Alliance editor, Kate Balding, speaks to P4NE director, Jo Swinson, and executive director of KR Foundation, Brian Valbjørn Sørensen, to make sense of the New Economy and funders place within it.

Kate Balding: In your opinion, do you think the New Economy is about creating something ‘new’?

Jo Swinson: A new economy will certainly be different to, and much better than, our current one, but lots of the ideas are admittedly old, drawing on what has always been known. The underpinning principles would be care and resilience, not just efficiency, and it will balance multiple outcomes for people and nature, rather than pretend that optimising for one metric can create good results.

Brian Valbjørn Sørensen: It’s less about inventing something new than remembering what we’ve forgotten—that people and nature are deeply interdependent, and that the economy should serve both.

The ‘new’ part is having the honesty to admit the old system is unravelling beyond repair. We’ve built an economy that extracts value faster than people or the planet can regenerate it, and we’re now living with the consequences. While we don’t yet know exactly what a new economic paradigm will look like, we do know it must operate within planetary boundaries and its purpose must ensure prosperity today does not come at the expense of tomorrow. We must place the wellbeing of future generations at the heart of economic purpose.

KB: How might philanthropy move from mitigating harms to redistributing power in a New Economy landscape?

JS: Power is often given far too little attention. I loved the reflective essay by Nobel prize-winning economist Angus Deaton on how he has changed his mind on this topic, and among other gems of wisdom, he says: ‘Without an analysis of power, it is hard to understand inequality or much else in modern capitalism.’ Meanwhile, philanthropy has tended to act as a ‘fixer’ of problems experienced by people and wider society without enough of this awareness.

Read the full article about the New Economy by Kate Balding at Alliance Magazine.