Welcome to the For Love and Money podcast, the show where business and social purpose meet to inspire a movement for positive change. Here's your host, Carolyn Butler-Madden. Today's guest is someone whose voice and vision are shaping a bold new economic future. Katherine Trebek is a political economist, writer, and passionate advocate for economic system change.
She's the co-founder of the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, known as WEAL, a global movement to transform our economies so they truly serve people and planet. She also co-founded WEAll Scotland and played a key role in initiating the Wellbeing Economy Governments Partnership, or WEGO, bringing governments together to explore alternatives to GDP-led growth.
In our conversation today, Katherine unpacks what a wellbeing economy is, why it matters now more than ever, and how business can be a powerful force in building it. We also talk about the rise of far-right populism, the ripple effects of economic disempowerment, and what gives her hope for the future. This episode is thoughtful, deeply human, and quietly revolutionary.
I hope it inspires you to reflect and, more importantly, to act on the role you and your organisation can play in creating a more compassionate, connected, and sustainable economy. Let's dive in. Katherine, welcome to the For Love and Money podcast. Thank you so much for joining us. I've been looking forward to this conversation hugely. Oh, thank you. I'm delighted to be here since we sort of first met many, many years ago when I was living in Scotland and you had zoomed into a conversation.
I think it's sort of 2am, 3am in the morning. So it's great to pick up from that. Yeah, absolutely. It's something like seven years on, but there you go. I've followed your journey along the way. So I'll kick off with the question I asked. This is the For Love and Money podcast. So the big question is, what's your view? Is there a role for love in business? Absolutely. Yeah. I think if it's love of creativity, love of collaboration, love of working together, often love of place.
So many enterprises are about serving their place, their local community. Love of service, but perhaps not love of money for its own sake, but seeing creating a viable business as a mechanism for other things. And if love is at the heart of those other things, then yeah, I think definitely. Have you ever had anyone who says no to that? Ah, interesting. Well, no, I had someone who said, he said, well, I don't know about that. He was American.
Okay. And he was a real character. It was the founder of, the creator of Dave's Killer Bread. So he had a background of being, you know, in the prison system four times and all of this sort of stuff. And he was like, well, yeah, I don't know. I think that's a bridge too far. And then as the interview unfolded, things that he was saying, it was just love, love, love. And I'm like, hey, Dave. Yeah. Hello. I got you. So many of the most exciting enterprises have these passionate people.
And I think passion is almost like a proxy for people who are driven by love and something that's really important for them. And whether it's love of creating craft beer or love of making the world a better place or love of treating the environment differently, I think that absolutely is a spot. And maybe it's not out there explicitly, but what matters is that people have love in their soul and in their guts and their work. And to be open to discovering it.
I mean, I think of purpose simply as love of people and planet. Like you care enough about people and planet to want to make things better. right? And I just think we have been so preconditioned to being professional, which means leaving emotions behind. And I don't know, I think it's intuitive. We are connected. So, of course, we're going to care about each other. And the macro version of that is that we see society and the economy as separate things.
Yet, of course, they're so interconnected, The same way people don't go to work and suddenly shed all their principles and their passion and their ethics and their concerns for their family. So I think those, as you say, these artificial, conditional, the way we've been conditioned into seeing these artificial barriers, probably is partly how we've got ourselves in the strife our planet faces at the moment.
A hundred percent. And false binaries and we've stopped being able to see over into the other sphere. And it's only when you stop... And actually take time to discuss it with an open mind. Like, you know, the economy is supposed to serve society's needs. Not the other way around. So, yes, anyway, I know this is going to be an interesting chat, but I want you to share a little bit about your background for our listeners. So you've had a really rich journey across academia, policy, activism.
Can you share a little bit about your background and some of the key moments that have brought you to where you are today. I love that you've ended with those words because one of my favourite Scottish phrases is your feet will bring you to where your heart is. And so my confession is I don't think I've ever been very deliberate about a career. I don't think I've ever been very strategic.
I've just followed where things sound interesting and feel important and where I can work with people I'm proud of. That to me actually is one of the ultimate privileges and to be able to do work that aligns to your values. I mean, I feel that's one of the most incredible privileges on the planet. How fortunate to be able to get up and make a living by working on activities that you care about and love and then work with cool people doing so. So yes, my little crazy, funny.
Weird journey, I sort of started, I did a PhD many, many years ago when I was working as a very, very young person at Rio Tinto, and I was really interested at the time in how Rio was grappling with its relations with Aboriginal communities around its mine site. And that really just...
Helped me see how incredible passionate individuals could mobilize the operating environment to bring about, at the time, this was in the 90s, extraordinary positive impact, and often where government was pretty absent at the time the company was going a lot further than what government was prepared to do. That is one of the many rabbit warrens you and I could go down this afternoon, you know, oh, back there.
Because then what I did is for no career orientation move at all, But just because I fell in love with Scotland, I moved to Glasgow and picked up a job at a university and then worked for a social enterprise for a while. And then I spent about 10 years almost in different ways working with Oxfam in different policy roles facing Scotland, facing UK, and then part of the global research team.
