its own authority to exercise power in furtherance of its agency, and its own language and logic of accountability for authenticity and integrity in their institutional exercises of their own unique institutional authority/power true to their own unique institutional agency/purpose/mission.
So we have institutions of Finance and Enterprise alongside institutions of Politics through which a population makes social choices that inform its economy.
In addition, there are institutions of Ciivl Society, of Science and Learning and Culture more generally, through which a population conducts inquires in search of insights and new learning that can inform prosperous adaptions to the circumstances then prevailing, and curates knowledge and norms.
Each of these institutions, of Civil Society, Finance, Enterprise and Politics, holds some power to shape the economy. None holds the power to shape the whole of it.
In addition, there is the population itself, that ultimately decides whether the economy is sufficient to their needs.
None of these, not Civil Society, not Finance, not Enterprise, not Politics, not the people themselves, as individuals or in society, holds the power to commission the design of an economy, and then execute that design on its own.
So maybe economies cannot actually be designed, although they can be visualized, at least partially, through designs such as Katie Raworth's Doughnut.
Which brings us to this last comment made by Kate in this interview,
we need a new shape of progress
Progress is a 19th Century social narrative of prosperity, that was reduced over the course of the 20th Century to Growth as the simple, numerical increase in transaction volumes measured in prices paid in money, from one period of measurement to the next.
Neither is fit to the circumstances now prevailing, in the 21st Century.
The new narrative we need is of social cohesion sufficient to the longevity of our wellbeing, on a planetary scale, under the circumstances now prevailing.
How shall we visualize that cohesion?
How shall we finance it?
How shall we realize it, through Enterprise?
How shall we subsidize it, through the public fisc, and regulate it through public force?
These are perhaps the right questions for economists to design and evaluate possible answers to.