Welcome to the Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Roberts, and I'm the editor-in-chief of

Current Affairs Magazine.

My guest today is economist Kate Rayworth.

She is a self-described renegade economist,

who is the creator of a new paradigm for economics.

She calls Donut Economics,

and she's the author of the best-selling book, Donut Economics. Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist, which has been translated

into over 20 languages. She is a senior associate at Oxford University's Environmental

Change Institute, and as well as being Professor of Practice at Amsterdam University

of Applied Sciences.

Professor Rayworth, thank you so much for joining me today.

Oh, my pleasure.

So what your book and your work does is you not only poke holes in and show how the prevailing concepts of mainstream economics

are limited and in fact destructive if followed rigidly, but you try to think about new ways, new ideas that we can replace our problematic

economic concepts with.

And where I want to start with you, though, is to ask you, in your economics education,

as you came to the discipline, where were the first places in which you began to notice sort of

cracks or problems or inconsistencies in the things you were being taught that led to the

kinds of frustrations that you had to grapple with that eventually led to your work in developing these alternatives.

Right. So I didn't study economics at school. I encountered it first when I went to university.

And so I was on a very eager game of catch-up to learn everything that many of my peers had

already studied for two years. So I devoured my textbooks.

...