The Doughnut of Prosperity and Comrade Guterres’ War on Capitalism – Watts Up With That?

Guest “Let’s end poverty by redefining prosperity!” by David Middleton

Anything proposed by UN Secretary General Guterres and endorsed by the Nature editorial board should be ignored with extreme prejudice!

• EDITORIAL
• 01 October 2025

End GDP mania: how the world should really measure prosperity

The obsession with economic output as a measure of human development puts sustainability on the back burner. Researchers can now help to devise better indicators.

Last week’s United Nations General Assembly, held in New York City, generated no shortage of headlines. But one notable policy initiative from the world body was not discussed by world leaders when it should have been. UN secretary-general António Guterres has put together a high-level group of specialists to propose new indicators for human and planetary prosperity that go ‘Beyond GDP’.

[…]

Guterres’ project is called Beyond GDP because of the necessity of getting past the world’s go-to indicator of economic progress: gross domestic product (GDP).

[…]

The 14-member panel, co-chaired by economists Kaushik Basu at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and Nora Lustig at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, is deliberating on a broad set of indicators, each of which should have equal weight to GDP. It is an extremely ambitious undertaking — and exceptionally complex.

Exactly how complex is set out in a paper in Nature this week¹. Economists Andrew Fanning and Kate Raworth of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab in Oxford, UK, describe a set of 35 social and ecological indicators that attempts to provide some answers to the questions being examined by the panel. They report 13 ecological indicators that draw on the Planetary Boundaries framework, developed by environmental scientists.

[…]

This work extends Raworth’s original idea of ‘a safe and just space for humanity’…

[…]

The latest study and the UN initiative are an opportunity for researchers across economics to engage with each other to achieve the best possible outcome for people and the planet. As Raworth wrote in Doughnut Economics: “We have economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive; what we need are economies that make us thrive, whether or not they grow.”

Nature 646, 7 (2025)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-03144-y

Nature

Obviously if you replace GDP with “35 social and ecological indicators” the cost of the Quixotic fight against climate change would become irrelevant.

Here’s part of the very abstract abstract of their paper:

• Published: 01 October 2025

Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries monitors a world out of balance

Nature volume 646, pages47–56 (2025)Cite this article

Abstract

The doughnut-shaped framework of social and planetary boundaries (the ‘Doughnut’) provides a concise visual assessment of progress towards the goal of meeting the needs of all people within the means of the living planet^1,2,3. Here we present a renewed Doughnut framework with a revised set of 35 indicators that monitor trends in social deprivation and ecological overshoot over the 2000–2022 period. Although global gross domestic product (GDP) has more than doubled, our median results show a modest achievement in reducing human deprivation that would have to accelerate fivefold to meet the needs of all people by 2030. Meanwhile, the increase in ecological overshoot would have to stop immediately and accelerate nearly two times faster towards planetary boundaries to safeguard Earth-system stability by 2050. 

[…]

Fanning & Raworth, 2025

Translation: “Although global gross domestic product (GDP) has more than doubled,” we don’t feel good about it and want GDP replaced with something that makes us feel better.

Here’s the “Doughnut of Prosperity”…

The inner ring of the doughnut is their arbitrary estimate a “social foundation.” The wedges inside the inner ring are their arbitrary shortfalls below that foundation. The outer ring of the doughnut is their arbitrary estimate of a planetary “ecological ceiling”… a “pre-industrial Holocene baseline.” The wedges are there arbitrary estimates of how much capitalism has caused overshoots above the “pre-industrial Holocene baseline.”

Obviously, the cost of fixing climate change, biodiversity breakdown, land conversion, freshwater disruption, nutrient pollution (WTF?), chemical pollution and shoring up the “social foundation” will be irrelevant if we simply start measuring prosperity with their “Doughnut of Prosperity” rather than good old US dollars… Brings a whole new meaning the the phrase “dollars to doughnuts.” Or maybe not a new meaning. Doughnuts are considered to be worthless in this rhetorical device… Despite the fact that doughnuts often cost more than $1 each.

Anyway, I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that George Orwell would have this to say about the “Doughnut of Prosperity.”

Reference

Fanning, A.L., Raworth, K. Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries monitors a world out of balance. Nature 646, 47–56 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09385-1

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