And what was extraordinary, moving to Glasgow that Glasgow, many of your listeners might know, used to be the second biggest city of the British Empire. And now when you land into Glasgow Airport, one of the first signs that meets you is, welcome to Scotland's biggest shopping destination. And that is a microcosm of incredible economic transformation that that city has gone through.
And the recent years of sort of de-industrialisation, people having, and communities having the economic guts pulled out from underneath them and the loss of identity that goes with that. And then this emergence of a hyper-consumerist culture where it's all about drinking Cosmopolitans in trendy bars and wearing the right clothing. And that has had a very, very real impact on people's lives.
And there's research that I found incredibly compelling that really caused me to look at the macroeconomic system was research that highlighted the extraordinary health inequalities and life expectancy inequalities, even within Glasgow itself. So my first job was at the university and I'm a Canberran, so I have a very low commuting threshold. So I lived in that part of the town, west end of the city.
So I wanted to be able to walk to my job at the uni. and then just the far side to the east of the city, you're talking a gap of life expectancy of about 15, 14 years between where I lived and where just the other side. Wow, that's significant. Yeah, and it got worse and worse the further east you went. And when I joined Oxfam, it was about the time of the Haiti earthquake and people know Haiti as what's often described as a failed state or a fragile state.
At the time, the life expectancy in Haiti was about 64. There were parts of Glasgow where the life expectancy was 54. Wow. And this sort of just prompted all these questions around what is it about the way the economy is operating, who is winning and who's losing out of the economy, how it's constraining or enabling choices for different people, how we think about economic success and how we think about it.
All those different questions swirling around, and a lot of that really fed my sense of questioning the economic model. And then my time with Oxfam, of course, Oxfam's an organization that works on global justice. And I saw that the way a lot of progress that had been achieved in terms of development and poverty reduction was being put at risk because of the environmental challenges.
And the way countries like the UK were, in a way, eating up more than their fair share of ecological room, which was implicitly saying inequalities are going to remain baked into the global system. And so that caused me to really look at the economic models of places like the UK, US, Australia, because that's the belly of the beast. And often their economic systems are often held up as the model for everyone else to follow.
And yet here I was in Glasgow where things weren't going well for so many people, despite being in this country that in GDP terms was the sixth richest country in the world. So all these questions were swirling around. And then after that, as those questions were swirling around, a beautiful... Called Stuart Wallace, who used to head up the New Economics Foundation in London. He used to work for the World Bank. He's led incredible businesses. He's spent time as deputy director of Oxfam.
He was asked to come out of retirement to set up something that became called the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. And he asked me to give him a hand with that. And so I left Oxfam, you know, moving from a big organization to a startup. And again, many of your listeners will be familiar with how challenging that transition can be. So when was this? What year was this? That was 2017-2018. Okay.
All right. So not that long ago. No. And what's been incredible is seeing how we all, as at Wellbeing Economy Alliance, abbreviates to it kind of like the theory of change through collaboration. We can talk about that later. It's been on. It's had an amazing success and more and more people coming to be part of it and local hubs bubbling up, including one here in Australia. And I carried on with that for a few years and loved it and really met amazing people.
But it was time to come back to Australia for various reasons, probably best summed up by that I was missing the smell of eucalyptus and all that that symbolises. And so moved back to here in Canberra, Ngunnawal and Ngambri country, where I've been living back in my hometown for the last couple of years and still figuring where I can be useful. But I've met amazing people and amazing businesses and amazing folks who are really asking similar questions to those that I've been asking.
So it's been fun and interesting, the transition back to a show. It sounds, and I can imagine. So when we met, you would have been early on in the We All journey. Yes, I suspect it was during COVID and so I was sort of transitioning out of We All at the time, but still, I mean, still very related and the work still is, that I do now in all its sort of diversity is united by this question of how can we create an economy that's better for people and planet.
And I still have a little connection to Scotland, which is lovely through the University of Edinburgh. Where I'm something called, and I think this is the best job title ever, Writer at Large. I saw that on LinkedIn. I'm like, what does that mean? It kind of sounds like a bit like Writer on the Loose, doesn't it? I mean, it's very practical because it was going to be Writer in Residence,
but they took so long to get it going. By the time it kicked off, I was back in Australia, and so we thought, oh, it's not really in residence. So what I do there is I teach a master's course on the wellbeing economy. I'm part of a new initiative called the Compassion in Financial Services Hub. And I really am exploring how compassion and the economy come together. What are the lessons from those two fields? And again, we can dig into that later. I love that.
I love that. That's a lot of fun. So let's kick off with, you mentioned it before, the theory of change, Weeall's theory of change. I think that would be a really good place to start. Yeah, so We All, I describe it as having many mothers in that lots of, many, many different organisations and individuals were part of starting We All and they recognised that there was loads and loads of folk around the world working to help make the economy more humane and more sustainable.
There were businesses who were rolling up their sleeves and delivering it and proving that it's possible. There were people in government trying to change policies and various policy instruments to help enable change to come about. There were activists, academics building the evidence base. There were all sorts of networks trying to sort of hasten this movement.
And yet a little bit like water in a river and the rocks in a river, when those rocks aren't connected, the water of business as usual just carries on around them. But the sense was we need all this diversity of incredible action and probably different emphasis and terminology, but we need to bring it together a little bit more to hopefully have a bit more impact.
And so we all, it was really about almost being the connective tissue, you know, that amazing, amazing work, whether it's in government, in enterprises, in communities, in academia. And it also helps people who are sort of working away who can feel really lonely.
When you all say the lone voice in a business that is headlong into maybe focusing too much on short-term profits and not protecting the environment or taking care of workers, but if you're the lone person or maybe you're the one who's able to articulate it and others aren't for various reasons, it can feel very lonely. And so a lot of people who've come into We All's movement and membership have often said, oh, I found my people. This is like coming home.
And I think that's a really important contribution, too, because... Gosh, we could talk about when you're trying to change the system and the system bites back and you can be very vicious in that. And so to have an organization that supports people and helps them feel that they are part of something bigger and they can learn from each other and be inspired by each other and have each other's back a bit. That's essentially what's behind We All.
And they do talks, they do members meetings, they publish summaries of some key ideas, they work with government. They've got an amazing policy makers training that's just gone live. It's a free, incredible course. And they have these hubs over, I think, 19 now hubs bubbling up around. Yeah, from Scotland to South Africa, from Ireland to California, and here in Australia. It's a fairly new one in Australia, but our friends over in New Zealand have
got a very well-established hub that's just doing incredible work. Oh, really? And so what does it look like? So let's talk about New Zealand, for example. pool, if they're doing really good work, what actions are coming out of the Hub? So the Hub's bringing together all sorts of folk. They had a huge conference last year called The Economy for the Public Good, which I went over and supported.
And one of the brilliant things they did there, because it was the anniversary, it must have been what, the 30th anniversary or 40th anniversary of sort of the shift to neoliberalism. And so they came out with this fabulous video with roller skating and 80s music. Let's leave neoliberalism in the past. Let's leave it in the 80s. And here's what could better could look like. And so they really are spotlighting great work that's happening. They're lobbying government.
They're supporting knowledge development. So things like the community wealth building agenda, which is essentially building the economic multiplier from community up through local ownership, procurement, local employment, and so on. So they're really developing a knowledge base and a practice base around that. And again, it's helping people. Folks who might otherwise feel a little bit on their own feel connected. And people might use different terminology for economic change.
In a way, I see the wellbeing economy term as a little bit like a sort of picnic blanket term on which all these different schools of thought. So there might be folk who are passionate about economic democracy or the solidarity economy or regenerative economics, bonnet economics, whatever you gravitate to, brilliant.
And in a way, the wellbeing economy me is about saying let's really hold on to our common core themes underneath that with all that slightly different emphasis different language which is entirely brilliant I'm all up for that plurality I don't think there's one narrative that will nail it but I think there is something important about saying yeah we do share some common core themes and core concerns yeah it's it's really interesting because that
idea of bringing people together that that that's something that I've been doing with my partner in purpose, Phil Preston. And we've just been hosting these intimate dinner events and, you know, inviting people, they're small, they're intimate, they're curated conversations. And people come a little bit unsure of what to expect. But the most amazing thing is they recognize each other.
Do you know what I mean? They recognize as themselves and that worldview and that shared narrative that where we are is not good enough and they're trying to figure it out and that's part of our role is tackling that you are not alone. You know, and together by sharing, you know, our experiences we can do so much more and that's just on a small level.
So to do it in the way that you've been doing it around the world I think is amazing and ours is really more business focused whereas yours is wider isn't the well-being economy whoever I mean it's if it's businesses absolutely but it's it's academics it's community organizers policy policymakers as well that's what you need to shift it yeah because no one person has all the answers no one move or policy shift will nail it you need a whole suite of actions
from the local right up to the supranational in business in government in community so you everyone I think is part of this there's a beautiful when they're speaking of New Zealand there's a beautiful Maori phrase which translated to English means if everyone plays their part the job will be done and I think that's really critical and I look I won't pretend that it's easy.
I bear the scars of people saying, you're taking the wrong approach, or you need to use my language, or you're too close to government, or you're not close enough to government. And I mean, all of that. And I. I don't think I would ever want to work for a membership organization again because it's incredibly difficult. But the flip side of that is just meeting the most extraordinary people who in really diverse locations share this passion.
That there's almost sharing this sense that we can dare to imagine an economy that's better for people and planet. And that kind of counters all the struggle and the frustration and, yeah, tears at night and so on sometimes. And I imagine it would be in a membership organisation, you would have to deal with a lot of judgment because people care deeply about this. Oh, yes. Yes. It's not something that they can just, you know, let go. By definition. And people are giving up a lot to work on this.
I mean, I think this is not the easy option. For folk to try to change the system and figure out their place in changing the way things are done to challenge received wisdom. It's really difficult. And so the easy option is kind of to go along with those waters of business as usual that I mentioned earlier. What's harder is standing in the middle of that stream and saying, actually, we need to do things profoundly differently.
