The economy's job is to create a safe and just space for us!

Every time a politician or newscaster refers to 'our' need to save the economy an alarm bell rings in my head. It should in yours, too.

The role of the economy is to prioritise the creation of a safe and just space for humanity.

It's not to deliver GDP or shareholder value. They follow.

If you follow the wrong kpis, you behave the wrong way. The UK's Johnson government is not alone in getting this wrong. It's a global narrative which has grown with the adoption of GDP as a measure of success. A, literally, toxic measure for the planet. Your people can be dieing early from pollution with close correlation to GDP rising, for example. Hardly a wise relationship between resource and need.

As we continue to hurtle headlong through what the UN decribes as The Decisive Decade we have to reclaim this narrative in order to re-establish the correct order or things (expressed in diagram form, here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/never-all-economy-stupid-david-cushman/.

As identified in Doughnut Economics and enshrined in the UN Sustainable Development Goals,

Our role isn't to save the economy. It's the economy's job to create a safe and just space for us!

The stories we tell, the language we use, it has deep power to shape the way we think, respond and behave. I am hopeful that it has the power to transform how we see our relationship with the ecosystem we reside in, too.

So let's start challenging our politicians and our media each time we hear them use the language of subservience to the economy.  It is not your master, we are its. It only exists to do our bidding - to allocate resources as effectively as possible to create a safe and just space for us.

The 'economy' is what emerges from all the interactions of resource and humans. We can shape towards more positive (safe and just) outcomes for us only when we realise our ownership of it and take back control.

That starts with shifting our point of view, changing the way we talk about success, encouraging new measures of success aligned to the unveiled reality that we are the masters of the economy and we control it to do our bidding.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash