Building a wellbeing economy in turbulent times with Katherine Trebeck and Till Kellerhoff

THE CLUB OF ROME PODCAST

Why does the vision of a wellbeing economy remain both urgently needed and frustratingly out of reach?
In this episode of The Club of Rome Podcast, Till Kellerhoff speaks with political economist and Wellbeing Economy Alliance co-founder Katherine Trebeck to unpack this dilemma. As overlapping global crises continue to shake confidence in our current economic model, they discuss the promise and paradoxes of wellbeing economics: its appeal, its challenges and its limitations.
Together, they dig into what’s stalling real systemic change, why hopeful visions struggle against the tide of rising authoritarianism and pessimism, and how ideology shapes our economic futures. Their conversation highlights the need for plurality and the need to move beyond dashboards toward courageous, structural reform.

Full transcript:

Till: People are losing trust in our current system, and we are faced not only with environmental degradation, but also the destruction of our social fabric. Many of the challenges we see today are actually symptoms of a crisis of our economic system. An alternative to that is the Wellbeing Economy, something I will talk about in today's Club of Rome podcast, where we explore bold ideas for shaping sustainable futures.

I am Till Kellerhoff, Programme Director at The Club of Rome, and in this episode, I'm delighted to be joined by political economist, writer and advocate for economic system change, Katherine Trebek. Katherine co-founded the Wellbeing Economy Alliance and is a member of The Club of Rome. During the episode, we get into the concepts of wellbeing economy, the challenges of implementation in this crazy world, why this movement doesn't benefit more from the existing pain of the people and current crisis and why there's still hope.
Katherine, it's a real pleasure to speak to you today. How are you doing?

Katherine: I'm well, yeah, fantastic to be with you, and I'm buzzing at the moment, because yesterday, I was hanging out with incredible community group who are doing amazing work up in Sydney. We're coming up with some cool cornerstone indicators for the success of their locality. So I'm filled with hope at the moment.
Till: Oh, that's amazing. And we will both speak about communities indicators and hope later in this episode. And we want to talk about Wellbeing Economics today, what it is, but also what the challenges and hopes are in the implementation. Before we dig deeper into that, if you had 30 seconds to explain wellbeing economics to someone who isn't very familiar with the term, how would you do that? And what does it have to do with a picnic blanket?
Katherine: Ah, okay, so I'm not going to tell you about wellbeing economics. I'm going to talk about the wellbeing economy agenda. Wellbeing economics, I think of as more about the curricula and the sort of the study of wellbeing, but the wellbeing economy agenda is much more like a program for change that is essentially about transforming our economic systems, how we produce, consume, who's winning, who's losing, how we treat the environment, how we treat each other, the nature of businesses, transforming all of that. So it's very deliberately in service of people and planet.
Till: Excellent.
Katherine: You want to hear about a picnic blanket?
Till: Absolutely
Katherine: That's my, my way of describing how the wellbeing economy agenda is not some new on its own concept that's here to sort of shove out of the way all the existing amazing schools of thought and ideas and visions for economic system change. There are loads of concepts out there, loads of ways of describing an economy that is much better for people and planet. And lots of folk who have heard of many of these, from donut economics, regenerative economics, solidarity economics, feminist economics, future generations thinking, post growth economics and so on and so on and so on.

I think of the wellbeing economy as not so much coming along saying, Here I am in addition to this, pick me over the others, but more sitting on a sort of different level and saying it's a bit like a picnic blanket, that's making all of them feel welcome, but really showcasing that, yes, they'll have their slightly different emphasis and different terminology and thus resonate with different audiences. And that's, I think, okay, but at their core, they really share this idea of an economy that is in service of people and planet, rather than the other way around.
Till: Excellent. And you said in a TED Talk five years ago that some people call wellbeing economics a utopian vision. But since when is this a bad thing? And I would agree with that, you know, I think we need utopia. We need also vision, but that was five years ago. Has this hope and this vision and this utopia changed in the last years for you?
Katherine: Do you know Till, I think, five years ago, almost, in retrospect, feels like halcyon days. And of course, the challenges were enormous then, but this is pre COVID, since that that talk, which was, I think 2019, we've seen more and more destruction of our planet. We're seeing almost daily records being being broken in terms of extreme heat and flooding and so on. And I'm here in Australia, and we feel that particularly acutely, and just people's level of despair and loneliness and frustration with the system seems to have been accelerated even since those days, which were challenging enough. And so I think the need to have hope in a better way of doing the economy.

