Here are 100 books that Beyond Uneconomic Growth fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have been teaching and writing about economics and the environment for over thirty-five years, and have been inspired by my students to work towards a new ecological economics that can underpin a sustainable planetary future. Many of the crises that I and colleagues have predicted – climate disasters, soil degradation, water shortages, biodiversity loss – are now upon us, but the situation is not hopeless. I am working for a rapid transformation away from fossil-fuel and resource-intensive forms of economic growth, and hope that the expanding field of ecological economics can help to usher in this badly needed change.
This book provides an essential introduction to the expanding field of ecological economics.
Authored by some of the leading figures in the field, it covers the basic evidence of global limits to economic activity such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and land degradation. The historical basis for ecological economic theory is explained in non-technical terms.
The book covers issues of sustainable scale, natural capital, and ecosystem services – simple concepts that nonetheless revolutionize economic thinking. It concludes with an analysis of policies needed to achieve sustainability.
From Empty-World Economics to Full-World Economics
Ecological economics explores new ways of thinking about how we manage our lives and our planet to achieve a sustainable, equitable, and prosperous future. Ecological economics extends and integrates the study and management of both "nature's household" and "humankind's household"-An Introduction to Ecological Economics, Second Edition, the first update and expansion of this classic text in 15 years, describes new approaches to achieving a sustainable and desirable human presence on Earth. Written by the top experts in the field, it addresses the necessity for an innovative approach to integrated environmental, social, and economic analysis…
I have been teaching and writing about economics and the environment for over thirty-five years, and have been inspired by my students to work towards a new ecological economics that can underpin a sustainable planetary future. Many of the crises that I and colleagues have predicted – climate disasters, soil degradation, water shortages, biodiversity loss – are now upon us, but the situation is not hopeless. I am working for a rapid transformation away from fossil-fuel and resource-intensive forms of economic growth, and hope that the expanding field of ecological economics can help to usher in this badly needed change.
I was privileged to know Herman Daly, often seen as the founding father of ecological economics.
Starting in the 1960s, he defied conventional economic theory to insist on the primacy of the ecological system and limits to economic growth. He introduced the concept of “full world” economics, arguing that the expansion of human economic activity was displacing essential ecological functions.
This book presents his extensive and insightful perspective on a range of economic issues, and offers a roadmap for saving the global economic system from collapse.
Ecological Economics and Sustainable Development comprises a carefully chosen selection of some 25 articles, speeches, congressional testimonies, reviews, and critiques from the last ten years of Herman Daly's ever-illuminating work.
This book seeks to identify the blind spots and errors in standard growth economics, alongside the corrections that ecological economics offers to better guide us toward a sustainable economy - one with deeper biophysical and ethical roots.
Under the general heading of sustainability and ecological economics, many specific topics are here brought into relation with each other. These include: limits to growth; full-world versus empty-world economics; uneconomic growth; definitions of…
I have been teaching and writing about economics and the environment for over thirty-five years, and have been inspired by my students to work towards a new ecological economics that can underpin a sustainable planetary future. Many of the crises that I and colleagues have predicted – climate disasters, soil degradation, water shortages, biodiversity loss – are now upon us, but the situation is not hopeless. I am working for a rapid transformation away from fossil-fuel and resource-intensive forms of economic growth, and hope that the expanding field of ecological economics can help to usher in this badly needed change.
Peter Victor, a leading Canadian economist, has worked to reform economic thinking and modeling to take account of twenty-first-century realities: the increasing stress placed on the world’s ecosystems by growing population, energy demand, pressure on agricultural and water systems, and multiple forms of pollution.
Victor surveys alternatives such as green growth, post-growth, degrowth, and regenerative economics, offering hope for a positive social, economic, and ecological future.
Earth overshoot will end either by design or by disaster. Which future should we choose?
Earth is in overshoot. The cumulative impact of 8 billion humans combined with the relentless pursuit of economic growth in the name of "progress" has stressed the planet beyond its limits. We must act now.
Surveying economic alternatives and charting plausible paths forward for a planned economic contraction, Escape from Overshoot covers a wide terrain, including:
An overview of Earth overshoot and prevailing trends and implications for humans and biodiversity
A concise review of economic ideas including neoclassical, Keynesian, Marxist, ecological economics, and steady state…
I have been teaching and writing about economics and the environment for over thirty-five years, and have been inspired by my students to work towards a new ecological economics that can underpin a sustainable planetary future. Many of the crises that I and colleagues have predicted – climate disasters, soil degradation, water shortages, biodiversity loss – are now upon us, but the situation is not hopeless. I am working for a rapid transformation away from fossil-fuel and resource-intensive forms of economic growth, and hope that the expanding field of ecological economics can help to usher in this badly needed change.