I'm not trying to paint myself as a hero here at all, but what I'm trying to paint as a hero, I guess, is the movement, not myself as an individual. No, I understand that. So what does the wellbeing economy look like? Yeah, at its most basic, and it's your words that you used earlier, it's an economy that serves people rather than the other way around. I think we've got a ton of evidence today that the current economic system is not taking care of enough people.
We see wealth going to those who have already got it, similar cohort of folks whose consumption patterns, investment decisions are responsible for a lot of the environmental damage. There's huge inequality in terms of it is who's treading most heavily on the planet. And so we see, I'd say, Mother Nature being pushed towards breaking point. And we see examples of that every day in our news or in our neighborhoods.
And we see people feeling that they don't have control over their lives, feeling a sense of despair, atomization, loneliness. And then we see them reaching for coping mechanisms at the sort of metaphorical pillbox and all that that metaphor conjures up but also at the ballot box with the rise of, I mean, let's be honest, fascists in certain parliaments around the world.
And so if you take that as almost the problem statement that the current system is not working for enough people and it's pushing the planet beyond a safe place, the wellbeing economy is about not just patching up, important though that is, it's about saying we have to really transform the way the economy operates.
And when I say the economy, because there's lots of different sort of understandings of the economy and its most beautiful definition is going back to the Greek word of household management. And then you think of the household as the planet, that wider society, future generations, and you think of management, but also about taking care of the resources. So that big expansive idea of economy and you think around, okay, there's different ways we do that, different ways we provide for each other.
But I often think what's really important is things like the nature of businesses, how what we tax, how we measure success, often it's defaulted into gross domestic product with all the perverse incentives there.
Really the nature of jobs how we produce and consume so there's a hell of a lot of changes required and if people were just to sort of think about well what would what would a good healthy neighborhood look for like what would i often use them the example of you know a context where the number of girls riding their bikes to school is going up so what's going on there parents have enough money the streets are safe there's local
services people are you know parents are able to afford breakfast for their schools and for their daughters and so on. The economy really matters to that. It's what sort of jobs are those parents able to access? Who's providing those local services? Are the streets polluted and so on? How are we using resources? And so think about all the different changes that are needed. And it's a bit like a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle, but you can cluster like you do when you're doing a jigsaw puzzle.
You start with the corners so you can loosely cluster all those changes into what I call the four P's of the economy in practice. And I'll rattle through these fairly quickly because you've got so many great questions to carry on talking about. But the four P's are purpose, prevention, predistribution, and people powered.
And so purpose is really, to be honest, getting our heads around the difference between means and ends and seeing the economy and growth not as a goal in its own right, but as a possible means to get to the ends we're really wanting. So it means we don't think about just faster, faster quarterly increases in GDP, but we have a slightly more qualitative conversation around, okay, what do we need more of? And also, what do we need less of? Because it's not good for people and planet.
And there's a sort of business equivalent of that too, perhaps profitability as a means rather than the end in and of itself. And then you see lots of governments who are broadening out their measures of progress through multidimensional well-being frameworks. Australia has its measure in what matters statement now.
The next corner is prevention. And this is really saying, if we're really honest with a lot of, looking at a lot of government spending, it's downstream after the fact healing repairing cleaning up and there's a phrase that we use to describe that that comes from management literature actually called failure demand that a lot of demand on governments at various levels of government are driven by a collective failure to take care of people ecological economists and we'll talk about defensive
expenditure and you can you know you only have to think about we've had cyclone alfred here last month all the repairing after you know damage to buildings or cleaning up. I was in Lismore last week or cleaning up after the Lismore floods a few years ago and rehousing people. And that creates a whole industries in and of itself, doesn't it? I'm also thinking of like immigration and the offshore detention and, you know, those sorts of things.
And prison systems, there's an incredibly sad concept that comes out from Harvard economists talking about guard labour. and in places in the U.S. There are cities where more people are employed in guard labor, so security guards in prison systems and building munitions, than there are employed as teachers. Yeah, wow, wow. What world are we in now?
So the failure demand is we spend a lot of this downstream, homeless shelters, a lot of mental health therapies, a lot of accident and emergency, criminal justice system and so on. And so this is a long way of coming to my second corner, but which is the prevention bit is saying we have to do better than simply doing.
Spending money on those downstream band-aids and we have to ask what are the causes why people lonely why people needing homelessness shelters why people need needing mental health therapies and actually take action upstream so whether that's better jobs more circular economy so we don't have to do you know plastic cleanups from our beaches and waterways and so on more renewable energy so we don't have to spend money on carbon capture sequestration and storage i mean there's a ton of examples.
The next one is predistribution. And that's essentially saying, well, of course, governments work through redistribution to reduce the gap between rich and poor is important through taxes and transfers and so on. But one that takes a lot of political argy-bargy, and we know in Australia that's pretty problematic, there's also often a lot of stigma associated with increasing welfare payments.
I mean, in the UK, there's been a horrible debate around, you know, people who are receiving welfare as strivers and skydivers. It's just awful. And in Australia, the government reduces the gap between rich and poor by about a third, which to me feels like quite a heavy lift. And so redistribution is saying, well, how can we get the market to do more of the heavy lifting? How can it generate a better balance of resources from the beginning?