The need to point out that our economy can be redesigned so it's much better for people and planet, that need has even become more critical. It certainly hasn't gone away. Has the hope for change abated? Well, I think it'd be almost naive to say we're not in a very challenging situation. I think though the recognition that business as usual can't carry on, feels to be more broadly understood, and we're seeing folks almost reaching for almost what I describe as coping mechanisms, because they're so frustrated with the status quo. They're doing that at the metaphorical pillbox in through, you know, self-medication or turning to retail therapy, for example, or their Twitter bubbles or x bubbles, or they're turning for coping mechanisms at the ballot box as well. And we're seeing that with the rise of sort of quite extreme politics around around the world, though not here in Australia, as we've just seen in the last few weeks. But yeah, it is interesting.

I think what's inevitable is change is happening. I think the question is how deliberate communities and societies can be about shaping that change so that it's just and something better emerges beyond.
Till: I would very much agree with that change is happening, but the key question is, why, despite the crisis, despite the factors you mentioned, despite the climate catastrophe, but also related social impacts, and we see rising levels of burnouts and depressions.

And one could say there are not only environmental tipping points, but also social tipping points in a way that destabilise societies. And all of that is there and all of that we see, but still, one doesn't have the feeling, if you look into the news today, that the implementation of the wellbeing economy is much farther advanced now than was five years ago. And the question really is, why is that? Because you point out that crises are very often moments of paradigm shifts, right?
Katherine: Yeah, I think you're right. I don't think it was a lack of ideas lying around that, say, for example, after the global financial crisis, we didn't see a whole scale shift to a different way of configuring and sort of having a different logic behind the economic system to the one that we have today. In a sense, we've just doubled down on the current approach. And so I think part of the challenge is that the ideas are not yet making it from the movement, if I can use that broadly understood idea of the economic change movement, they're not making it from the movement's quarters and desks and discussions and conferences and gatherings into policy making sufficiently. They're not making it into many universities sufficiently. They're not, definitely not making into education curricula, and they're not, perhaps most critically, making it into the everyday conversations of everyday people.

I don't think the movement is short of ideas. I don't think the movement is short of policy examples, and there's definitely no shortage of evidence of the why for change, and I think that's great, and that's all critical and important, but it clearly has not been enough. And so I think that almost we need the next wave of work to be done by the movement is to broaden the base, take these conversations into quarters that are that are not hearing them, that are not excited by these ideas, do not feel that their lives will be positively improved by implementation of these ideas, and, perhaps most importantly, also help people work with people in a compassionate way, so that they feel they're owning the change, and that they're at the forefront of the change. So it's not just being imposed on them by admittedly really well-intentioned movement, but it's something that's and it's a cliche word to use, but really co-created with communities around the world, and then use that momentum to shift the pressure on various policymakers.

And when I say policymakers, I also mean decision-makers inside businesses and enterprises as well, not just governments. I don't think either we should be naive about the counter pushback to some of this work, and if I could just even share the small example of Scotland, where I used to live, the movement there this sort of civil society group and colleagues that I worked with, I think we're pretty successful in pushing the agenda onto the policy table. We had a lot of government traction. We even had the First Minister do her TED talk on the wellbeing economy approach, and a group of governments that her government was part of setting up for a point in time. There was even a Cabinet Secretary for the wellbeing economy. There were lots of policies individually being enacted that would speak to the sort of economic change needed to build a wellbeing economy.

