In winter 2018, the British economist Kate Raworth addressed a sold-out hall of 500 people in the Dutch city of Rotterdam. “Who is an economist or is currently taking an economics course?” she asked the audience. Dozens of hands went up. “Wow, they’re here . . .” she said — according to the Dutch newspaper De Telegraf, a comment made “half-jokingly, half-threateningly.”

It was a characteristically ambiguous jab from Raworth, a self-described “renegade economist” at Oxford University who has a bone to pick with her peers in the field. Raworth was in Rotterdam to speak about the recent translation of her 2017 bestseller, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a Twenty-First Century Economist, which argues that modern economics isn’t fit for the challenges of the twenty-first century. Instead, we need a new framework — one that, yes, looks like a doughnut — designed to meet “the needs of all within the means of the planet.” For Raworth, getting global economies “into the doughnut” — the hitherto elusive space between well-being for everyone and ecological overshoot — should be the aim. As for growth, she says, we should be agnostic about it.

For those staring down the barrel of the crises that capitalism has wrought, Raworth’s proposal likely sounds like a mild one, but at the time of her appearance in Rotterdam — just one stop of a nationwide tour including sold-out speaking engagements in Amsterdam and Tilburg and a speech at the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy — Raworth was the subject of both intense praise and scorn in the Netherlands. Jan Peter Balkenende — a former prime minister for the center-right Christian Democratic Appeal party, who attended the Rotterdam event — told De Telegraf, “I recommend [Raworth’s] book in all presentations I give on sustainability.” Dutch economist Bas Jacobs, a critic of modern capitalism, on the other hand, called Doughnut Economics the “intellectually poorest and most annoying economics book of 2017.”