Here are 100 books that How Will Capitalism End? fans have personally recommended if you like
How Will Capitalism End?.
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I am passionate about the selected books because they have a unique way of broadening one's horizons and inspiring change in life. Their diverse narratives and profound insights invite all of us to discover new perspectives, challenge our beliefs, and deepen our understanding of the world.
I was deeply captivated by Rutger Bregman’s book. In a world that often feels dark, this book was like a beam of light.
What resonated with me the most was how Bregman masterfully combines compelling stories with solid scientific research to argue that empathy and cooperation aren’t just societal constructs; they’re imprinted in our very nature.
His optimistic view of the human behavior was both surprising and reassuring at the same time. This book left me feeling hopeful not just for the present but for the future as well.
THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER A Guardian, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman and Daily Express Book of the Year
'Hugely, highly and happily recommended' Stephen Fry 'You should read Humankind. You'll learn a lot (I did) and you'll have good reason to feel better about the human race' Tim Harford 'Made me see humanity from a fresh perspective' Yuval Noah Harari
It's a belief that unites the left and right, psychologists and philosophers, writers and historians. It drives the headlines that surround us and the laws that touch our lives. From Machiavelli to Hobbes, Freud to Dawkins, the roots of this belief have…
I have worked all my adult life trying to understand the implications of the insight that the economy depends on the environment for all its materials, energy, and assimilation of all its wastes. What began as academic curiosity developed into concern about the urgency of a transition to a post-growth economy, especially in rich countries. Justice requires that those most responsible for ecological overshoot reduce their demands on nature furthest and fastest so that those least responsible but suffering the worst consequences can also flourish. I hope you find the books I have chosen will help you take informed action to bring about the transition to a post-growth society.
I loved this book because it helped me expand and deepen my understanding of why and how we should transition to an economy not dependent on economic growth. Tim Jackson is a profound thinker, talented writer, and compassionate human being.
Reading his book led to a friendship and collaboration that I value enormously, and which resulted in our path-breaking work on the transition of rich countries to post-growth. I hope this book will open your eyes as much as it did mine.
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.…
I have worked all my adult life trying to understand the implications of the insight that the economy depends on the environment for all its materials, energy, and assimilation of all its wastes. What began as academic curiosity developed into concern about the urgency of a transition to a post-growth economy, especially in rich countries. Justice requires that those most responsible for ecological overshoot reduce their demands on nature furthest and fastest so that those least responsible but suffering the worst consequences can also flourish. I hope you find the books I have chosen will help you take informed action to bring about the transition to a post-growth society.
My understanding of how the world works has been greatly influenced by my study of economics. However, economists often make overly optimistic assumptions about technology and resources that are not grounded in fact and experience.
Smil's book on how the world really works is a powerful antidote to the wishful thinking of those, not just economists, who believe that technology will solve the problems of overshoot, poverty, inequality, conflict, and whatever else may be ailing us.
I love Smil's grasp of physical, biological, and technological fundamentals and his ability to communicate his wisdom about how the world really works simply and with conviction.
'There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil' Bill Gates __________
We have never had so much information at our fingertips and yet most of us don't know how the world really works. This book explains seven of the most fundamental realities governing our survival and prosperity. From energy and food production, through our material world and its globalization, to risks, our environment and its future, How the World Really Works offers a much-needed reality check - because before we can tackle problems effectively, we must understand the facts.
I have worked all my adult life trying to understand the implications of the insight that the economy depends on the environment for all its materials, energy, and assimilation of all its wastes. What began as academic curiosity developed into concern about the urgency of a transition to a post-growth economy, especially in rich countries. Justice requires that those most responsible for ecological overshoot reduce their demands on nature furthest and fastest so that those least responsible but suffering the worst consequences can also flourish. I hope you find the books I have chosen will help you take informed action to bring about the transition to a post-growth society.
Economist Herman Daly, who died in 2022, had a wide and deep influence–except among his fellow economists. I have read virtually everything he wrote. Daly's long introduction to this edited book is an early yet comprehensive exposition of his ideas on a steady-state economy.
I also found the chapters written by luminaries such as Kenneth Boulding and E.F. Schumacher inspiring and thought-provoking. Much of the book is as relevant today to the transition to a post-growth society as when it was published in 1973. Other editions followed, but the first edition remains my favorite.