And then the pushback happened. And I think it really speaks to that bit of that cliche of, first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, because the attacks started to come. And I think what we hadn't done in Scotland, and I'd say this applies more generally, hadn't done the work of building a broader critical mass. We hadn't yet built the strong enough momentum in a wider, more public sense to really pressure politicians. I mean, it's still the momentum's still there, but it was fascinating to see the attack come thick and fast.
Till: Yeah, and I think it's also one of the frustrations I feel that we see all this polling, and we had an Earth4All survey some time ago that people in G20 states are in favour of policies that can be related to wellbeing economies, right? Like prioritising planet and wellbeing overgrowth, but even more specifically, on higher wealth taxation, on environmental protection, on ecocide law, all of that is there, people on an abstract level support it. And I think I'm wondering, are movements enough? You mentioned that we need to kind of push the pressure off the street, also more to policymakers.

Movements are important, and I agree with that, but to me, it seems sometimes like there are system pressures, right inertia, path dependencies, unintended consequences, positive, negative, feedback loops, all of that that make it very difficult to just implement certain changes, even if movements and the population agrees to that right? I mean, we have seen that often, and that's also the question of, why do policymakers remain so cautious and timid, almost despite the crisis we have at the moment? Is that really because of individual failure, they just don't dare or is it really because there are bigger systems pressures behind it that make it really, really hard?
Katherine: Yes, and I think it's a lot of that. I think there's a lot of pressures on individual policymakers. I mean, it's almost often quite hysterical here in Australia, the reaction that you get from certain sectors of, say, the extractive industries, if government even suggests the tiniest step towards, say, increasing taxes on resource extraction, for example. And so politicians feel that, and they almost self, self-censor, as you mentioned, the path dependencies. And they're just that sort of bias towards the status quo of a lot of how governments are set up, how they're designed around individual, siloed departments, how, then, often not all the time, but often not very good at thinking beyond the short term. They're often rushing to respond from one crisis to the other, and those crises are real and legitimate and require urgent support. But because of the way governments often operate, they're constrained to into downstream, not really daring to go upstream to the economic root causes.

It's often downstream, tweaking responses at at best, and it's lonely being bold. And so I think, yeah, movements are almost not, clearly not enough on their own, but I think there's almost broader mobilisation is part of what's been missing for the economic change movement over the last few years, few decades, even. And so I think that's the next frontier, if I can use that language that the economic change movement needs to invest in. In the report I wrote for you lot that was published last year, just over a year ago, when I looked at what's been successful in getting wellbeing economy, policy ideas onto the table, and then what has been the pushback?

And we identified in that report, three different types of blockers. And there's, I think the obvious one we can talk about is the sort of the hysterical vested interest. You know, you see car companies, for example, in Europe, you know, threatening over emissions standards. You see all sorts of examples around higher health legislation in food, for example, a lot of hysterical pushback on that. The other sort of blocker that I want, I think it's worth calling out, and it's not as overt or as nakedly hostile, but it's a group of folks who get a lot of airtime, a lot of column inches, who get a lot of access to politicians who seem to implicitly feel that business as usual is largely okay, and we just need to do a few tweaks, round around the edges. And that group of commentators, economists, advisors, have, I'd say a disproportionate influence on government, and it means that what solutions they are creating the space for in their dialogue with government are incredibly narrow and not nearly up to up to the task. And that's an equal form of blocking as well, and the other, just as an aside, the other form of blocking that we talked about was those who are really fighting for a related cause, for social justice or environmental issues, but are seeing those as disconnected.

So blocking is not really the right word, but what they're doing is almost setting up a false binary between, for example, jobs or an environmental goal, where the wellbeing economy approach and others like it would really identify how, if we, if we can mobilise for economic change, by looking upstream, you can bring about co, multiple benefits and achieve environmental and social justice outcomes at the same time.
Till: Yeah, excellent. I really recommend everyone to check out our website and read that report and also read a related blog you wrote on that. And I want to quote one sentence out of that, because it relates to what you just said. You said there are those of us working in this space need to remember that most people, when they are talking about dashboards and indicators, are talking about their cars, not their quality of life.