And so things you'd expect to see in this corner of the jigsaw puzzle would be things like maybe worker-owned businesses, of which there's a huge number, or community-owned businesses. I mean, as I said, I was up in. Northern Rivers last week, and you have an amazing number of agriculture cooperatives where they're keeping money circulating locally.
Community wealth building agenda, which I mentioned earlier, another great example of pre-distribution, but also getting the prices right for our goods and services. I saw an ad a few weeks ago saying that it was cheaper to fly a plane from Edinburgh down to London than it was to get a train from Edinburgh across to Glasgow, which is just crazy. I mean, not least, Carolyn, because Glasgow is a much cooler city than London. So, of course, you'd want to get the train to Glasgow.
But really seriously, I mean, it just shows that that's completely externalised the environmental impact of that plane flight. And so, you get these misleading price signals. And so we need to much better align how we price goods and, you know, pay people decent wages and incorporate that in the prices. And that must link to competitive, you know, competition in industries as well, surely.
Oh, yes, because a lot of, you know, the sort of, I guess, cowboys, we might call them, are sort of staying in success because they're artificially cheap on the back of externalising. And just as a footnote, the IMF has done some really interesting research over many years. they've been tracking what they call subsidies, the implicit and explicit subsidies of the fossil fuel sector.
They say, okay, explicit subsidies are the obvious ones, but they say, have a look at implicit subsidies, essentially costs imposed on a third party. So a community downstream that's having to pay cleaning up a polluted river or a local government that's having to pay increased money into its hospital system because of increased asthma because of cars and so on. And the IMF is saying that implicit subsidies massively outweigh the explicit ones. And they've been tallying it up over many years.
And one of the most recent figures was saying this adds up to $7 trillion a year, about 7% of GDP globally. Wow. So, I mean, when you're talking about, you know, competitiveness, I mean, are these firms really viable if they're having to impose all of these costs on third parties? Yeah. Yeah, so that's part of the pre-distribution piece is really saying, you know, what's properly, you know, what's a real successful business look like? Not one that doesn't pay a lot of its costs.
And then the final corner of this jigsaw puzzle, and I can't believe I told you I'd give you a short answer. No, this is great. This is great. The final piece is people-powered. And I think a lot of your listeners will recognize that if people don't feel in control of decisions that impact them, even if it might ultimately benefit them for whatever. When people feel that they're being done to, they quite understandably dig their heels in.
And so this is about helping people feel they're participating and leading the decisions, whether that's things like citizens' assemblies or participatory budgeting or Or really making the idea of the just transition real and robust and tangible and authentic by having communities design what an economy that's beyond carbon, for example, look like.
And one of the organisations I work with here in Australia works with places like Gladstone and Mount Isa and Latrobe Valley to help them imagine what's over the horizon of their coal-fired power plant, for example. And doing that with communities.
So they fit in control and so that's that's people people power is that not i mean i've often wondered isn't that what government should be doing yeah and a lot of times government supports those those processes but sometimes government for various reasons might not necessarily be trusted in these communities okay they might not have the skills to do necessarily that deep partnership and deep deep listening and that synthesis that's that's required.
So it requires, and I'm not saying I do this, my colleagues do, they're very skilled at this. So I think it requires a special sort of approach. But I mean, in Scotland, the government there set up what they claim is the world's first just transition commission to really help navigate the shifts that the economy is going to require. So as we power down, for example, in Scotland, some of the oil industries, certain types of manufacturing that are not aligned with a more sustainable future.
Because, I mean, Scotland knows as we started this conversation, what happens when economic shifts happen too quickly. They know, I mean, that can do to communities. And so having just transition as not just a nice tagline, but really making it a verb and making communities at the forefront. So that's, that's a very long answer that I, that's the wellbeing economy, but ultimately it's about an economy that, is deliberately designed and delivered to take care of people and planet.
So we could do an episode on each of those. You know, talking about all of them, the one to me that probably starts and ends with is people-powered because so long as people feel disempowered, and just like, you know, we can't do anything, nothing will ever change. I watched your TED Talk, which I'll include the link. Sorry, TEDx Talk. I'll include a link in the show notes.
But, you know, one of the things you said that really stood out to me is we're trapped in an economic system that is hurting us. Yeah. And you see the impact on people from that hurt all the time. Yeah. And, yes, it's got to be incredibly hard to create systems change. And I think that change is coming and I don't think it's a choice between the status quo and building a wellbeing economy.
I think it's a choice between a more and more dystopian future of which we're seeing a lot of hints on the horizon already and nearer than the horizon or really collectively mobilising to build a more just and more sustainable future. And yes, that's going to really require challenging a lot of received wisdom and orthodoxy and supporting pioneers that prove that it's possible and working together in ways that are hard and require compromise and working with people we may not agree with.