I am an anthropologist of development who has conducted ethnographic research in India, Indonesia, and more recently, Australia. Throughout my career I have grappled with questions of how power works in development, particularly in and through processes of self-making. I seek new theoretical tools to examine these questions, but always grounded in the realities of the everyday. I came of age when post-development critiques were dominant, but both my idealism and cynicism have been tempered by working alongside local development actors. In my work I try to give readers a sympathetic portrait of their lives, beliefs, and hopes, and how these shape practices, relationships, and consequences of ‘development’.
Akhil Gupta asks why so many people in India suffer extreme poverty, and yet invite so little reaction.
His answer is structural violence. State inaction, or ineffective action, are part of the conditions that let people die from poverty.
The brilliance in Akhil Gupta’s work is inviting us to look at the state not as a coherent and unified entity, but as operating through multiple levels, agencies, and departments.
As someone interested in local development actors, I find his ethnographic accounts of low-level government offices and officials particularly compelling.
By showing everyday practices in these offices, and fine-grained encounters between officials and welfare recipients, Gupta shows how state indifference is produced, and challenged, in ways that shape life and death.
Red Tape presents a major new theory of the state developed by the renowned anthropologist Akhil Gupta. Seeking to understand the chronic and widespread poverty in India, the world's fourth largest economy, Gupta conceives of the relation between the state in India and the poor as one of structural violence. Every year this violence kills between two and three million people, especially women and girls, and lower-caste and indigenous peoples. Yet India's poor are not disenfranchised; they actively participate in the democratic project. Nor is the state indifferent to the plight of the poor; it sponsors many poverty amelioration programs.…
I didn’t know anything about Victorian history before I started writing the Arrowood books. The idea for the character of William Arrowood came as I was reading a Sherlock Holmes story. It occurred to me that if I was a private detective working in London at the same time, I’d probably be jealous, resentful, and perhaps a little bitter about his success and fame. That was the basis of Arrowood. I started to write a few pages and then realized I needed to learn a lot about the history. Since then, I’ve read hundreds of books on the topic, pored over newspapers in the British Library, and visited countless museums.
Published in 1903, this classic piece of investigative journalism describes novelist/journalist Jack London’s visit to London in 1902, during which he tried to understand how the poor live by living himself as a pauper. Full of vivid descriptions of the people he met as he stayed in doss-houses, walked across the city to find work, and scraped for food, this experience made a profound impression on him. He later said "No other book of mine took so much of my young heart and tears as that study of the economic degradation of the poor." The characters you meet in this book, and their stories, just burst off the page.
The People of the Abyss (1903) is a work of nonfiction by American writer Jack London. Written after the author spent three months living in London's poverty-stricken East End, The People of the Abyss bears witness to the difficulties faced by hundreds and thousands of people every day in one of the wealthiest nations on earth. Inspired by Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) and Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, London hoped to expose the indignities faced by those left behind by industrialization. In 1902, Jack London traveled to England to live in…
I grew up in a small seaside town north of Boston. I have three siblings, and we always spent a few weeks every summer with our cousins in a rented house somewhere in New England—a new place each year. I became a bookworm at a young age, and I’ve always loved reading novels about big families that capture both the magic and the conflicts inevitable with many siblings and relatives. I was also an anglophile, and I tended to gravitate toward books written in earlier decades, particularly those of the mid 20th century. When I began writing my own novels, it seemed natural to set them in those fascinating earlier times.
Toward the end of her career, Rebecca West wrote an unusually autobiographical novel, retelling her Edwardian childhood with the wisdom and sadness of hindsight. The Fountain Overflows, published in 1956, describes the struggles of an artistic family with a fiercely devoted mother and an impossibly wayward father. West brilliantly describes the hard work and ambitions of gifted children, but the book is mainly memorable for its strange, semi-magical atmosphere and the sense it gives readers of revisiting a lost world—for hanging over this book is the shadow of the First World War, a cataclysm that finally arrives in the sequel, This Dark Night.
