Fans pick 100 books like The Limits to Scarcity

Limits To Growth summarized the first major computer simulation of world society. It was comprehensive, including the influence of: human population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion. The results were sobering! It showed that, if major limits were not established for human population, pollution, and resource depletion, a severe collapse of human society would follow in the near future. What most people do not know is, the report was so disturbing it was accepted by the United Nations for action. It was so well received by world leaders that, by 1974, almost every world nation agreed to take major steps to set such limits. China, for example, established its one-child family policy. Ironically, the U.S. refused any commitment. By 1978, carbon industry disinformation killed all the commitments.

The book offers an in-depth exploration of how an anarchist, anti-capitalist society without money or government would work and juxtaposes it against a more familiar, wasteful, capitalist world. It's thought-provoking and can be a great tool for self-exploration because this world isn’t easy to live in and has its own challenges.
Even though it took me a long time to get into the story, once I did, I was fascinated by all the details. It's unlike other stories. It offers ideas that don't often get explored in speculative fiction, and it left me with a lot to think about.

This is a brilliant intellectual history of US environmentalism and its rooting on what in the 1960s was seen as a global ‘population bomb’. The global population kept growing in the 1980s and 1990s, but slower, and the bomb has, for the time being at least, been defused. It is time for environmentalists like myself to reflect on the legacy of our roles as prophets of unrealised doom, and this book helps us get the historical record right. Paul Ehrlich is a key figure in this story of overpopulation scare, that was not a marginal academic debate, but one that made it into the political mainstream, and around which Ronald Reagan fashioned his persona, as the ever optimist who unlike Jimmy Carter, did not succumb to limits of growth, and the pessimism of Ehlrich and his likes. What I learned from this book is that unless environmentalists develop a positive… show more.

Michel Foucault had a variety of interests and wrote about many different topics – ecology and limits to growth were definitely not among them. I have found this book super useful though in thinking about what I call self-limitation, the processes through which individuals and collectives voluntarily craft the limits of their action and their power. Foucault’s book analyses how ancient Greeks perceived sexuality, and how they managed their bodies and desires. For the Greeks mastery over one’s wants was seen as key to personal freedom and development. Sexual freedom was part and parcel of the self-regulation of sexual desire. I can´t say I understand everything Foucault writes, but this is definitely one of his clearest books, with a more American style short prose than his previous labyrythical French writing. Reading about a civilization that was so similar, but also so different from ours, and how it regulated without suppressing… show more.

The book provides an excellent introduction to the philosophical foundations of economic analysis as a normative theory of human behavior and as a tool for public policy making.

It lucidly explains and criticizes the building blocks of welfare economics – the normative branch of economic analysis.

This book is for the modern economics student comfortable with seeing problems as a game to be solved. 

While still exploring many of the topics in my book, Grant uses game theory to illuminate the economics of social issues and how we should approach them. Game theory brings incentives and strategies to the forefront of analyzing possible solutions to the economic problems we face. This focus also forces us to be more thoughtful about why human beings behave the way they do.

Economic Analysis of Social Issues is not a gamification of economics, but how economic behavior can be seen through the lens of strategic games. 

The book that gave birth to the slogan... This is an iconoclastic look at the capitalist economy from a man who trained as an academic economist and worked for the National Coal Board. Schumacher thought creatively and wrote and spoke in a lively and engaging way and the book is an accessible introduction to a different way of thinking about what the purpose of an economy, or economics, is.

Also, Schumacher was invited to become the first Director of the Anglo-German Foundation for the Study of Industrial Society, but felt that he was already too old for the job. Many years later, I became the Foundation’s last Director.

Moneyless Society, conceptually, is a curious read. Tracking how money affects us all and its presence as a centralized decay against society is another curious concept. I enjoyed reading Moneyless Society for the context of why change needs to be made. Surrounded by the author’s intent in publication is a group of individuals committed to making change. I may quote in my own volumes that money is necessary as a tool but that does not mean you can’t argue otherwise. Moneyless Society is a great feel-good economic story through history into potential change.

I do not read romance novels; they're not my thing, except this one. I found this book to be charming and an easy read. It delivers good ideas in a format that is so missing these days: earnest conversation between people who respect each other despite differences, a respect that grows into a romance.

I thought this was a fun read, I found myself rooting for the characters, hoping things worked out and the economics is delivered in easy chunks and not preachy or overbearing and a natural part of the story.

Did it ever occur to you that economics might be theological, even a form of religious idolatry?

This is not, by the way, about the Worship of Mammon; it is about capitalism as a system of beliefs and practices.

Nelson carefully maps out the genealogy of modern economics, showing that its underlying foundation can be traced back to competing Greek philosophies as filtered through Catholicism and Protestantism. We have never been secular!