What is the economy for?

I went to see a film called Purpose and came out thinking about what the economy is actually for. For most of my working life the answer has been treated as obvious. Growth is the goal, so GDP should rise along with profits and productivity, and anything that gets in the way is either a cost to cut or a problem for later. The question I kept returning to on the way home was simpler than that and harder to shake: growth of what, and for whom?

Two frameworks have shaped how I think about it more than any others. Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics pictures a safe and just space for humanity, a ring between a social foundation that nobody should fall below and an ecological ceiling that none of us should push through. The wellbeing economy, championed by the Wellbeing Economy Alliance and set out in The Economics of Arrival by Katherine Trebeck and Jeremy Williams, takes the idea further, towards an economy designed for care, connection, fairness and regeneration, where success is measured by how well we thrive rather than how fast we grow.

What I find most useful is the way these ideas sit inside one another. Meeting human needs with dignity is the practical part, and it’s the part most policy is written about: health, education, meaningful work and communities that can hold people through hard times. That work only lasts if it happens within the limits of the living world, which is why regeneration matters as much as distribution. And both depend on something economics rarely talks about at all, the intention underneath, the sense of what life is for that decides what we bother to measure in the first place.

Through a systems lens

Here I step back from the story to look at the system it belongs to, how the same pattern shows up elsewhere, and where it sits in the Coherence Framework.

That deeper layer is where my own work lives. When the intention behind a system is growth for its own sake, the same pattern shows up at every scale. In an economy it looks like extraction counted as success. In an organisation it looks like purpose-driven teams running on the same incentives as everyone else, with the most committed people absorbing the most cost. Inside a person it looks like worth measured in output, and rest that has to be earned before it can be taken, and the parts of us that don’t produce anything, our tenderness, our grief for a living world being spent faster than it can recover, our need to belong to something larger than a job, are the first to be exiled.

Older traditions never separated these questions the way we have. Many Indigenous and contemplative ways of knowing hold the care of people, the care of land and the care of spirit as a single practice, and would see an economy that forgets any one of them as out of balance rather than merely inefficient. Part of what I think we’re being asked to do now is remember that, and let it shape the systems we build instead of leaving it to the private hours of people who are already exhausted.

Part of why I co-founded SIX was to build financial tools that fit inside the doughnut, where money serves life rather than the other way round and every shareholder action becomes a small vote for a different answer to the question. It was never only about investing differently. It’s about imagining what finance could look like if its purpose was wellbeing, and then having the nerve to design for it.

We’re living through a time that asks us to rethink what we measure and what we choose to grow, and I suspect that’s where real progress begins, not with a bigger number but with a better question.