So the problem begins right on day one.

When I give talks about donut economics to groups of students or in midlife executives,

I'll often say, what's the first diagram you remember learning in economics?

And it's the same the world over. It's a planned demand.

That's Kate Rayworth. She calls herself a renegade economist. A few years ago,

she sat down and drew a new economics chart in the shape of a donut.

Her chart includes the whole picture, not just of what we buy and sell,

but the parts of our lives that mainstream economics often leaves out or oversimplifies.

For example, here's how she looks at this story about Vietnamese farming communities.

There are parts of rural Vietnam where they're famous for their rice paddy fields.

And these households aren't particularly well off and so somebody had an idea like,

hey, let's have them come and having homestay tourists. You get to stay with a family,

you get to be there, great. And it did well. And it expands. And it expands.

That's good, right? I mean, growth means everyone is better off.

And now it's expanded to the point that those families are utterly dependent upon the income

from the whole state to us. And actually, they're not really doing the farming.

So they're sort of having to just try and maintain it so it still looks good.

So it's almost becomes a mirage of what it is that people are coming to visit.

That real thing has been lost in this sheer fact of their arrival in numbers.

The literal and figurative soil beneath their feet has been neglected and discarded.

The substrate of these people's lives has become just slightly and subtly more shaky.

But they have a new economic foundation so they seem to be getting by.

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