Paul Samuelson (1915-2009) was an American economist and Nobel laureate often called the “father of modern economics” (15). His 1948 textbook, Economics, became the most influential introductory text of the 20th century, shaping the education of millions of students worldwide. Raworth presents Samuelson as the chief architect of the visual language that came to define mainstream economics. While his technical work was highly mathematical, his textbook was designed for the masses and relied heavily on diagrams to communicate core concepts.

Raworth focuses on Samuelson’s creation of the Circular Flow diagram to illustrate how he established the dominant mental model of the macroeconomy. Originally written to teach engineering students, the textbook used metaphors drawn from mechanics and plumbing, depicting income as water flowing through pipes between households and businesses. This visual framing, Raworth argues, had profound consequences. It presented the economy as a self-contained system, isolated from society and the living world, with no mention of the energy and materials required to power it. The diagram’s depiction of the market as the central arena for provisioning set the stage for later neoliberal narratives that championed market efficiency while marginalizing the roles of the state, the household, and the commons.

In Raworth’s analysis, Samuelson’s influence demonstrates the power of visual framing in shaping economic thought. She notes that Samuelson understood this power, quoting his declaration: “I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws—or crafts its advanced treatises—so long as I can write its economics textbooks” (18). Raworth’s purpose in featuring Samuelson is to show how his seemingly innocuous diagrams became “graffiti on the mind” (13), embedding a narrow and outdated worldview that today’s economists must actively scrub out and replace.

Simon Kuznets (1901-1985) was a Russian American economist and Nobel laureate who developed the first national income accounts for the United States. In Doughnut Economics, he is a pivotal and complex figure who plays a dual role: he created the metric that became the “cuckoo in the economic nest” (GDP) but also warned against its misuse and developed an influential theory about inequality (28). Raworth argues this model is ultimately incorrect.

Raworth first presents Kuznets as the inventor of Gross National Product (GNP), the forerunner to GDP, in the 1930s. This metric proved invaluable during the Great Depression and World War II, allowing policymakers to monitor and manage the national economy. However, Kuznets himself was acutely aware of its limitations. Raworth highlights his early warnings that “the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income” (34), as it excluded unpaid household labor and gave no indication of how income was distributed. By showcasing Kuznets’s own caveats, Raworth demonstrates that the subsequent political obsession with GDP growth was a distortion of its creator’s original intent.

Kuznets is also central to the book’s critique of outdated thinking on inequality. In 1955, he proposed the theory that became known as the Kuznets Curve, an inverted-U showing that inequality must first rise during industrialization before it eventually falls as an economy matures. Raworth explains that this theory, based on what Kuznets himself admitted was “5 per cent empirical information and 95 per cent speculation” (142), became economic dogma. It provided a convenient justification for enduring social pain in the name of future gain. Raworth seeks to debunk the curve with modern data, showing it is not a law of development but a historical anomaly. Her purpose is to dismantle the myth that rising inequality is a necessary phase of progress, arguing instead that it is a failure of economic design.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was a British philosopher and political economist who played a crucial role in shaping the identity of modern economics. Raworth identifies him as the first “economic caricaturist,” responsible for narrowing the discipline’s focus and sketching the first influential portrait of Homo economicus, or Rational Economic Man.

Raworth explains that Mill, writing in the 1840s, sought to make political economy more scientific. To do so, he proposed that it should not treat “the whole of man’s nature” but should instead focus on a simplified version of humanity concerned “solely as a being who desires to possess wealth” (84). Mill admitted this was an “arbitrary definition of man” but argued it was a necessary abstraction for scientific inquiry (84).

This act of simplification, Raworth argues, was a pivotal moment. By paring down the complexity of human motivation to a few key traits—the desire for wealth, a dislike of work, and a love of luxuries—Mill created a predictable character that could be modeled mathematically. This caricature laid the foundation for later, more extreme depictions of Rational Economic Man. Raworth’s purpose in including Mill is to trace the origins of the flawed protagonist at the heart of mainstream economics and to show that this narrow view of humanity was a deliberate, and ultimately damaging, theoretical choice.

Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) was an Austrian British economist and philosopher, best known as a leading figure of the neoliberal movement and a key intellectual opponent of John Maynard Keynes. Raworth presents him as a co-author of the 20th-century economic script that championed market fundamentalism.

Hayek was a founding member of the Mont Pelerin Society, a group of laissez-faire thinkers who gathered in 1947 to draft a “neoliberal” agenda to counter the rise of state planning and collectivism. Raworth positions this group, and Hayek within it, as the playwrights who scripted the dominant economic story of the late 20th century, which placed the market at the center of the economic stage and characterized the state as incompetent and meddlesome.

However, Raworth also uses Hayek for a more subtle purpose. She notes that despite their deep disagreements, Hayek and Keynes concurred on the dangerous level of authority that economists had acquired. Raworth highlights Hayek’s 1974 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which he stated his opposition to the prize itself because “the Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess” (6). By quoting Hayek, Raworth demonstrates that even the intellectual father of neoliberalism recognized the ideological power and potential for error within his own profession, strengthening her case for a more humble and pluralistic approach to economics.

Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012) was an American political scientist and the first woman to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Raworth presents her as a crucial figure for challenging one of the core tenets of 20th-century economic thinking: the “tragedy of the commons” (22).