But the choice is between doing that or things just becoming more unequal and more painful and as our planet burns. I don't think it's a choice between change or not change. Enjoying the podcast? If you're looking for more inspiration, head to our website, thecauseeffect.com.au for more resources on how you can start using your business as a force for good. Or buy the For Love and Money book. Every copy sold allows us to protect one square metre of rainforest.
Someone I know who was very senior in government and is no longer in government but is incredibly well read in history and ethics and ancient history. I was talking to him about what's happening and he said, yeah, this is just part of the cycle. We've been through cycles like this before. We're in the degenerative cycle and you've got to go through, a society has to go through that in order to be able to hit the bottom to actually, it's that idea, isn't it?
That, you know, change only happens when the pain of staying in the same situation outweighs the pain of doing something, you know, the unknown. Indeed, indeed, when you're really pushed. I mean, I understand that perspective and there's a lot of folk in the wellbeing economy movement who are saying, let's just prepare to build from the ashes and, you know, start something new once system collapse happens. And I see why they're thinking like that.
Personally, I just, knowing how much suffering that transition is going to entail and that I just cannot give up on trying to make things better now quickly and bring about the system change in a more considered way rather than just saying, right, hands back, let's let it all go to port and then we'll be there to build back. I see why people think like that. I just can't go there myself. Yeah. And I certainly didn't get that sense of don't bother with anything.
And I think people who are involved in this sort of movement of change, they can't sit on their hands anyway we can't sit on our hands it you and you can see shift happening you can see you know it's a ripple effect isn't it you see it happening in one small area and the ripple effect and that that sense of I you said you've there are so many stories I share stories of you know businesses that it just wakes people up out of their stupor yeah and they go
oh my god I want some of that and are prepared to fight for it and that's the opportunity isn't it yes there is certainly no shortage of what i describe as pioneers that prove that it's not just desirable but it's doable and and these are folks yeah in business but also people in government folks i'd describe as policy entrepreneurs who are really trying to bring about change from from within and that there's folks in all in all quarters who are just yeah that is the most hopeful piece i think
actually how there are just so many people in really diverse localities who are trying to make things better in the here and now and when people see them there's a story that I share with some of my speaking and I know I just watch people in the audience and and you see their surprise have you heard of the restaurant of mistaken orders no it sounds like my experience I'm always have menu envy when I'm with someone at a restaurant.
Okay. So this is like the question I ask is, can you imagine a restaurant where all the waiters and waitresses have dementia? And of course, everybody's like, wait, what? You know, what would that look like? It would be mayhem. And that restaurant exists in Tokyo and it's called the Restaurant of Mistaken Orders because its purpose is not accuracy of orders.
Its purpose is to create a place where people with dementia can feel like they belong and where, you know, other people can understand, you know, a little bit more about people like that. And there's this beautiful video. I'll actually put it in the link in the show notes. It is such a stunning video of this restaurant. And I think, what's the stats like? Only 37% of orders are accurate, but 99% customer satisfaction. Oh, brilliant. And it's thinking differently. Mm-hmm.
About how we use our, you know, businesses, our societies, our everything for the well-being of people. Absolutely. Absolutely. There's a lovely quote from Colin Mayer and the British Academy and so on that around the purpose of business is to help solve the problems of the society and the planet profitably.
So, sort of profitably, the means, of course, you have to be commercially viable and then there's a critical second part of that and it's not to profit from the problems of people and planet yeah so that's a yeah i mean it's failure demand is basically.
Profiting i think it was james galbraith who said you know it's it's not to create the demand for something by creating more wants is is you know it's flawed and so forth there's a lovely phrase that applies at the individual level from the French degrowth scholar called Sergei Latouche, and he talks about consolation goods and the consolation goods industry. And again, you only have to walk down a high street in a city and see this fierce marketing to us who we feel lonely.
You used the word belonging earlier, feel lack of belonging, and we're reaching for sort of pseudo-satisfiers, as one of my intellectual heroes, Max Neif, would describe it, through consumption and so on. And that's a consolation good or whether it's the bottle of wine on a Friday night after a stressful week that I'll put my hand up, I'm guilty of. Whatever it is for different folk.
The drugs to treat depression and all of that sort of thing, yeah, it goes back to what you talked about, the failure demand. Indeed. Indeed. So we touched on, you know, the current political, global political situation, but I want to ask you, how do you see the rise of Trumpism and far-right populism affecting the movement today? You know, it's obviously really complex and I think we're now seeing a lot of more, I'd say, sophisticated analysis come out.
You're looking at the different forces behind that's pushing Trump and Yanis Varoufakis talks about techno-feudalism and he's been talking about it for a few years and I think now we're seeing that in reality in the US.
But at one level why people in many many parts of the states were voting for trump was partly because i'm sure there's a range of reasons but partly it was as a out of recognition that the economic system wasn't working for them it wasn't working for their families and you're probably familiar with the work of the nobel laureate angus deaton and his wife ann case around what they mapped was what they call the deaths of despair in the US.
Basically, white middle-aged men in sort of working-class jobs who are dying from suicide or what we could describe as slow suicide through drug and alcohol and so on. And they labeled, they said there's this huge phenomenon of this that they call the deaths of despair, huge correlation with voting for Trump.