The lives of the talented Aubrey children have long been clouded by their father's genius for instability, but his new job in the London suburbs promises, for a time at least, reprieve from scandal and the threat of ruin. Mrs. Aubrey, a former concert pianist, struggles to keep the family afloat, but then she is something of a high-strung eccentric herself, as is all too clear to her daughter Rose, through whose loving but sometimes cruel eyes events are seen. Still, living on the edge holds the promise of the unexpected, and the Aubreys, who encounter furious poltergeists, turn up…
My father’s side of our family is from North Carolina, and I’ve always felt the magic of these mountains, especially within the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I yearned to understand how the people lived and raised children, created an entire community, lived off the land, and handled sickness, despair, and celebrations. I wanted to bring their stories to life and honor and preserve their unique history. We can all learn something from these brave men and women who staked out the land, built, grew, and hunted everything they needed, and created a community full of family, resilience, and perseverance. I proudly honor their stories within my historical fiction novels.
I wanted a totally different perspective of Appalachia, and this book delivers on that completely. I love the heartwarming and sometimes tragic stories of pioneering people who settled in these mountains in the 1800s. But this tale shoved me right into modern-day Appalachia, with its poverty, drug abuse, and violence.
This book definitely made me think about life’s choices; how would I have handled such obstacles as the characters faced? What options did they really have, and did they truly make the best choices? Whether I agreed, disagreed, yelled at these characters, or cried with them, it was a very well-written and immersive reading experience.
Afterward, I closed the book and thought about my own life’s decisions.
Demon's story begins with his traumatic birth to a single mother in a single-wide trailer, looking 'like a little blue prizefighter.' For the life ahead of him he would need all of that fighting spirit, along with buckets of charm, a quick wit, and some unexpected talents, legal and otherwise.
In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, poverty isn't an idea, it's as natural as the grass grows. For a generation growing up in this world, at the heart of the modern opioid crisis, addiction isn't an abstraction, it's neighbours, parents, and friends. 'Family' could mean love, or reluctant foster…
I’ve always loved technology. I like the constant change, the sense of creativity and invention, of how it can act as an incredible force for good and human progress and betterment in the world. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t tinkering with gadgets—taking radios apart to mend them or learn how they worked; designing electronic circuits for music synthesis; programming computers. But I’ve also always been interested in politics and the complex intersection of technology and public policy. So much so that most of my working life has been spent at this intersection, which is why I love these books—and hope you will too.
Virginia Eubanks writes in an incredibly immersive and engaging style, making her book as compulsive as a work of fiction—and equally hard to put down. It exposes the deeply toxic consequences of the way automated decision-making increasingly dominates our public institutions, creating a sort of “twenty-first century digital poorhouse”.
This automated inequality denies citizens their humanity and any sense of agency, condemning them to the sort of negative moral judgments and cycle of decline and despair that would have been familiar to Charles Dickens in his day.
In Indiana, one million people lose their healthcare, food stamps, and cash benefits in three years-because a new computer system interprets any application mistake as "failure to cooperate." In Los Angeles, an algorithm calculates the comparative vulnerability of tens of thousands of homeless people in order to prioritize them for a shrinking pool of housing resources. In Pittsburgh, a child welfare agency uses a statistical model to try to predict which children might be future victims of abuse or neglect.
Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change.…
I love reading about artists and creators because I’ve been around them most of my life and they are the people I feel I understand the best – though I’m always surprised by the new crafts, facets, and ideas I learn! I grew up in and around my mother’s ceramic shop, my best friends in high school were artists and I was their dorky theater friend, and the two YA books I wrote centered on issues that face young creators. The passion of creative people and artistic friends has always driven me to do my best and not give up on my dreams.
Linka’s art-thriller is smart, compelling, and almost impossible to stop reading. Not only does it tackle being a first-year student in an art school in Los Angeles, it examines a subject that is often glamorized without being scrutinized: living in poverty as a homeless-at-times college student and artist. The myth of the starving artist is torn apart in this contemporary, empathetic, and intriguing story as we follow Sabine Reyes into the world where she thought she belonged, only to find out it’s not as picture-perfect as it seems. There’s some good romance in here, too and Linka’s sharp, penetrating stare at the character’s choices makes us, as readers, question what would we do? Who would we trust? And what happens when we’re wrong?
Winning a scholarship to California's most prestigious art school seems like a fairy tale ending to Sabine Reye's awful senior year. After losing both her mother and her home, Sabine longs for a place where she belongs. But the cutthroat world of visual arts is nothing like what Sabine had imagined. Colin Krell, the renowned faculty member whom she had hoped would mentor her, seems to take merciless delight in tearing down her best work-and warns her that she'll lose the merit-based award if she doesn't improve.
Desperate and humiliated, Sabine doesn't know where to turn. Then she meets Adam,…
