Hey there podcast listeners. In our last two episodes, we talked about the economic impact

of the private equity industry, which has been rolling up small businesses into conglomerates

and loading up established companies with death. Sometimes this has positive consequences

and sometimes negative. The main question we've been asking is whether private equity investors

are just extracting value or growing the pie. But what if that's the wrong question to

ask? A couple years ago in the early months of the COVID pandemic, a lot of people were

rethinking the very model of a modern major economy and we talked to some of these people for

an episode called is economic growth the wrong goal. We are revisiting that episode today

with some updated information. I hope you enjoy it. I grew up on the outskirts of London.

My mum was florist. My dad was a businessman. I didn't really know much about that. It's

Kate Rayworth. I am a renegade economist passionate about rewriting economics. It needs to

be rewritten. Let's do it. Rayworth teaches at Oxford University's

Environmental Change Institute. She admits that as a kid, she was a bit sheltered. I've

led a happy, pretty innocent life saw the world on the TV news and it was much bigger than

the world I lived in. Through that TV screen, Rayworth saw the Ethiopian famine of the early

1980s which killed an estimated one million people. She saw the widening hole in the ozone

layer and other environmental problems. And I thought economics would be the subject to help me

have the tools to help sort it out. Boy were you wrong. Was I so wrong? Rayworth did go

on to study economics at Oxford. She learned all the foundational knowledge she was asked to learn.

She memorized the diagrams. She was asked to memorize. She felt she had a pretty good grip on

basic theories like supply and demand but she was frustrated. There just was no option to study

anything. Environmental. It didn't exist. It gradually began to creep up from me that that was a

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