And I think we can look at that and recognise that these are communities like the communities I worked with in Glasgow, where the sort of economic guts have been ripped out and we haven't had that sense of belonging enabled through other mechanisms. And so people feeling and rationally seeing their livelihoods going down and the prospects for their kids not looking any brighter at all. And so, again, as I said earlier, reaching for coping mechanisms.
I think we probably, you and I could agree that Trump is not likely to make life better for these folks who are voting for him. But what it very, I think, clearly showed was people who, People recognise the economy is not good enough for them. So I think in a way Trump has to galvanise the economic change movement because it just makes it so much more urgent, but it also makes it harder. People and governments rushing to respond, Trump pulling out of Paris.
All those sort of setbacks for climate change will make it harder to respond. So it makes it harder but more necessary. and I think it does underline that cause of we need an economy that truly does work for people rather than the other way around and often you have people, the phrase I often use is being treated as just-in-time inventory, the same way like any other factor of production and you can't treat people like that without them becoming pretty alienated and unhappy and so we see that.
So I think there is a message in the rise of Trump And his equivalence in other parts of the world. Yeah. It's interesting. There's a book that I read a few years ago called Cast by Isabel Wilkerson. Have you read it? I've known of it. Yeah, I haven't read it. It's amazing and it's helped me understand it. It talks very much to what you just spoke about, but it's really, you know, you talked about the depths of despair.
The depths of despair. Yeah, and it's that they have a caste system in the US and the people who felt they were close to the bottom but not quite there, you know, because there were others, you know, who were there and then they saw President Obama, first black president, and suddenly they find themselves. What they see as the very bottom, and it's the fear that comes from that. And, yeah, I guess. But, you know.
Catherine, one thing I wonder is what we're seeing happen in the States now and around the world because of it is almost like what we saw happen over COVID. Everyone feels you can't touch our system. Mm-hmm. Yes. And yet. And then suddenly. Yeah.
So the pandemic suddenly and we we managed to get through it and it was extraordinary to see the response the human response to help right from businesses from organizations just how can we help what can we do and then we lost the momentum of that you know that was such a sliding doors moment and we lost that momentum but I don't know I look at what's happening in America now and it's like well, we're seeing this again. Yeah. In a way, doesn't it sort of make that possibility?
I mean, it does show all bets are off and that, you know, received wisdom of what government can do or can't do has been, you know, smashed wide open. I mean, I think you did see the good, the bad and the ugly during COVID and one perhaps more recent example of, you know, the difference between different business approaches. I was in the UK when Heathrow shut down last month because of the power plant. Oh, yes. So it's shut for about 24 hours all of a sudden.
And guess what airport hotels did around Heathrow? They jacked up their prices. Oh, no. By like into the thousands. And this is, you know, horrible, predatory, exploiter crisis. I mean, that goes back to that quote, you know, profit from society's problems. You see, it's like, yeah, horrible, blatant, profiteering. And then the contrast, as we saw during COVID, not all, but a lot of incredible businesses say we're going to be part of something positive.
And one of my favourite examples was many Scottish whiskey distilleries said, well, we know how to make alcohol. And so they turned their stills into making alcoholic, sanitising hand liquid to get into the NHS. And so there you have it, you know, two very different types of business approaches. One that sees a crisis and thinks let's cash in, the other that sees a crisis and says let's be part of positive change and addressing things here.
And so I think part of the wellbeing economy agenda is to really support and inculcate and spotlight the latter, those that are making a positive contribution and have incredible potential to do more of that, but also to power down the former to say that's your attitude, you're not part of the future. Yeah, because there were hotel chains. I know here I think Accor were the first to open their doors to the homeless during the pandemic and, you know, that happened around the world.
Perhaps it's possible, doesn't it? You can. So where do you see the greatest momentum for change right now? What's giving you hope? Oh, I will be really honest with you, Carolyn, that I don't always have hope.
I think the world is in a pretty dire place And I think those of us who are lucky to have agency to make decisions over our lives and our livelihoods and where we shop, we need to recognise that and open up a different conversation around the economy and challenge that, I'd say, sort of economic orthodoxy that's keeping us in a straitjacket, despite Trump and COVID and so on throwing it out.
I mean, it's incredible the sort of shibboleths that keep getting repeated when you hear the economy discussed here in Australia.
So hope for me comes from meeting these incredible entrepreneurs i mean i did it i did a talk last week up in northern new south wales where i mentioned that the hotel around heathrow example and a businessman who runs a chain of factories he came up to me and he just said that that was horrible how could someone do that just he was shocked and so meeting people who are just using whatever sphere of influence they have to make a positive impact.
And it's people in government, it's communities. It's a bit of a cliche, I know, but through teaching the Wellbeing Economy course I do at Edinburgh Uni, meeting young people from all over the world and how they are thinking big and bold because they have to. Yeah. That gives me hope. They don't have a choice, do they? Oh, gosh, no. No. No, they have to. And so they're there, but they're doing so many of them really deliberately in a collegial, collaborative way.