For decades, economists relied on Garrett Hardin’s 1968 theory, which asserted that shared resources like pastures or fisheries are inevitably overexploited and depleted. This belief was used to justify either state regulation or, more often, privatization as the only solutions. Ostrom’s work provided a counter-narrative. By conducting extensive field research on communities from Southern California to Nepal, she demonstrated that people can, and frequently do, create their own rules and institutions to sustainably and equitably manage common-pool resources.

Raworth uses Ostrom’s findings to legitimize the commons as a vital fourth realm of provisioning, alongside the household, market, and state, in her “Embedded Economy” diagram. Ostrom’s research proved that self-organizing communities can often outperform both state and market solutions. By highlighting Ostrom’s work, Raworth’s purpose is to move beyond the simplistic state-versus-market dichotomy and to argue for unleashing the creative and distributive potential of the commons in designing 21st-century economies.

Donella Meadows (1941-2001) was an American environmental scientist, author, and pioneer of systems thinking. She was a lead author of the influential 1972 report The Limits to Growth, which used a dynamic computer model to explore the long-term consequences of exponential growth in population and economic output on a finite planet.

Raworth presents Meadows as a visionary thinker who challenged the dominant paradigm of endless GDP growth decades before it became a mainstream concern. Meadows argued that growth was “one of the stupidest purposes ever invented” and insisted on asking critical questions like “growth of what, and why, and for whom, and who pays the cost?” (35). Her work introduced systems thinking into public debate, revealing how feedback loops, stocks, flows, and delays create complex, often unpredictable behavior in economic and ecological systems.

Meadows’s concept of “leverage points”—places in a complex system where a small shift can produce big changes—is central to Raworth’s own approach. Raworth adopts this idea to argue for changing the goals of the economic system, a high-leverage intervention. By featuring Meadows, Raworth honors a forerunner of ecological economics and champions systems dynamics as an essential tool for stewarding the economy as a complex, evolving organism rather than attempting to control it like a simple machine.

Janine Benyus is an American biologist, innovation consultant, and author best known for popularizing the concept of biomimicry. Raworth features her as a leading voice for regenerative design, a core principle for creating economies that can bring humanity back within planetary boundaries.

Benyus argues that 3.8 billion years of evolution have produced ingenious and sustainable solutions to many of the challenges humans now face. The core of her philosophy is to look to nature as a “model, measure, and mentor” (186). By studying and mimicking life’s cyclical processes, she asserts that people can design products, cities, and industries that are not just “less bad” but actively beneficial to the living world. Raworth highlights this approach as the foundation of a truly regenerative economy, one that moves beyond simply aiming for zero impact.

Raworth focuses on Benyus’s concept of creating “generous cities” and industries that give back to the ecosystems they inhabit. For instance, a building could be designed to sequester carbon, purify air, and create wildlife habitats, thereby performing with the generosity of “the wildland next door” (186). Benyus’s work provides a tangible vision for the “be generous” ambition on Raworth’s corporate to-do list, illustrating how businesses can become full participants in regenerating Earth’s cycles. Her ideas serve as a cornerstone for Raworth’s sixth way to think: create to regenerate.

Adam Smith (1723-1790) was a Scottish economist and philosopher widely regarded as the father of modern economics. Raworth presents Smith not as an icon to be revered, but as a complex thinker whose nuanced insights were oversimplified by later generations of economists to justify free-market ideology.

While Smith is famous for his concept of the “invisible hand” from The Wealth of Nations, Raworth emphasizes the broader context of his work, particularly The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In that earlier book, Smith explored humanity’s capacity for empathy, justice, and public spirit. Raworth argues that Smith never considered humans to be motivated by self-interest alone; instead, he saw a complex moral character shaped by both self-regard and concern for others. By presenting this fuller picture, Raworth critiques the one-dimensional portrayal of Smith as a champion of pure self-interest, asserting that later economists selectively plucked the ideas that suited their mechanistic models.

Milton Friedman (1912-2006) was an American economist, a Nobel laureate, and a leading figure in the neoliberal Mont Pelerin Society. Raworth presents him as a key scriptwriter of the 20th-century economic story that prioritized market forces and corporate profits above all else.

Friedman is featured as the chief proponent of the idea that “the business of business is business” (59), a philosophy that promoted shareholder primacy and argued against corporate social responsibility. He also defended the highly abstract model of Homo economicus, arguing that its unrealistic assumptions were legitimate because people behaved as if they were perfectly rational calculators. Raworth uses Friedman to personify the market-fundamentalist ideology that she argues has brought the world to the brink of social and ecological collapse, making him a central figure whose ideas must be overturned.

John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) was a highly influential British economist whose ideas fundamentally changed macroeconomic theory and policy in the mid-20th century. Raworth portrays him as a brilliant and revolutionary thinker who, despite his innovations, still struggled to break free from the deeply ingrained assumptions of his time.

Raworth highlights Keynes’s own words describing the “struggle of escape from habitual modes of thought and expression” (19). This demonstrates how difficult it is to shed old paradigms, a central challenge for today’s economists as well. Furthermore, Raworth notes that Keynes, like John Stuart Mill, anticipated a future in which economic growth would solve the “economic problem,” allowing humanity to focus on “the problems of life and of human relations” (213). This foresight places him as an ally in imagining a post-growth or growth-agnostic future, making his legacy more complex than his traditional association with managing growth would suggest.