Robby Richardson is an old friend and colleague who has led the way in developing practical ecological economics policies.
He has been on the front lines: fired by the Trump administration from a position at EPA for defending effective environmental protection, he returned to government in the Department of the Interior in the Biden administration, and in that role has developed natural resource accounting systems to guide government policy.
In this edited volume, he brings together leading ecological economics scholars to offer a variety of perspectives on building a green economy that places human welfare above consumerism and resource-intensive growth.
The first decade of the twenty-first century has been characterised by a growing global awareness of the tremendous strains that human economic activity place on natural resources and the environment. As the world's population increases, so does the demand for energy, food, and other resources, which adds to existing stresses on ecosystems, with potentially disastrous consequences. Humanity is at a crossroads in our pathway to future prosperity, and our next steps will impact our long-term sustainability immensely.
In this timely volume, leading ecological economics scholars offer a variety of perspectives on building a green economy. Grounded in a critique of…
I grew up in the 1950s next door to Long Island’s iconic Levittown. All my aunts and uncles lived in similar modest suburbs, and I assumed everyone else did, too. Maybe that explains why America’s sharp economic U-turn in the 1970s so rubbed me the wrong way. We had become, in the mid-20th century, the first major nation where most people—after paying their monthly bills—had money left over. Today we rate as the world’s most unequal major nation. Our richest 0.1 percent hold as much wealth as our bottom 90 percent. I’ve been working with the Institute for Public Studies, as co-editor of Inequality.org, to change all that.
The climate crisis, many of us now understand, may just end up crushing us. What can save us from that crushing?
Greater income equality, the former World Bank economist Herman Daly argued in this concise 1996 volume, has to be central to our solution. Daly, who passed away in 2022, pioneered the discipline of ecological economics.
Our planet, this University of Maryland professor emeritus believed, has “a limit to the total material production that the ecosystem can support.” In other words, we can’t afford to continue grasping for ever more.
We need to center ourselves instead around having enough, and that means, Daly concluded, moving toward adopting a “maximum personal income” since having 99 percent of a limited total product “go to only one person” would be “clearly unjust.”
"Daly is turning economics inside out by putting the earth and its diminishing natural resources at the center of the field . . . a kind of reverse Copernican revolution in economics." --Utne Reader
"Considered by most to be the dean of ecological economics, Herman E. Daly elegantly topples many shibboleths in Beyond Growth. Daly challenges the conventional notion that growth is always good, and he bucks environmentalist orthodoxy, arguing that the current focus on 'sustainable development' is misguided and that the phrase itself has become meaningless." --Mother Jones
"In Beyond Growth, . . . [Daly] derides the concept of…
When I started teaching a course on the Political Economy of the Environment at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, little had been written that made the connection between environmental quality and economic inequality. Happily, this has changed over the years. The books recommended here mark the rise of a new environmentalism founded upon recognition that our impact on nature is interwoven closely with the nature of our relationships with each other.
Economist Eloi Laurent’s book is a long-overdue introduction to the political economy of the environment.
In contrast to standard environmental economics textbooks that disregard interpersonal conflict by analyzing aggregate costs and benefits – disembodied from those who experience them – Laurent embeds our treatment and maltreatment of nature in our treatment and maltreatment of other people.
This book puts sustainability across generations and justice within them at center stage, where they belong.
Too often, economics disassociates humans from nature, the economy from the biosphere that contains it, and sustainability from fairness. When economists do engage with environmental issues, they typically reduce their analysis to a science of efficiency that leaves aside issues of distributional analysis and justice.
The aim of this lucid textbook is to provide a framework that prioritizes human well-being within the limits of the biosphere, and to rethink economic analysis and policy in the light of not just efficiency but equity. Leading economist Eloi Laurent systematically ties together sustainability and justice issues in covering a wide range of topics,…
I’m an architect, ecodesigner, economist, environmentalist, author, and professor. I like making use of all or parts of these to break down silos between fields in order to better understand and communicate sustainability. As a professor who is hoping to entice the next generation to not repeat our environmental mistakes, I try to emphasize carrots rather than sticks. I look to the win-win-win approaches: the symbiotic overlaps between sustainability, health, happiness, and economics. I call this EcoOptimism, and it’s the focus of my blog by the same title. Though it can be harder to remain optimistic amidst the worsening climate crisis and other environmental issues, I still find it one of the most viable routes.