And so I think there's a lot to learn from that. I mean, there are people in government who are making amazing change. So in a couple of months, there's going to be a huge forum, the third of five Wellbeing Economy Governments forums in Reykjavik. Lots of governments will be there. The World Health Organization is there.
The OECD is there. And so there's folks who are saying, how do we translate these ideas into different economic policy and using different levers of government and recognizing that none of them have all the answers? And even something like a group I was part of starting a few years ago, the Wellbeing Economy Governments Partnership, the fact it's still going. I mean, there's five governments there now. It started in 2018 with Scotland, New Zealand and Iceland. Yeah.
Led by crews. I remember you talking about it at the time, yeah. Female leaders, all those leaders have gone. They've all tapped out of politics for various pretty similar reasons actually.
But it's still going and the civil servants behind it are still carrying it and learning from each other and wanting to support each other so there's a and this growing movement of people who from in various different ways are recognizing that business as usual can't carry on and who are curious about what better might look like and then who are asking their next question beyond that which is okay what role can I play very very different roles but as that beautiful Maori phrase is,
if everyone plays their part, the job will be done. That's beautiful. And it really goes to the idea of, you know, people often say what gets measured gets managed, but it's really what we're talking about is what gets imagined gets built. Yeah, I love that. You know, we've got too many examples of what gets measured doesn't get done. Absolutely. But we've got to be able to dream, right? To think beyond what we already see.
And where we do see it happening, elevating that, telling, like how important is storytelling in this? Oh, critical. Because humans don't think with facts and figures. They think through stories and, you know, they feel things first and then they feel and that changes how they think and that changes how they act. And so stories help people feel differently. And I think the stories in the past few decades that we've told about our economies have been pretty sick stories.
Stories of endless growth with no heed for the impact on the environment or what it means for humans around the world and who wins and who loses. And so the time for a new story is really critical. The word I often use is new recipes, that those 20th century recipes have served their time, not to entirely denigrate them. Maybe they had their time and a place, but we're in a different world. We're starting the second quarter of the 21st century now. We need different recipes. Wow, yeah.
Yeah, different recipes that are much more appropriate for our time, much more cognizant of the era we're in. So we're not reaching for these 20th century solutions. And that's extraordinary here in Australia, how often you see government just reaching for 20th century social democracy. When we have any government official who doesn't really have the environmental crisis at the forefront of their mind, I think is just, to me, it's not credible.
And so we need different conversations that hold the social and the environment together because they're so incredibly interlinked. Linked. And I often say that the social justice question and the environmental crisis question are two sides of the same coin. And it's the economy that links them, hence why we need to build a different economic system. Re-imagine a different one. And while it's been re-imagined, it's about building it now.
Yeah, we know what it looks like. And people are building it. They're just the exception that currently proves the rule. So the more we can support and sustain and replicate and share those ideas, the better. Yep. I'm going to wind this down because of time reluctantly, but we often ask our guests to share one bold idea or call to action. So I'm going to ask you, if you had the ear of CEOs who had influence, but who are actually open. Who are actually open to new possibilities.
If you had their ear right now, what would you urge them to do to help create a wellbeing economy? I'd say really recognise their disproportionately large sphere of influence and harness it to use their channels of influence with government, their cultural leadership, the way they can set new ideas influence others, the way they can make decisions that treat their staff differently, treat communities, who's around the table when they make decisions.
I mean, there's incredible examples of companies that have got workers around the table. There's a great Edinburgh company called Faith in Nature that has someone on their board whose job it is to represent nature.
How can they really bring in that seventh generation thinking, not just quarterly returns thinking, but how can they use that sphere of influence, which is bigger than most people's by virtue of their economic power, be really honest about that and harness it to open up a different conversation around the sort of economy we need.
A really honest one, a really honest one that doesn't get stuck in 20th century, false binaries and orthodoxies that are no longer fit for our time, but to be really creative and support, bring about that different conversation, those different stories, and then have the back of people who are bringing it about and then yeah and join the movement be part of it they're amazing big organizations that are part of part of this movement too it's not just for the small community grassroots scale
yeah fantastic well we will share the links that you provide us in the show notes finally katherine where can people follow your work and support the work you're doing and the movement toward a well-being economy thank you for asking that's lovely i'm i'm now i'm no longer a user of Twitter for all the reasons. Yep. Many people appreciate I'm dabbling in blue sky, but I really have been putting my shoulder into LinkedIn, and so that's where I share a lot of materials.
I have a website that people are welcome to contact me through. But also to get involved in groups like We All and other equivalents, wherever you sort of feel that it suits your energy and your passion. But We All is a great place to start, and it's weall.org. Yeah, brilliant. will share that. Thank you so much for joining us. I've really enjoyed our conversation and yeah, I hope it inspires some people to just take action, open up conversations and imagine what we can do if we work together.
Well, thank you so much for having me. It's been great fun and thanks to everyone who's taken the time to listen to our conversation. I appreciate it. We'll be right back. Thanks for listening to this episode of the for love and money podcast if you'd like to take a deeper dive into the purpose movement visit us at thecauseeffect.com.au, and remember doing good is good for business so if you're not doing good then what are you doing.