The Line on the Map

Abstract

The five essays at the centre of this book first appeared as a series in the Ecstatic Economics lineage at hautelumiere.life. They traced the idea of an economy inside the biosphere from John Stuart Mill to Raworth, stated its critics at their strongest, read it through the house's own living-systems lens, followed one city through it and set it beside its neighbours. They are here, revised into chapters, with the magazine furniture taken out and the repetition between them removed. They were never the whole of what a leader needs. An essay can show that a firm is better seen as an organism in a habitat. It cannot hand a chief executive the twelve months of meetings that turn the seeing into a practice. An essay can say that measurement matters. It cannot sit with a board while the first honest number comes in worse than the one in last year's sustainability report. So seven chapters are new, and they are the reason this is a book.