Upon seeing me carrying this book around, a friend of mine looked at me curiously and asked why we wouldn’t want growth and instead want prosperity. I realized she had misinterpreted this book’s title. The author isn’t referring to personal growth (which is, of course, good) but to economic growth and the assumption that bigger economic numbers (GDP) are better. The idea may get a bit geeky, but economic growth tends to not emphasize the things that are important (the unpaid tasks of taking care of elderly parents, for instance) but count the money spent on things that we’d rather not have more of, for example, prisons and war. What we want to measure and encourage are the things that truly make us better people and better societies. Happily, those things also tend to not be as environmentally bad.
What can prosperity possibly mean in a world of environmental and social limits?
The publication of Prosperity without Growth was a landmark in the sustainability debate. Tim Jackson's piercing challenge to conventional economics openly questioned the most highly prized goal of politicians and economists alike: the continued pursuit of exponential economic growth. Its findings provoked controversy, inspired debate and led to a new wave of research building on its arguments and conclusions.
This substantially revised and re-written edition updates those arguments and considerably expands upon them. Jackson demonstrates that building a 'post-growth' economy is a precise, definable and meaningful task.…
The world around us is an amazing and beautiful place and for me science adds another layer of appreciation. I am a Professor of Earth System Science at University College London - which means I am lucky enough to research climate change in the past, the present, and the future. I study everything from early human evolution in Africa to the future impacts of anthropogenic climate change. I have published over 190 papers in top science journals. I have written 10 books, over 100 popular articles and I regularly appear on radio and television. My blogs on the 'Conversation' have been read over 5.5 million times and you might want to check them out!
Let us be realistic, we all know that our economic system is broken. We cannot go on making stuff and throwing it away on a finite planet.
There are now 8 billion people on Earth all wanting to have a good life. So what is the alternative to economic growth? Well, Tim wonderfully shows us how the economy of tomorrow could protect employment, facilitate social investment, reduce inequality, and deliver both ecological and financial stability.
When this book was first published it was seen as a radical and dangerous text. Now with the rise of environmental and ecological economics it is the fundamental book that kicked off the revolution in the way we see the future.
Is more economic growth the solution? Will it deliver prosperity and well-being for a global population projected to reach nine billion? In this explosive book, Tim Jackson - a top sustainability adviser to the UK government - makes a compelling case against continued economic growth in developed nations.
No one denies that development is essential for poorer nations. But in the advanced economies there is mounting evidence that ever-increasing consumption adds little to human happiness and may even impede it. More urgently, it is now clear that the ecosystems that sustain our economies are collapsing under the impacts of rising…
As a student, I was intrigued by Newton’s laws of motion. As I grew older, I sought to understand how these laws apply in a real-world setting of economics and politics. I spent my full professional life in this search and held several positions – Minister of Finance, Governor of the Central Bank, Minister of Foreign Affairs. I was decorated over the years with several awards. I had a good education at the London School of Economics and at Harvard University. After it all, I still did not quite comprehend how Newton’s Laws work to advance the quality of life in communities and countries. The Caribbean on The Edge is a reflection of that journey.
This book is a penetrating analysis of how economic institutions can foster a resilient economy. It is path-breaking in its search for sustainable development. I find this book to be ‘a bible’ for policy making and for students of economics, and provides a sound theoretical frame for policy initiatives. Linking the theory and practice of economics has been at the center of my main arguments.
I’ve worked in and around the tech, science and startup world for the past 10 years, and hype has played various roles in my work and life. From working in advertising where my job was to build narratives around ideas and products, then in journalism where I was tasked with sorting hype from reality when deciding who and what to write about, to now being a researcher who looks into the very nature and power of narratives, ideologies, political economies and cultures around science and technology – hype has been a recurring topic which is so important in understanding and navigating the tech industry. I hope you find these books as enlightening as I have!
I loved this book because it not only picks apart the concept of "innovation" and helps you approach its usage across work, media, and everyday life but it also goes into exploring an alternative view – that of "maintenance."
It’s packed full of great examples, provides much-needed clear analysis of things we take for granted (like bridges!), and gives me hope for different ways of approaching how to talk about technology, innovation, and the future.
“Innovation” is the hottest buzzword in business. But what if our obsession with finding the next big thing has distracted us from the work that matters most?
“The most important book I’ve read in a long time . . . It explains so much about what is wrong with our technology, our economy, and the world, and gives a simple recipe for how to fix it: Focus on understanding what it takes for your products and services to last.”—Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media
It’s hard to avoid innovation these days. Nearly every product gets marketed as being disruptive, whether…