And I think that's very strong, because very often this movement tries to be very accessible, rightly so. But in a way, it's also not indicators and dashboards are very, very far attached from many people's daily lives. Do you see a risk of that by over emphasizing debates on beyond GDP, for example, instead of really talking about the food crisis, the cost of living crisis, etc.
Katherine: Yeah, and I feel the impact of that. I think it's often easier, it seems, from amongst allies in the movement to fight each other and critique each other for what I'd say, marginal differences of emphasis, or marginal differences of tactics and approach. And I think I am very squeamish about anyone who thinks that their single tactic is going to be sufficient, when I think we've just got to throw as they say, what is it? The whole the whole kitchen sink at this, and so I find really frustrating these arguments internally in the movement. That's what I mean when I say internally. And yeah, debates like beyond GDP are fascinating. I mean, my doorway into this space is through the beyond GDP doorway. Everyone has different doorways, I think, into the economic change movement. So I'm really passionate about really taking a good hard look at GDP and its influence on policy making, how it influences our minds, of how we think about success of a country and how politicians are held accountable, and particularly all the perverse incentives that are bound up in GDP and how it doesn't measure sufficiently what makes a good life. And there's this lovely phrase from a friend of ours, Mark Anelsky, who says a GDP hero is a chain-smoking terminal cancer patient who crashes his car on the way to his job as an arms dealer because he's texting while eating a takeaway hamburger. Now, every one of those activities will increase GDP. It'd be hard to find anyone who thinks that's the sort of person you want to live next door to or have running the country or running our businesses. So I think GDP does present a false perspective. But I don't think even if we were tomorrow to switch out GDP and bring in something like, I don't know, the Human Development Index, or the OECD Better Life Index, or the Social Progress Index, or something richer. I don't think that'll automatically change, because it's one it's how people think about the economy and its role, not just how we measure it. And then also you then need to make those measures matter. You need to utilise them to transform how policymaking is done and how people think about what is the ultimate goal of the economy, what's the purpose of the economy, and what sort of activities need to make up the economy.
Till: I very much agree with you. And coming back to the point you mentioned on the problem of heterodox movements, sometimes fighting each other more than the common enemy. I feel very frustrated by that as well. But despite all of that, what I agree with is there also a challenge in this pluralism, trying to create something like an -ism, something like in the 20th century it was ideology of progress, which were kind of trying to unite people behind the common cause. Is it a problem for that movement we are engaged in that? It's more difficult to say this is our joint movement because we embrace a plurality. Or is that a strength, as you emphasised before?
Katherine: Well, I mean, there, of course, there are tensions with it, but I'm wary in how diverse and complicated the world is now, the idea of an -ism in the sort of 20th century mode of an -ism feels, it just doesn't feel appropriate for where the world is today. You know, I think the key thing is really emphasising what change is needed, that change is possible. Help people get excited about our change. I'm not sure an -ism is what is going to mobilise. I think it'll be different language and different framing, and I think you'd be hard to find anyone inside government who doesn't say, “Oh, of course, we recognise the flaws of gross domestic product as a measure.” I think most people get it, and yet it is still profoundly sticky. And what is held on to by a lot of policymakers when they're touting the credentials of a particular policy. Well, this will increase GDP. And here in the UK, for example, a lot of the framing is we must go for growth, growth, growth, growth measured by GDP. And so even if there is an intellectual consensus, even if quietly, that hasn't been enough to budge something like GDP.

So, I'm not sure that is enough these days. I think we need a whole suite of different conditions, some of which exist. I think there are loads of folk rolling up their sleeves, starting to demonstrate and deliver change in different localities and at different scales, so we start to see what this looks like. But as yet, as we were talking about at the beginning of the conversation, it does feel like we're further behind than we were even five years ago.
Till: Yeah. And the question is, then still really how this paradigm shift happens, right, and how we also can learn from existing positive models that might work. But a quote, and I promise it's the last one for this conversation, but a quote comes into my mind regarding this paradigm shift, by Buckminster Fuller, who said, and is very frequently, very often quoted, saying, "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." And I was wondering what you think about that, because it does sound a little bit naive, in a way, also in the context of building a new model in existing antagonisms and contradictions and power dynamics of our world. Like, is that something like, how do you look at that?
Katherine: I really struggle when I hear that phrase referred to. And of course, it feels very positive and really action orientated, and just get down to building something beautiful. I think what it misses is how incredibly powerful the existing reality is, is to adjust and reconfigure itself in order to remain in existence, and its power to snuff out these threats that emerge from good examples. We haven't seen them make the the old obsolete. Yet they're often very vulnerable, very liable to push back, very liable to attack as as well. And so I think we need both. Again, this comes back to my my sense is we need a plurality of approaches as well. Yeah, we need folk who are the pioneers, who are proving through their practice that's doing the economy differently is not just desirable, it's eminently doable. But so often, at the moment, they're going against these headwinds, they're pushing against a whole lot of policies and financial instruments and even mindsets that are counter to those policies flourishing and those practices becoming the new normal.

One of the organisations I support and work with here in Australia is called the Next Economy, and they work with communities that have been dependent on fossil fuel industries, and work with those communities and businesses and counselors, and, you know, everyday local folk, people in government, people you know, in business there, and to imagine what's over the horizon in terms of economic change that's not reliant on, say, coal mining, for example, and it's that work, I think that is also really critical is, you know, helping folks transition.

I think we need people inside government bringing about different changes to policies, you know, that shape the rules of the game. I think we need people inside finance as well, directing financial capital to the sort of activities we need more of. So I think there is a task to really transform the structures that entrench the existing reality, so that they enable the new to not be nice, inspirational mini projects. And I call them like, you know, the Lego wins. There's lots of great projects out there, policies and practices, but they're like Lego on my nephew's floor. They're all disconnected and sporadic, not yet adding up to something.
Till: Yeah, and I agree it's very important to show what's at the horizon, right, and also open imaginations beyond our ideological bias of either everything sticks as it was or is now, or it gets even worse. And I think that's a little bit our current dichotomy. Very often, either people are like, oh, we need to go back to a normal. And that normal was already not normal five years ago. It was a system based on ecological destruction, on social inequalities, on post-colonial rules in an international system. So it was not normal.

It felt more normal for people in the West or in comfortable countries there, but it was not. But now the alternative doesn't seem to be, oh, the positive other system, but rather something I know Varoufakis called techno feudalism, or others call authoritarianism or even fascist tendencies. And I think there needs to be a third scenario, almost right, a third way out. And I think we also need to be careful as a progressive movement to not tap too much into the back to normal rhetoric?
Katherine: No, I entirely agree. I think it cannot be a choice between something that you know, the likes of Trump are bringing in, or Melei in Argentina or others, or even what was on the table here in Australia over the last few months, and has, thank goodness, been pushed back, and, you know, rebuffed by Australian voters. It can't be a choice between that and just sort of every day, bit more green, but I what I would still describe as a 20th century social democracy approach, and I think that is almost what's on offer by the most progressive governments around the world.

That's almost the best that we see in terms of government. And that's patently not enough. We cannot just green the current system and think that will be okay. It's still a profoundly extractive model, extractive of people and from the planet. And so it can't be these sort of either or binaries, as we were saying earlier.

Change is coming. It's hitting us hard right now, it's hitting planet hard, and it's hitting communities around the world very, very hard as well. People are, I think, noticing and feeling scared for that change, and I think the task is to in the middle of all that really point to the different possibilities that are already emerging, that are already in place, that are really showing, as we said earlier, that something different is not just desirable, it's doable.

And then think about, how do we need to change the instruments, our evaluation measures, approaches, the measures of progress, to enable those amazing practices we already see to become the new normal, so they become just, this is the economy. So we don't need to call it a wellbeing economy. It's just how things are done, and it's an economy that takes care of people and looks after the planet.
Till: We speak about really challenging times and also crisis moments, and still, you say that with a certain amount of optimism in your voice and a smile on your face. So I was wondering, what are you curious about at the moment? Or what gives you that hope that a better future could happen. And what are the these elements in your life at the moment that gives you that motivation, maybe as well.
Katherine: So Till, to be really honest, I do find it really hard to be to be hopeful. I've, you know, with many folk, I have a profound sense of eco anxiety. It's very hard living in a country like Australia that is seeing record breaking temperatures year after year, and how that's, you know, record number of species lost, and then seeing friends around the world who are more vulnerable to that as well. I feel pretty depressed at all that seems to be on offer from our policymakers is what I'm calling system compliant fixes.

So just tweaking the current system, as if that will ever be be enough, but that's balanced by the sense of purpose and sense of solidarity, which is incredible gift that I get from things like last night, where I get to hang out with amazing community folk and amazing activists who are mobilising to change how things happen, to focus on, in this case, it was their local government as a, as an agent, where we transform how government sees its progress, but really come together in a really collegial way. Listen to each other, have fun with each other, eat together, laugh together, but think about doing something different and that that is the utter joy. It really is a privilege to be able to do that work. I also feel hope in that.

I think there's an amazing amount of entrepreneurs in business who are also using the mechanism of business to deliver social and environmental benefit. And they probably don't use the term wellbeing economy or economic system change, but they are just whether it's a circular economy business or a workers cooperative or a group signing up to the economy for common good accounting mechanisms, or in all those different ways. They're not the norm yet, but I think there's no shortage of cool examples in the business space that also show that businesses can be part of the solution too, and that that gives me hope as well, that they're, you know, from all sorts of different quarters. There are people chipping away, working their socks off to make things better.
Till: That's good. And I also think we shouldn't fall into a naive hope for the future, right? Not naive positivity. And we need to acknowledge what is going wrong. And this is a Club of Rome podcast, and The Club of Rome, via different initiatives and projects, tries to build up the alternative futures. Tries to not only paint a vision, but also in certain niches, describe pathways that could lead us there. Tries to work with people on the ground and communities. You are a member of The Club of Rome, and my last question is, why is that, and also what would be a role for an organisation like The Club of Rome in these challenging times you see.
Katherine: Why did I join? Well, apart from fact, I get to work with you till which is a great, great privilege for me and your amazing, amazing team at The Club of Rome. I mean, what I get out of The Club of Rome is feeling that sense of community and some of my intellectual heroes and members feeling that I'm part of something, that they're all working together. It's almost a bit like an example of trying to carry a huge, heavy table across a massive empty room that you need lots of people around the table.

And I think The Club of Rome almost is an example of all sorts of different people, different skills, different perspectives, working together in different ways to bring about something transformational. And so I just being part of that is great. And community really matters. You know, as we were saying earlier, this can be very, very lonely, and having that sense of there is a greater movement out there, and The Club of Rome is a subset of that.

And so for me. It's a, it's a real privilege to be, to be part of of this incredible family of thinkers and doers that are members of The Club of Rome. And I'm also just really proud when I see the comms that The Club of Rome team puts out and the reports and the analysis, yeah, and the collaboration that they they are able to create. It's lovely to be a small part of them.
Till: Excellent. Thank you. And for me, it was a real privilege speaking to you today. Unfortunately, time runs and we have to come to an end, but for now, thank you very much.
Katherine: Thanks Till, great to be with you today. Chat soon.
Till: Thank you for listening to The Club of Rome podcast. Follow us on Apple podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about The Club of Rome at clubofrome.org